Chapter12
1508 Words
The morning after the warehouse confrontation arrived with a silence too loud to ignore.
Ava stood in front of the open windows of the guest room, coffee cooling in her hand, watching the mist rise over the DeLuca estate. The glass panes reflected her outline—messy bun, dark circles, the faint bruising of unrest beneath her eyes. She hadn’t really slept.
Her mind was replaying everything: the scorched crates, the Ashen’s sigil, the way Nico had spoken for her in front of Rafe like she wasn’t just a bystander but something more.
She hated how it affected her.
She sipped the coffee. Bitter. Burned. Just like the air that clung to her skin ever since that warehouse.
A knock at her door made her flinch.
It wasn’t Enzo this time. It was Nico.
She opened the door slowly. He didn’t wait to be invited in.
“You’re riding with me,” he said, his voice already dressed in that low command she was learning to decipher. Not anger—focus.
“Where?”
“Bank trails. Ashen operatives don’t come back from the dead without funding. We’re going to find out who’s feeding them.”
She nodded, grabbed her jacket, and followed him.
The SUV cut through the morning like a blade. Darkened windows, black leather seats, the smell of fresh gun oil and expensive cologne lingering in the air between them.
Ava sat in silence for most of the ride, watching the city blur by. The Bronx faded into Harlem, and then Midtown’s towers stretched out in glass and ambition.
“Did you sleep?” Nico asked suddenly.
She turned to him. “No. Did you?”
“No.”
He glanced at her hand, where she was unconsciously fidgeting with her ring—nothing fancy, just one she always wore on her thumb.
“You always do that when you’re nervous?”
Ava dropped her hand into her lap. “You always pry?”
He smirked but didn’t push. That, more than anything, unsettled her.
They arrived at the first location—a private banking office hidden behind an art gallery. No signage. No security visible. The kind of place where dirty money came in clean and left powerful.
Inside, a sharp-eyed man in a navy suit greeted them. His gaze flicked over Ava briefly before landing on Nico like he was seeing a ghost.
“Mr. DeLuca. This is… unexpected.”
“Everything about this week is unexpected,” Nico replied. “You received a wire two nights ago. Half a million, routed through four ghost accounts. I want the origin.”
The banker’s mouth twitched. “There are… privacy protocols—”
Nico stepped forward once, silent and dangerous.
“Do I look like I care about protocols?”
A beat of silence. The man nodded. “Right this way.”
Ava watched him crumble with barely a raised voice. It wasn’t just power Nico had—it was the ability to make people second-guess their own survival.
Inside the glass-walled office, Nico leaned against the table while the banker opened a secure server on his desktop.
“The wire came through a company registered in Prague. But its routing ledger led back to an account in Queens. A tech supply front.”
“Name?” Nico asked.
“Fulgur Electronics.”
Ava blinked. “That place burned down six months ago. Faulty wiring. Or that’s what the fire report said.”
Nico turned to her slowly. “How do you know that?”
“I bartended near there. I remember the fire. I served half the firefighters.”
The banker looked pale now.
“We flagged the account because it started moving again this week,” he added. “Fresh funds. Withdrawals in cash.”
Nico stood, his eyes distant but calculating.
“Print everything. Every linked transaction. We’re going to pay the ashes a visit.”
They reached the charred husk of Fulgur Electronics by noon.
Ava stepped carefully over the broken glass and warped metal near the service entrance. The interior was dark and still reeked of smoke.
It looked like a hollowed-out rib cage—steel beams exposed, twisted in unnatural angles, everything blackened but intact in strange places. Whoever burned it hadn’t done it to destroy, not completely. They’d wanted to hide something. And now, they were using it again.
“There,” Ava pointed. “Corner of the back office. It wasn’t touched by the fire.”
Nico nodded. They moved silently, with Enzo flanking behind, gun in hand.
The room Ava had pointed to still had a working keypad by the door—dusty but functional.
“Enzo,” Nico said. “Pop it.”
Two clicks later, the door swung open—and what lay behind it made Ava freeze.
It wasn’t just an office. It was a server room.
Still running.
Rows of black drives lined the wall, faintly glowing green.
“They’re back online,” Nico muttered. “Son of a bitch.”
Ava stepped inside, gaze drawn to a table in the middle of the room—maps, printed surveillance photos, handwritten notes in code. And in the center, carved into the metal with a knife, was the same diagonal sigil with two dots.
Her stomach twisted.
“They’re watching us,” she whispered.
Nico picked up one of the photos.
It was of the DeLuca estate. Taken from high ground. Recent.
“They’ve been planning this longer than we thought.”
“And now they want you to know,” Ava added.
Nico glanced at her. “They didn’t leave this behind by mistake.”
“Why would they bait you like this?”
He looked toward the servers. “Because they think they’re untouchable. And they want us distracted while they strike somewhere else.”
Enzo cursed softly. “They’ve got a f*****g war room.”
“Pull everything,” Nico ordered. “We take this apart brick by brick.”
Back at the estate, the tension was thick enough to choke on.
The air crackled with activity—footsteps, encrypted calls, the sound of weapons being checked. Everyone was on edge.
Ava sat alone in the briefing room with one of the Ashen maps spread in front of her. She traced a red circle with her finger—Hunts Point again.
She didn’t notice Nico walk in until he spoke.
“You see something?”
“Maybe. This circle… it isn’t just territory. It’s transport. Tunnels, shipping routes. Could be how they’re moving unnoticed.”
He studied it with her. “That’s good work.”
“You sound surprised.”
He looked at her. “I’m not. Not anymore.”
A moment stretched out. Quiet. Charged.
Then he said, “You’re not the same woman I met behind that bar.”
“No,” she said softly. “I’m not.”
Their eyes met.
And this time, neither of them looked away.
“You kept telling me I didn’t belong here,” she said. “That I’d get eaten alive.”
“I also said I’d protect you.”
“You still plan on doing that?”
He stepped closer. “You don’t need it as much as you used to.”
Her breath hitched. His nearness made everything else in the world fade—maps, gangs, blood, risk. All of it disappeared under the weight of this charged gravity between them.
“Why me?” she asked. “Why bring me into this when you could’ve walked away?”
Nico looked at her, expression unreadable.
“Because you never flinched.”
He was so close now that his voice vibrated in her ribs.
“You could’ve run. But you stayed. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that since.”
Ava felt the air tighten. Her heart thudded like a warning.
Then he did something dangerous.
He reached out—slowly—and touched a strand of hair that had come loose from her bun, tucking it behind her ear with the softest graze of fingers.
She didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
“Say something,” he said.
“I don’t know what this is,” she whispered.
His hand fell away, but his gaze didn’t.
“It’s real. That’s all I know.”
She blinked hard, stepping back. “We’re being hunted, Nico. By people who want to carve up your empire. This is the worst time for… whatever this is.”
His voice was quiet. “Or maybe it’s the only time.”
He didn’t press her further.
Didn’t lean in.
Just watched her.
And that, somehow, made it harder.
That night, Ava couldn’t sleep.
The sigil burned behind her eyelids every time she closed them. Her phone buzzed once—an encrypted message from Enzo: We decrypted a name tied to the servers. Virelli crew had a backdoor in the Ashen’s network.
She stared at the message.
Suddenly, it all fit.
Smoke and ghosts. Fire and ashes. Two enemies.
And one war just beginning.
- Writer
