DENVER
Late afternoon.
The room was thick with smoke and silence.
Five of my men sat around the table, waiting on me, eyes flicking between the maps, the files, and my face.
But my head wasn’t on the maps.
It was on Zee.
I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight this morning. Not with Davison’s people sniffing around. Not with Cherry’s betrayal still bleeding into everything like poison.
I leaned back in my chair, one hand drumming slow against the armrest, the other holding a cigarette burning low. Each tap of my fingers was its own warning — a countdown to something ugly.
The map between us was marked with red Xs, showing where we’d hit Davison’s shipments. Five cargoes gone this past month — enough to hurt him, but not enough to stop him. Each X was millions lost, maybe hundreds
