Page 73 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“Sorry?” Luca asked.

I lifted the glass slightly. “I said I am deciding whether the champagne deserves a second chance.”

“And?”

“Still under review.”

His thumb moved once against the linen at my side before his hand dropped.

In my ear, Wolf chimed in, “You aren’t there to entertain yourself.”

Anger flashed through me.

I turned toward the pool as though something there had caught my attention and gritted my teeth. “Then stop narrating my job while I’m doing it.”

The line went silent long enough that I could almost feel Wolf deciding which part of that sentence he hated most, but Raven cut in before he answered. “Bellandi’s phone just joined the guest network. Keep him where you have him if you can.”

At least that gave me something useful to focus on, so I looked back at Luca.

“You know almost nobody here,” he said.

“Is it that obvious?”

“You still look interested in people.”

I laughed. “Give me an hour.”

“Come on. I’ll ruin that for you.”

He led me away from the bar, and the next stretch of the party became the reason I had argued so hard to get inside in the first place.

Luca knew people.

More importantly, people wanted Luca to know them.

He introduced me to a property developer from Vienna whose security contractor had changed drivers twice in one month. He brought me into a conversation with a German logistics executive who complained that private events near Ulm had become impossible to staff because one particular firm kept hiring temporary security away from everyone else.

A man from Milan mentioned Morgenstern Sicherheitslogistik in the context of executive transport, and Luca dismissed the company as “useful but humorless,” which told me more than a database entry would have.

I kept my questions light and let other people fill silence. Whenever a useful name surfaced, I repeated it naturally so Raven would have clean audio.

“Morgenstern? I thought they were mostly Austrian.”

“Ulm? I know the area. Which side?”

“Südweg Transport still operates privately?”

Nothing I said sounded like an interview, which was the advantage of being able to let people believe they were only talking about themselves.

Raven occasionally fed me a surname or told me when a device appeared on the network. Wolf mostly stayed quiet, which should have made the work easier. Instead, I found myself noticing every time he did speak.

“Don’t follow him inside.”

“Stay where Hawk has you.”

“Move left. Security is coming down the terrace.”

No praise and no reassurance. Every instruction came with the same cold certainty he used when telling me I was temporary, except now his voice was pressed directly into my ear while I stood in a bikini among strangers. It was unfairly intimate for a man who sounded like he disliked me personally.