Ezekiel found them at 6:47 AM on County Road 14, exactly where his calculations predicted they'd be. The dark sedan had left the industrial district twelve minutes earlier, following the route he'd spent three days mapping. Two men inside—the driver lean and angular, the passenger built like a concrete block. Both armed, both with histories written in blood and unmarked graves.
He'd been waiting in a turnoff half a mile back, engine idling, watching their headlights approach through the pre-dawn darkness. The stretch of road was perfect—no houses, no traffic cameras, woods dense enough on both sides to muffle sound. He'd verified all of this during his reconnaissance, measured sight lines, calculated response times.
Now he pulled out behind them, maintaining distance, letting them build false security. They'd know they were being followed soon enough. That was intentional.
At the quarter-mile marker, Ezekiel accelerated. The gap closed—two hundred feet, one hundred, fifty. The sedan's brake lights flashed. They'd noticed.
Good.
He pulled into the oncoming lane, drawing parallel. Through the tinted windows he could see the passenger turning, one hand reaching for something. Ezekiel didn't give him time to draw. He jerked the wheel right, his SUV's reinforced frame slamming into the sedan's driver's side.
Metal screamed. The sedan veered, overcorrected, tires shrieking against asphalt. Ezekiel hit them again, harder this time, and the sedan careened off the road into the shallow ditch. It didn't flip—he'd calculated the angle to avoid that—just crashed nose-first into the soft earth and stopped.
Ezekiel was out of his vehicle before the dust settled. He moved with practiced efficiency, weapon already drawn—a Sig Sauer with suppressor, loaded with rounds that would leave minimal forensic evidence. The sedan's driver was dazed, fumbling with his seatbelt. The passenger was reaching for the glove compartment.
Two shots, center mass. The passenger slumped.
The driver's eyes went wide with understanding—not an accident, an execution. His hand scrabbled for the door handle. Ezekiel put a round through the window, through the man's temple, spattering the interior with red and gray matter.
Silence fell, broken only by the SUV's idling engine and a crow calling from the trees.
Ezekiel holstered his weapon and went to work. He'd brought supplies—bleach, plastic sheeting, accelerant. The sedan would burn, bodies inside, evidence destroyed. The fire would be discovered eventually, probably by afternoon when traffic picked up. By then the flames would have consumed anything useful to investigators.
Traffic accident, most likely. Two bodies, burned beyond easy identification. Maybe drugs involved—he'd plant residue in the vehicle to suggest it. Rural cops would file it as criminal activity gone wrong, not worth extensive investigation.
He was dragging the passenger's body into better position when his phone buzzed. Cipher's name on the screen.
"Status?" she asked without preamble.
"Cleaning up. Twenty minutes."
"We've got a problem. Network's gone dark. Complete communications blackout as of 5 AM."
Ezekiel straightened, scanning the road. Still empty. "They know someone's hitting them."
"Looks that way. The warehouse is empty—cleared out sometime last night. We've got surveillance on three other locations, all showing increased security. They're fortifying."
"The shipment?"
"Rerouted or delayed. We're trying to track it, but if they've gone full dark protocol, it could take days."
Ezekiel considered this, weighing options. A complete communications blackout meant the network was spooked, which meant someone had tipped them off. But who? The only people who knew about his surveillance were his team, and he'd personally vetted every one of them.
Unless the network had its own watchers. Unless they'd noticed the same thing he'd been monitoring.
"What about the civilian?" Cipher asked.
"Still at her location. No direct contact from the network yet."
"Yet. Ezekiel, if they've connected her to the police report, and they know someone's hunting them—"
"I'm aware." He looked at the bodies in the sedan, at the men who'd been planning to do exactly what Cipher was implying. "These two were her immediate threat. But there will be others."
"So what's the play?"
Good question. The original plan—systematic elimination of the trafficking network while keeping Mitchelle Carter oblivious—was no longer viable. The network knew it was under attack. They'd be moving assets, changing protocols, accelerating timelines.
Which meant anyone they considered a liability would be handled quickly.
"I need to get closer," Ezekiel said. "Establish direct observation."
"How close?"
Close enough to intercept any threat before it reached her door. Close enough to know what she was thinking, planning, documenting in that meticulous log of hers. Close enough to control the situation before it spiraled beyond his ability to manage.
"As close as necessary," he said.
After ending the call, Ezekiel finished staging the scene. He poured accelerant through the sedan's interior, paying special attention to the bodies and anywhere his DNA might have transferred. Then he used a remote ignition device—placed carefully to look like electrical failure—and walked back to his SUV.
