“Entry points?” Prime asked.
“Three. Main gate here, but that’s where they’ll expect us. East side of the property has a section of fence that backs up to the tree line, no cameras, no motion sensors. That’s our primary entry. West side has a drainage culvert that runs under the fence, tight but passable for one or two at a time. That’s the secondary. We come from two directions at once and they won’t know which way to point their guns.”
“What about the garage?” Justice asked.
“Thermal shows two vehicles inside. If Rodrigo tries to run, that’s where he goes. I want somebody on that garage before we breach the house. Cannon, that’s you.”
Cannon nodded once.
“Prime, you and the mercs take the east entry. Quiet approach through the tree line, neutralize the patrol team on that side, then breach through the back of the main house. Quest and Justice, you come through the west with Riot. The drainage ditch puts you on the south side of the property with a clear line to the front entrance. We hit both sides at the same time. Coordinated breach. Nobody inside gets time to organize.”
“Comms?” Prime asked.
“Encrypted radios. Channel four. Check in before breach, check in after. If anybody goes silent for more than two minutes, we assume the worst and adjust.”
Creed closed the laptop and looked around the room. “This needs to be surgical. The property is rural but it ain’t remote. Houses within a mile. Suppressed weapons only. No explosives. We go in clean and we come out clean. By morning this compound is empty and the Rios name is history.”
Nobody had questions because there was nothing to question. The plan was tight. The intel was solid. And every manin this room had a reason to be here that went beyond money or loyalty. This was personal for all of us in different ways.
• • •
We geared up in silence. Prime moved through his routine with the calm efficiency of a man who’d done this more times than anyone in the room could count. Checking the suppressor on his Sig, loading magazines with his thumb moving in a steady rhythm, adjusting his vest straps without looking down. He’d been built for this since before any of us understood what that meant.
Justice was quieter. Slower. He loaded his weapon carefully, deliberately, like a man who was still getting used to the weight of what these tools could do. Six months ago he would’ve been in the car running logistics while Prime and I handled the wet work. Tonight he was strapping on a vest, checking a chamber. I could see in his face that the man who walked out of this warehouse wasn’t gonna be the same one who walked in. That was the cost of this life. Every door you walked through changed you and some of those doors only swung one way.
The Kings moved like a unit. Creed, Riot, and Cannon had clearly done this together before, each one occupying their own space, handling their own weapons, communicating with looks instead of words. Riot cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders like he was warming up for a pickup game instead of a raid on a cartel compound. Cannon was still and focused, already in whatever zone he went to before the violence started.
I checked my own vest. Tightened the straps. Loaded two magazines and slid one into the Glock. Racked the slide and felt the click travel up my arm.
I thought about Aziza. About her little fists curled up by her face while she slept in the incubator. About the tubes, themonitors and the soft beeping that had become the soundtrack of my life. I thought about Mehar on that island, seven months pregnant, starving, carrying our daughter through a hurricane. I thought about the operating room I couldn’t enter and the hallway floor I sat on and the doctor who told me they took her uterus to save her life.
Every person in that compound was responsible for those moments. Maybe not directly. Maybe they never touched a wrench or climbed on a plane. But they carried the name and they benefited from the money and they slept under the same roof as the men who tried to kill my family. That was enough.
Prime looked at me from across the warehouse. “You ready?”
“Been ready.”
“Then let’s go end this.”
We moved toward the vehicles in the dark, nine men strapped and vested, engines turning over one by one. The Manassas compound was forty-five minutes south. Rodrigo and Gabriel and everyone else inside those walls had less than an hour left on this earth and they didn’t even know it.
I climbed into the passenger seat next to Justice and closed the door. He started the engine and pulled out of the warehouse lot without turning on the headlights.
Nobody spoke. There was nothing left to say.
45
Rodrigo
“He’s dead, Rodrigo,” Gabriel called out from the couch while I paced the floor with Fosso’s number ringing out for the tenth time. Straight to voicemail. Again. He’d been gone since yesterday and my little brother didn’t go silent for this long. He didn’t have the discipline for silence. If he was breathing, he was talking.
He wasn’t breathing.
“He went up there hopped up on coke and they killed him,” Gabriel continued. His voice was steady, clinical. He’d already processed it. Already moved past grief and into calculation because Gabriel didn’t have time for feelings when there was work to do. “We need to plan our attack.”
“How?!” I stopped pacing and turned to face him. “We don’t even know how to catch Quest. Every time we swing at this man he ducks and comes back harder. Mehar has security on her around the clock. The casino is locked down. The sister is in Connecticut somewhere and we can’t find her. We’re running out of family to go after because they’re running out of family to leave unprotected.”
“We kill the security,” Gabriel said like he was ordering lunch. “Two private guards at the hotel. We handle them, we get to the woman. That brings Quest to us.”
