They reached the garage without incident, which did not mean it was safe.
It meant the fortress had not yet noticed what was missing.
The access corridor sloped downward in a way that discouraged haste. Concrete gave way to reinforced steel, the walls thickening, the ceiling lowering just enough to remind anyone passing through that this space existed for machines, not people. The air cooled as they descended. Not fresh, not stale, but conditioned, filtered, managed. Money always smelled like this when it settled long enough.
Amina adjusted her pace, not because of fear, but because sound behaved differently here. Hard surfaces amplified carelessness. She rolled her shoulders once, resetting tension, and felt Jin mirror the movement beside her without looking.
Roles held.
The garage door was biometric, newer than most of the fortress, layered redundancies stacked like an insult. Jin took position by the hinge seam while she worked, attention split between corridor reflection and the door's surface. She didn't rush the override. Rushing left fingerprints systems remembered. Her fingers moved steadily, pressure measured, timing deliberate.
The lock gave way without complaint.
Inside, the garage opened wider than the exterior footprint suggested. Long. Deep. Designed to impress the owner every time he walked in. Lighting recessed into the ceiling cast a soft glow over polished metal and concrete floors so clean they reflected silhouettes back at you. This wasn't storage. It was curation.
Amina catalogued it the way she always did, by priority.
Vehicles. Equipment. Infrastructure.
Jin moved first, drifting along the perimeter, confirming what the space was not. No hidden personnel alcoves. No maintenance crew sleeping it off. No late patrol checking inventory out of pride or boredom. Cameras fed into the loop she had already built, the garage watching itself remain unchanged.
She stepped between the rows.
The first car was expensive in the obvious way, restored, pristine, a statement piece more than a machine. The next was subtler, a limited run never released publicly, the kind collectors pretended not to own. She let her gaze skim rather than linger, registering shape, condition, configuration.
Then she stopped.
Not because she wanted it more.
Because the numbers didn't line up.
There were supposed to be two.
Both of them were here.
Side by side, identical down to the smallest detailing, one showing faint signs of use, the other still sealed beneath factory film along the undercarriage, like it had never been driven long enough to justify unwrapping it. The kind of excess that only existed when acquisition mattered more than experience.
Her mouth curved briefly, an expression gone as quickly as it appeared.
Then she moved on.
The system accepted the first transfer without resistance. The car vanished cleanly, weight and presence erased so completely the space it left behind looked unfinished. The second followed, then the third. No sound. No vibration. Just absence replacing ownership.
Motorcycles came next. Custom builds, antique frames restored beyond their original specifications, modern machines tuned well past legal tolerances. Jin worked alongside her now, unspoken division of labor in effect. He handled the mechanical equipment, lifts, diagnostic rigs, specialty tools laid out with obsessive order.
Neither of them spoke.
A guard passed somewhere overhead. Footsteps muted by concrete and distance. A pause. A laugh, careless and unguarded. The sound drifted away again.
They didn't look up.
The tension wasn't in the risk of discovery. It was in how smoothly everything continued.
Amina stripped the walls next. Storage units came away cleanly, shelves emptied in sequence, contents catalogued and absorbed. Compressors. Fluid reserves. Filter systems. Even the small things, the kind people forgot to count until they were gone, disappeared. Wiring spools, spare fittings, mounted fixtures that took time and effort to detach.
She took those too.
The work was steady, breath even, movements efficient without being rushed. This wasn't adrenaline. This was execution. Preparation resolving into action that felt almost quiet inside her head.
Jin paused once, attention drawn toward the far end of the garage. She followed his line of sight.
A private bay sat behind reinforced glass, separate from the rest. Less polished. More purposeful. The vehicles there were older, heavier, armored beneath civilian design. Transport, not display. Assets meant to move people and things that mattered.
She nodded.
Those went as well.
As the space emptied, sound began to behave differently. Footsteps echoed where they hadn't before. The room felt larger, wrong somehow, like a mouth missing teeth. Amina adjusted her movement to account for it, recalibrating her awareness to the new acoustics.
She stood still for a moment when the last bay cleared, not savoring, not reflecting, just orienting herself to the altered geometry of the room. Her thoughts brushed against the man who had built this place, not with fascination, but with clarity.
This wasn't inheritance. It wasn't luck. Nobody drifted into this level of accumulation by accident. This was money built deliberately, through every dirty corridor available, through years of choosing profit over consequence. A fortress wasn't paranoia. It was insurance. People didn't want him dead because he was powerful. They wanted him dead because of how he'd become that way.
The thought passed as quickly as it came.
Judgment didn't change logistics.
She signaled Jin. He stepped in beside her, spacing instinctive, the work finished without ceremony. They turned away from the garage together, movements already shifting toward the next checkpoint.
Behind them, the room held nothing but light and oil ghosts, the echo of their footsteps folding back on itself, bouncing through a space that no longer had anything left to guard.