The sedan caught with a soft whump, flames spreading quickly through the fuel-soaked interior. Ezekiel watched long enough to confirm complete ignition, then drove away, taking a circuitous route that would avoid any potential traffic cameras.
By the time he reached his operations room, the sedan would be an inferno. By afternoon, it would be a burned-out husk with two corpses that would take days to identify through dental records.
Two more monsters removed from the world. Two fewer threats to Mitchelle Carter.
But Cipher was right—others would come. The network wouldn't tolerate a witness, especially not now when they were under attack. They'd send professionals next time, people who wouldn't announce themselves with surveillance sedans and obvious reconnaissance.
People like him.
Mitchelle's phone buzzed at 7:15 AM while she was elbow-deep in brioche dough. She wiped her hands on her apron and checked the notification—motion alert from her driveway camera.
The feed showed a delivery truck, a driver approaching her door with a package. She watched him knock, wait, knock again, then leave the box on her doorstep and return to his truck.
Normal. Completely normal.
So why did her chest feel tight?
She forced herself to finish the brioche, shape it into individual rolls, set them for their final proof. Then she cleaned her hands and went to retrieve the package. A box from Amazon—the extra camera batteries she'd ordered, along with a motion-sensor light for her back door.
She brought it inside, locked the door, checked the street through her window. Empty. The morning was gray and cold, frost still clinging to the grass. November settling into the countryside like a held breath.
Mitchelle returned to the bakery kitchen and tried to lose herself in work. But her mind kept circling back to last night—the man walking toward her apartment, studying it, making that phone call. The police officer's dismissive expression. The way nothing she documented seemed to matter until it was too late.
"You're doing it again."
She looked up. Marcus stood in the doorway, concern deepening the lines around his eyes.
"Doing what?"
"That thing where you're here but not here. Where your hands are working but your brain's somewhere else." He moved closer, lowering his voice. "Mitchelle, what's going on? And don't say 'nothing.' I've known you three years. Something's wrong."
She wanted to tell him. Wanted to unload everything—the staged apartment, the surveillance, the growing evidence that something terrible was happening at Ashwood Lane. But Marcus was kind and soft-hearted, the type who'd want to help and wouldn't know how. The type who'd get involved and potentially get hurt.
"Just some stuff with my neighbor," she said. "It's fine. I'm handling it."
"The neighbor who doesn't exist?"
Mitchelle's hands stilled. "What?"
"You mentioned weird neighbor stuff yesterday. Then this morning I saw you checking your phone every five minutes, jumping at sounds. Either your neighbor is legitimately threatening you, or they don't exist and you're spiraling." He held up a hand before she could protest. "I'm not judging. I'm worried."
"She existed," Mitchelle said quietly. "Mrs. Kowalski. Elderly woman, lived in the other half of my duplex. Except her apartment is completely empty—staged, like a showroom. And now there are men watching my place at night, and the police won't do anything because technically nothing illegal has happened."
Marcus was quiet for a long moment. "Men watching your apartment. Plural men."
"At least two."
"Mitchelle, that's—" He rubbed his face. "Okay. Okay, here's what we're going to do. You're taking the rest of the day off. Go home, pack a bag, stay with a friend for a few days. Let this blow over, whatever it is."
"I don't have friends here." The words came out harsher than she'd intended. "I have this job and my apartment. That's it."
"Then stay with me and Linda. We've got a spare room, and—"
"No." Mitchelle wiped her hands on her apron, forced steadiness into her voice. "Thank you, but no. I'm not running away because some assholes are trying to intimidate me. I've done that before, and it didn't help."
She could see him trying to process that, to understand the history she'd never fully explained. Finally he nodded. "At least take the day. Get some sleep. You look exhausted."
After he left, Mitchelle stood in the empty kitchen and considered his offer. It was logical, practical. Remove herself from the situation until it resolved. Except she'd learned the hard way that situations like this didn't resolve—they escalated. And being somewhere else just meant being unprepared when the escalation came.
She finished her prep work, cleaned her station, clocked out at noon. The drive home felt longer than usual, every car behind her a potential threat, every turn revealing possible surveillance.
But when she pulled into her driveway, everything looked normal. No sedans, no utility vans, no men studying her apartment. Just the quiet duplex and the overgrown yard and the gray November sky pressing down like a weight.
Inside, she made coffee and pulled up her camera footage from the previous night. She'd watched it a dozen times already, but maybe she'd missed something. Some detail that would make sense of the pattern.
