“Good,” Elias said.“Listen carefully.”
Luca’s gut dropped.
“I haven’t heard from the safehouse security,” Elias continued.“Not one check-in.”
The warehouse tilted.
Luca was already running.
****
The safehouse feltwrong.
Luca knew it before Mateo even brought the SUV to a stop.
The street was too quiet.Not empty—never empty—but wrong in the way instinct screamed at men who survived by listening to the spaces between sounds.No hum of the security feed in his ear.No casual check-in from the roof.No voice swearing about bad coffee over comms.
Silence.
Mateo killed the engine and they were out before the echo died.
The front door was ajar.
Luca pushed through first.
The smell hit him immediately.Copper.Cordite.Death.
“Fuck,” Dominic breathed.
Security lay where they’d fallen.Two by the door.One near the hall.One halfway up the stairs.Professionals, all of them.Men who knew how to fight, how to retreat, how to buy time.Men that had fought side by side with them over the years.
Luca moved through the house like a blade slipping between ribs.Each room confirmed what his gut already knew.
Mara was not there.
Her room was untouched.Bed neatly made.Yoga mat still rolled in the corner.A mug on the bedside table.
She hadn’t run.
She’d been taken.
Elias was already there when Luca came back downstairs.
That alone told him how bad this was.
Elias stood in the center of the room, jacket off, sleeves rolled, spiderweb tattoo along his right forearm, calm carved into his posture like it had been forged there.Blood marked his boots.Luca was willing to pay big money that it was not his.
“Lock it down,” Elias said.“Now.”
Kol was already moving, fingers flying over his phone.“Feeds were looped and it was clean work.Someone knew the timing, the layout of the place and the rotation of the security team.”
“It was an inside job,” Mateo said flatly.
“Yes,” Elias agreed.“Which means we’ve been compromised—but I am unsure to what level.”
Luca dragged a hand through his hair, forcing himself to breathe.Iron Covenant didn’t function on panic.It functioned on layers of skill, information, experience, and hard fucking work.
Different cells within the organization that didn’t know each other.A series of rotating crews that did not cross over.Compartmentalized intel that was only shared with cells that needed to know, and safehouses nested inside other safehouses.
