Chapter 7: The Dock

Felix POV:

The city looked different at night when you were trying to disappear from it.

I moved through backstreets instead of main roads, hood up, bag slung low across one shoulder. Every sense stayed tuned to the kind of alertness that had kept me breathing through worse nights than this. No car. Cars left records. I had called a cab from a burner number three blocks from my apartment and had it drop me two blocks short of the docks. The rest of the distance I covered on foot, past shuttered storefronts and alleys that smelled like rust and last week’s rain.

The air changed the closer I got to the water. Salt first, then diesel, then something colder underneath both. The specific stillness that came with places nobody wanted to be caught lingering in after dark. Warehouses lined the waterfront, most of them dark, a few with lights still burning behind windows too grime-streaked to see through. Dock 14 sat at the far end, past a chain link fence with a gap someone had clearly cut through before and never bothered fixing.

I checked my watch. Eleven forty. Twenty minutes to spare.

That should have made me relax. It didn’t.

I felt it before I saw it. That specific prickle at the back of my neck that had saved my life more times than I could count. I slowed my pace, let my eyes drift without turning my head, and caught the shape of two men peeling off from the shadow of a shipping container up ahead. Then a third, coming in from my left, closing the gap between us with the kind of unhurried confidence that meant they thought they already had me.

Ha. Didn’t even need to think hard to know who sent these men.

“Didn’t think you’d make it easy,” the closest one said, stepping into the weak light from a streetlamp overhead. Big. Built like someone who relied on size more than skill, arms crossed like this was already decided. “Boss wants you home. Nice and quiet, if you cooperate.”

“Tell him I’m busy.”

“Wasn’t a request.”

“Neither is this,” I said, and moved first. Always move first. I drove my elbow into the throat of the nearest man before his hand fully closed around my arm. He staggered, choking, and I used the half second his body gave me to put distance between myself and the other two.

“Grab him,” someone barked. The second one lunged, wide and clumsy with too much confidence and not enough training. I ducked under his swing, caught his wrist, twisted, and drove him face first into a stack of crates. Something clattered and rolled across the pavement. Glass or metal. I didn’t stop long enough to check which.

“He’s stronger than they said,” one of them muttered, backing up a step.

“Then hit harder,” another snapped.

The third one held back, circling instead of charging. That hesitation was the only reason I clocked movement behind me half a second before it connected. A fourth man I hadn’t accounted for. Someone who’d been waiting in the dark the entire time, patient in a way none of his friends had bothered to be.

I turned into the hit instead of away from it, took it glancing across my shoulder instead of square in the back, and answered with a strike to his ribs that folded him with a wheeze. He hit the ground hard, gasping, and didn’t get up.

Four down.

I straightened, breathing hard. Adrenaline burned hot and clean through everything else I’d been carrying since I woke up in Renato’s bed that morning. Blood on my knuckles again. A night that kept insisting on ending this way.

Then I heard it. More footsteps. More than four. Coming from the direction of the main road, unhurried in a way that told me this wasn’t a rescue. When he actually wanted results, he never sent people in small numbers.

I counted shapes moving through the dark. Six. Maybe seven.

I checked my watch.

Eleven fifty one.

Fuck No. I don’t have time for this shit.

I didn’t wait to find out how many of them there actually were. I turned and ran. Boots hit wet pavement. My lungs already burned from the fight I hadn’t fully recovered from. The dock’s gate loomed ahead of me like the only thing that mattered in the entire city right now. Shouting broke out behind me. Someone yelled my name. My real one. Which meant they knew exactly who they were chasing. I didn’t slow down long enough to care.

Nine minutes. I had nine minutes to make it through that gap in the fence, find whoever was supposed to be waiting for me, and disappear onto whatever boat was leaving this port before midnight turned the entire plan into a memory.

I ran like my life actually depended on it.

Because it probably did.

——

Renato’s POV

I read the name twice before it actually landed.

Felix Luciano.

I set the file down on the desk with more care than the moment probably called for, staring at the space where his photo had just been, replaying the last forty-eight hours through a completely different lens now. The stranger from my own doorway. The man currently sleeping in a bed that hadn't been meant for anyone but me in longer than I cared to admit.

Is Luciano heir. The one my grandfather had spent the better part of a year negotiating an alliance with.

I almost laughed. Almost.

Instead I sat back, cigar between two fingers, and let the pieces rearrange themselves into something considerably more interesting than a marriage of convenience had any right to be.

I didn't tell him. Not that morning, watching him stumble around my kitchen half asleep and thoroughly unimpressed with the pajamas I'd put him in. Not when he stood in my living room, suspicious and sharp eyed, cataloguing every gap in my story with the kind of precision that told me exactly how dangerous he actually was underneath all that irritation.

I told myself there'd be a better time.

I spent the rest of the day the way I spent most of them, in meetings that mattered less than the people in them thought they did, calls I let drag on longer than necessary because ending them meant thinking about something else entirely. By evening I'd almost convinced myself the day had been ordinary.

Then my phone rang. Not my usual line. The one reserved for the men who watched things I needed to watch.

"Talk," I said.

"We found him." A pause, careful, the way my men always paced their words when they weren't sure how I'd take news. "Dock fourteen. Looks like he's arranging passage out. Alone.”

The report had been short. Direct. Exactly the way I preferred them.

A slow smile pulled at the edge of my mouth before I could stop it.

“Well,” I said quietly, almost to myself. “Look at that. My little cat’s trying to run.”

The man on the other end of the line stayed silent, waiting.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“There’s a complication. He’s currently being chased. Looks like they got to him first.”

The smile disappeared.

“How many?”

“Counted Eleven before he took down the first four on his own.” A short pause. “He’s fast. Faster than expected.”

Of course he was.

“Is he hurt?”

“Not badly. He’s running for the fence now. Looks like he clocked the numbers and decided fighting wasn’t worth the time.”

Smart.

“Do you want us to move in? We could have men on that dock in six minutes.”

I considered it for exactly as long as it took to picture the way he’d looked at me that morning. Sharp. Suspicious. Insisting he didn’t need anyone’s help. Showing up now, guns first, would cost me more than it would ever earn me.

“No,” I said. “Don’t touch him. Don’t stop him. Just watch.”

“Watch, sir?”

“You heard me.” I stood, already reaching for my jacket. Something warm and dangerous settled low in my chest. “I want eyes on him the entire way. And make sure to follow him until he reaches his final destination”

“Sir, what about those thugs? What if they catch up first?”

I paused at that. My jaw tightened at the thought of him cornered, dragged back like something that had simply been misplaced.

“They won’t,” I said, quiet now, certain in a way that left no room for argument. “Just watch him. I’ll handle the rest myself.”

I ended the call and stood in the quiet office for a moment longer, jacket half on, the city lights glittering beyond the glass. Somewhere across the water, a man who had woken up in my bed that morning was running for a boat with

blood on his knuckles and a price on his freedom.

I smiled again, slower this time.Let him run.

I would find him either way.