LOGINClintI had learned the hard way over the years, that the most dangerous moments were never loud. They didn’t come with sirens or raised voices or a gun pressed to your head. They came quietly, slipping into the space between our decisions, thoughts and emotions, settling in your chest like a weight you couldn’t shrug off. That was where I was now. I was past the panic and the fear, standing in the calm that came right before everything broke.The safehouse I’d stayed in for the pasy couple of days sat just off a dead service road, the kind built decades ago and forgotten once traffic found faster routes. It had concrete walls, one narrow window, a door that stuck unless you lifted it just right, but fortified enough to block anyone or anything from entering. I’d chosen it because in a way it looked abandoned. Places like this didn’t show up on surveillance sweeps. They didn’t register as important and were most often overlooked. But it didn’t matter to me. To me it was the perfect hi
JulianBy the time Evan and I finished outlining the plan, the sun had already dipped low enough to cast a gold hue on the office windows. The light made everything look calmer than it felt. That contrast had become familiar; quiet rooms, steady voices, and sharp decisions.We had reached the same conclusion separately and then confirmed it together without saying much at all. If we touched the money directly, it would explode. Not immediately, not loudly, but it would leak in ways we couldn’t control. The kind of leak that led enemies straight back to your front door with smiles and documents and carefully prepared accusations.Our father had built his empire on plausible distance. We would have to dismantle it the same way. Evan leaned back in his chair, rubbing his face like he was trying to wipe the years off it. He looked older lately. Not from stress alone, but from awareness. Knowing something is wrong is one thing. Knowing you helped maintain it is another.“So,” he said quiet
MelordyI learned a long time ago that silence often said more than noise ever could. That was why even as the city was quiet that morning, to me, it wasn’t peaceful. It carried the kind of stillness that came right before something broke. I felt it in the back of my neck as I stood by the window of my apartment, watching the traffic below move in orderly lines, pretending the world still made sense.Clint was preparing something drastic. I knew it the same way I knew when a deal was about to collapse or when a lie was about to surface, by instinct sharpened through years of watching men unravel when their backs were finally against the wall.He had gone quiet. That was never Clint’s style. For days now, the reports had been thin. There were no sloppy moves, no desperate mistakes or frantic calls except the one he shouldn’t have made, the one to the mercenary. That single thread told me everything. Men didn’t reach out to people like that unless they had decided they were done playing
ClintI’d learned a long time ago that survival wasn’t always about staying clean. It was about staying ahead. Clean men got buried with their principles intact. But the rest of us learned to carry dirt quietly and keep moving.The safehouse was too quiet that morning. There was no traffic outside, or stray sounds through the vents. It was the kind of stillness that always meant one thing, you’d stayed too long. I packed light again, muscle memory guiding my hands as I stripped the place of anything that could trace me back here. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the phone in my palm, trying to think of a certain plan. But there was only one name I hadn’t said out loud in years.It wasn’t because I’d forgotten him. But because remembering him meant admitting I’d crossed a line I couldn’t uncross.Still, I scrolled until I found the number. Just a string of digits I knew by heart anyway. An old mercenary ally, one of the few men I trusted to finish a job without asking why it
ColleenI had always believed fear was useful. It slowed reckless people down. It forced patience. But sitting alone in my apartment with the lights dimmed, and the city noise muted behind thick glass, I understood the moment fear stopped being a tool and started becoming a cage. And I refused to live in one.The files I had uncovered refused to leave my mind. There were faces without names. Companies erased from history and decisions made in rooms I had grown up thinking were built for protection, not sacrifice. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that waiting for a perfect moment was just another way of choosing silence.And so I stood by the window, the phone heavy in my hand, as Savannah’s contact glowed on the screen. I didn’t want to call her. Calls could be traced, misread, overheard. Words lingered too long when spoken. What I needed was something quieter. Something deniable.Savannah didn’t need rescuing. That much I knew. She had survived her father’s board, M
ColleenThere was a certain stillness that came with late nights in my family’s offices. It was never the peaceful kind, it was more like the hush you hear right before something collapses. The building always felt heavier after midnight, as if the walls themselves remembered every deal that had been whispered around them. That was when I found it.I hadn’t been looking for anything dramatic. At least, that was what I told myself. I was just following threads and contracts that didn’t quite line up, partnership dissolutions that happened too cleanly, and companies that vanished overnight without litigation or noise. In our world, silence usually meant money had changed hands in a way no one wanted recorded.And so I sat alone in one of the conference rooms with my sleeves rolled up, my tie discarded on the table, and the glow of my laptop casting harsh shadows across old leather chairs. The files Marcus Hale had hinted at were buried deep, labeled in a way only someone inside the fami