The footage showed the same sequence: sedan arrives, parks, passenger exits, walks toward her apartment, makes phone call, returns to vehicle, sedan leaves. She zoomed in on the man's face during the moment he'd passed under the streetlight, tried to capture a clear image.
The resolution was poor, but she could make out features. Heavy brow, thick neck, cold expression. She took a screenshot, ran it through a reverse image search even though she knew it wouldn't work—the angle was wrong, the lighting poor.
No matches.
She saved the image anyway, added it to her evidence folder, backed everything up. Then she sat at her kitchen table and tried to think like whoever was watching her.
They knew she'd filed a police report. They knew she had cameras now. They knew she lived alone in an isolated location. What would they do next?
Wait for her guard to drop. Wait for a moment of vulnerability. Then act quickly, quietly, make her disappear the way Mrs. Kowalski—or whoever had been using that identity—had disappeared.
Mitchelle opened a new document and began typing: Safety Protocol
She listed everything she could think of—varying her routines, installing the motion lights, keeping her phone charged and accessible at all times, maintaining the evidence backups, checking in with Marcus daily so someone would notice if she vanished.
And the gun. She'd keep it loaded, keep it close.
The thought should have been frightening. Instead it was oddly comforting. She wasn't helpless. She wasn't the same woman who'd frozen when her ex had emerged from her closet, who'd been too shocked to scream. She'd learned since then. She'd prepared.
Her phone buzzed—a text from an unknown number:
Ms. Carter, this is Daniel Mercer. I wanted to confirm my custom order for Saturday. Still good for 2 PM pickup?
Right. The man from the bakery, the European accent, the generous tip. She'd completely forgotten about the order.
She typed back: Yes, still confirmed. Two dozen kouign-amann and one dozen almond croissants with dark chocolate.
His response came quickly: Perfect. Looking forward to it. Those pastries will be the highlight of the evening.
Mitchelle set down her phone and frowned. Something about the interaction felt off, though she couldn't identify what. The tone was friendly, appropriate for a customer. Nothing threatening or unusual.
Maybe that was the problem. Everything felt threatening now. She was seeing patterns in randomness, danger in normalcy. Exactly what Dr. Reeves had warned about.
Except the staged apartment had been real. The surveillance had been real. The man studying her property had been real.
So when did justified caution become paranoia? When did pattern recognition become delusion?
She didn't have an answer.
The afternoon passed slowly. Mitchelle installed the motion-sensor light at her back door, tested it repeatedly to ensure it worked. She reviewed her camera footage, watched the empty street, documented nothing because nothing was happening.
At 4:30 PM, a news alert popped up on her phone: Traffic Fatality on County Road 14—Two Dead in Vehicle Fire
She clicked through to the article. Minimal details—a sedan had crashed and burned in a ditch, two bodies recovered, identities pending. Possible criminal activity involved based on preliminary investigation.
County Road 14. She pulled up a map, traced the route. It connected the industrial district to the highway, passing through rural areas. The same route someone would take coming from the warehouse district toward Ashwood Lane.
Mitchelle stared at the article, at the phrase "possible criminal activity," at the timing—early morning, right around when the surveillance sedan would have been returning from her street.
Coincidence. Had to be coincidence.
Except she'd stopped believing in coincidence two weeks ago.
She saved the article, added it to her evidence folder with a note: November 5th—Two unidentified men dead in vehicle fire on CR 14. Same route surveillance sedan would use. Timing correlates with typical departure time. Connection unclear.
Then she pulled up the camera footage from last night, found the moment when the sedan had driven away, tried to get a clear image of the license plate.
Still too blurry. But she could see the shape—a dark sedan, same model as the one in the news photos of the burned vehicle.
Her hands were shaking. She set down the phone and forced herself to breathe.
If those men were the same ones who'd been watching her apartment—if someone had killed them—then who? And why?
Unless she was making connections that didn't exist. Unless the universe contained more than one dark sedan, more than one pair of men involved in criminal activity.
But the timing. The location. The pattern.
Mitchelle opened a new document titled: Theory—Third Party
She typed: Assumption: Surveillance sedan men are connected to Mrs. Kowalski situation. Observation: They appeared to be monitoring me as a potential threat/witness. Question: If they died in suspicious circumstances, who killed them?
Possibility 1: Rival criminal organization
Possibility 2: Law enforcement (unlikely—no arrests, public traffic accident narrative)
Possibility 3: Unknown third party
She stared at the third option, at the implications. If someone was eliminating the people who threatened her, that meant someone else was watching. Someone who knew about the surveillance, who knew she was in danger, who had the capability and willingness to kill.
