Roman didn't accelerate anymore. That was amateur hour. He knew the docks: broken pavement, dead ends, and nobody around but hungry seagulls and forgotten fishermen. This was his territory now, not some freeway cruise. He cranked the wheel hard, pulling a tight U-turn into a dark, oil-stained loading bay. The Mercedes stopped dead.
The red bug didn't miss a beat. The driver wasn't panicked. They just slid to a stop twenty feet away, the tiny car looking ridiculously defiant in the morning gloom.
He was out the door before the engine stopped whining. The Beretta (gun) was a heavy, familiar-an old friend who never asked too many questions.
"Hands on the wheel. Now," Roman snapped, the sound echoing off the concrete. The wind coming off the water smelled like rot and salt.
The driver complied, slowly putting two hands up, small and pale against the black plastic.
"Get out. Don't push it."
The door popped open, and he saw why the car matched his speed-calculated risk. Not a man. Not a gangbanger. Just a woman who looked too sharp for 5 AM. Dark hair, eyes that saw way too much a petote but volumpcious body and hair packed into a tight ponytail, and a jacket that looked like it cost more than the VW.
This had to be the tail. The loose end.
"You're quicker than I expected, Roman Blackwood." Her voice was low, absolutely flat. No panic.
He lowered the muzzle an inch. "I'm sure the database gave you all my cool specs. Now who the hell are you, and why are you following me in a clown car?"
She smiled then, a small, tight, irritating thing.
"It's a Bug. And it's invisible. No tracking. No telemetry. Your Mercedes is practically screaming its location right now."
"Anya Griey. The genius hacker, right? The one who breaks banks, not balls."
Anya took a single, deliberate step toward him, past the safety of the car door. He didn't drop the gun. She wasn't carrying. Smart.
"I didn't waste my damn gasoline to threaten you," she said. "You're a great thief. A goddamn menace. But you're still chasing pennies and thrills because Tanya and Angie are gone."
The air went out of Roman's lungs. The roar of the ocean faded. The world shrunk down to the muzzle of his gun and the sound of her voice speaking those names. Tanya. Angie. God.
"You've got three seconds to explain how you know those names and why you're using them, or I'm calling Leroy for a body pickup."
Anya didn't flinch. She reached into her jacket pocket. Roman braced, thumbing the safety off.
It wasn't a gun. It was a black, sleek USB drive.
She flipped it lightly, catching it, then held it out.
"The robbery that killed your wife? It wasn't some random job. It was a diversion. It covered up a security breach orchestrated by The Nexus."
The Nexus. He'd heard the whispers on the street. The real chaos. The people in the suits.
"They're the reason crime is 'rampant.' They're the ones who ran the operations that put the shooter on that corner, that night, last year," she continued, her voice gaining speed. "I have the proof. I have the accounts. I have the name of the man who gave the order."
She tossed the USB drive. It hit Roman's chest before he automatically caught it in his free hand.
"I need your eyes. Your cop brain. Your reckless ass on the ground," Anya commanded. "I can get us the biggest score in history-enough cash to buy a country. But you, Roman Blackwood, get the revenge you couldn't get with a badge. You get the chance to shoot the guy who killed your family."
Anya leaned back against the red Bug, crossing her arms. She looked like she was waiting for a bus.
"So, what's it gonna be? More fun, hoes, and fast cars? Or justice?"
That was intense! Anya definitely knows how to push his buttons.
The black USB drive felt heavy, a sudden, unwanted anchor in his hand. Roman stared at it, then back at the woman who had just weaponized the two names that made his world fall apart. Tanya. Angie.
His control snapped. He lunged, slamming the muzzle of the Beretta hard against the side of the red Bug. The hollow thunk echoed across the docks.
"Don't you dare," Roman snarled, his voice thick and raw, tasting like the whiskey and regret from the night before. "You think you can play games with me? You think you can use my family to line your pockets?"
Anya didn't flinch. She just studied his face, her hands still crossed over her chest. She wasn't afraid of the gun; she was calculating its trajectory.
"I'm not playing, Roman," she said, her voice dropping to a dangerous whisper. "I'm giving you a target. You're spinning your wheels, robbing jewelry stores and safe houses when the people who ruined your life are running this whole damn city from the shadows. The chaos you're profiting from? They created it."
He wanted to smash the USB, smash her car, smash her smug, intelligent face. He wanted to go back to the bar and drink until the names were just blurry sounds again. But he couldn't. Not after she said the names. Not after she drew the line from his wife's death to something bigger than a random thug looking for a payday.
"It was a robbery gone bad," Roman said, reciting the official line. He'd read the report a thousand times. The dead perp, the messy apartment, the missing safe. Closure wrapped in red tape.
"No. It was a perfectly executed distraction," Anya countered, her voice sharp with contempt. "The man killed in that apartment, Greg Visser? He was a low-level accountant for a holding company called Onyx Holdings. That night, the Nexus wanted to wipe the entire data center across town. They needed a spectacular local news story to draw all the police response, all the eyes, away from the real target. The robbery you drove away from? It was page one on the police blotter. The data breach? That was page 40 of a financial trade journal."
A horrible chill began to snake its way up Roman's spine, cutting through his thick criminal shell. That was exactly the kind of calculated, cold-blooded tactical move he would have executed as a lieutenant, only on the side of the law. He looked at Anya, seeing not just a hacker but a mirror of his own dangerous, brilliant mind.
He slowly pulled the gun back, holstering it in his jeans. The metallic click sounded like a surrender.
"Tell me," he demanded, pointing at the USB.
"Go to the warehouse over there. It's cleaner than the floor of your Mercedes."
The Cold Proof
Five minutes later, they were standing inside the crumbling dock warehouse. Dust danced in the sparse columns of sunlight slicing through the missing roof panels. Roman had the USB plugged into a worn laptop. Anya pulled from a hidden compartment under the Bug's passenger seat.
The drive wasn't a virus bomb. It was a single, heavily encrypted, self-executing file. Anya typed a string of characters faster than a drum roll. The screen filled with data.
"This is a fragment," Anya explained, hovering over the screen. "A piece of the data I pulled before they locked me out. Look at the timestamp."
Roman leaned in. The timestamp for the data breach at Onyx Holdings was 11:17 PM.
"Now," Anya said, scrolling down to a second file, a raw audio recording labeled: 911 C-234-A. "This is the audio from the 911 call reporting the robbery at Visser's apartment."
The thin, tinny sound of a woman screaming cut through the warehouse silence. Roman's knuckles went white. He knew that apartment, the address branded into his memory.
The timestamp on the call is 11:05 PM.
Thirteen minutes. Tanya and Angie were dead before The Nexus even started the real job. The entire police force was diverted to the robbery and the homicide scene, giving the hackers a clean, wide-open field.
"The police database said Visser was murdered at 11:30 PM. The records were manipulated," Anya whispered, her voice full of a cold, professional certainty. "The chaos was the cushion. Your wife and daughter were nothing more than collateral damage in a financial data heist."
The reality hit Roman like a physical blow-worse than the sting of the bullets he'd faced, worse than the whiskey burn. His grief, his resignation, his entire reason for becoming a criminal, had been founded on a lie carefully planted by the very people he was now trying to steal from.
He looked at Anya. She wasn't smug now. She looked intensely focused, but underneath, there was a shared, profound anger.
"The man who ordered the kill on Visser-and by extension, anyone who got in the way-is named Elias Vance," Anya stated. "He's the CSO of The Nexus. He's the reason I need you."