Someone who'd been there, invisible, for who knew how long.
The thought should have been terrifying. Instead, Mitchelle felt a strange kind of vindication. She'd been right—something was happening at Ashwood Lane. The pattern was real.
But now the pattern had expanded to include a protector she'd never seen, never asked for, who left bodies in burning cars on rural roads.
She closed the laptop and went to her bedroom, pulled the revolver from her nightstand, checked that it was loaded. Then she sat on her bed with the gun in her lap and the camera feeds on her phone, and waited for night to fall.
Because whoever was watching her—whether threat or protection or something in between—they'd be back. Patterns didn't break themselves. They escalated, revealed themselves, demanded resolution.
And Mitchelle was done waiting for resolution to come to her.
At 8:47 PM, Ezekiel sat in his operations room and watched Mitchelle Carter sit on her bed with a loaded revolver, watching her camera feeds, waiting.
She'd made the connection. He could see it in her posture, in the way she kept returning to the news article on her phone. She'd put together the surveillance sedan, the traffic fatality, the timing. She hadn't reached the correct conclusion yet—that someone was actively eliminating threats to her safety—but she was close.
Too close.
He pulled up her evidence folder, scanned the new entry about the third party. Her logic was sound, her reasoning careful. She was building a profile of him without knowing it, documenting his actions the same way she documented everything else.
Eventually she'd have enough evidence to bring to police. Eventually someone would take her seriously, start investigating, find threads that led back to his organization.
That couldn't happen.
Ezekiel opened a communication channel to Cipher. "I need a deep scrub on Mitchelle Carter's digital footprint. Everything connected to Ashwood Lane, the police reports, her evidence folders."
"You want me to delete her investigation?"
"I want you to make it look like paranoia. Adjust timestamps, introduce inconsistencies, make sure that if she shows this to anyone, they'll think she's creating connections that don't exist."
"That's gaslighting."
"That's protection." Ezekiel's voice was calm, certain. "If her evidence looks credible, the network will consider her a bigger threat. If it looks like the ramblings of someone experiencing a mental health crisis, they'll dismiss her as irrelevant."
Cipher was quiet for a moment. "And what happens when she realizes her files have been altered?"
"She won't. The changes will be subtle—a timestamp off by fifteen minutes here, a screenshot that's slightly different there. Nothing obvious, but enough to undermine credibility."
"You're playing a dangerous game."
"I've been playing it for thirty-seven days. This is just the next move."
After ending the call, Ezekiel returned his attention to the monitors. Mitchelle was standing now, pacing her bedroom with the revolver held low and ready. She'd learned to handle weapons properly—he'd checked her training records, knew she'd taken classes, practiced regularly.
Good. She should be prepared to defend herself.
But preparation only went so far. The men who'd been watching her were dead, but the network they worked for was still operational. Still deciding how to handle the witness problem. Still capable of sending more professional killers.
And Ezekiel couldn't eliminate an entire trafficking network overnight, not when they'd gone to ground.
Which meant he needed a different approach.
He pulled up the custom order information he'd submitted to Breadcrumb & Thistle—Daniel Mercer, dinner party, Saturday at 2 PM. A simple excuse to interact with Mitchelle again, to establish himself as a regular presence. Someone she'd recognize, someone harmless.
The European accent had been a calculated choice. Studies showed people were more likely to trust foreign accents in service contexts, more likely to ascribe positive qualities—cultured, educated, refined. And the compliments about her baking had been genuine, which made them more effective.
He was building a foundation. Laying groundwork for the moment when direct intervention would become necessary.
Because Ezekiel could see the trajectory now. The network would eventually make another move—they had too much invested in the Ashwood Lane location to simply abandon it. And when they did, when they sent professionals to eliminate the witness problem, Ezekiel would need to be close enough to intercept.
Close enough that Mitchelle Carter would see him. Would know someone had intervened. Would understand that the violence protecting her was real.
And then she'd have to make a choice: accept the monster watching her, or reject the only thing standing between her and something worse.
Ezekiel found himself hoping she'd choose acceptance. The alternative—watching her die because she refused protection from someone she found morally repugnant—was unacceptable.
He'd killed forty-seven traffickers in eight years. He'd killed two more this morning. He would kill however many necessary to keep her safe.
Whether she wanted him to or not.
On the monitor, Mitchelle finally set down the revolver and climbed into bed, fully clothed, phone on her pillow with the camera feeds still active. She lay there in the darkness, eyes open, watching the screens.
Ezekiel watched her watching, and began planning his next move.