Chapter 16: Three

Malik

The number stared back at me from the note.

Three.

Three what?

Three hours. Three days. Three targets. Three chances before the enemy made good on whatever promise they had hidden inside those words.

I hated not knowing.

I hated it more because whoever was behind this knew exactly how to use uncertainty as a weapon. This was psychological warfare, and they were playing it well. Fear. Pressure. Confusion. They wanted us reacting, scrambling, chasing shadows until one of us made a mistake.

I didn’t make mistakes.

Not anymore.

Zariah stood beside me, watching my face like she could read the answer there. “What does it mean?”

I folded the note and handed it to Darius. “Find out everything about the guard’s last twelve hours. Everyone he spoke to, everyone he texted, every door he opened, every camera he passed. I want his phone, his bank records, his messages, and the names of every person who came within ten feet of him.”

Darius nodded. “Already working on it.”

I looked around the room at the men standing near the doorway. My men. My security. My people. Or at least they were supposed to be. One of them had allowed an enemy inside my home. One of them had helped turn my building into a hunting ground.

The betrayal burned deeper than I wanted to admit.

My phone rang.

Unknown number.

Again.

The room went silent immediately.

I answered, putting the call on speaker. “Talk.”

A laugh moved through the speaker, distorted and amused. The same voice. The same bastard who thought fear made him powerful.

“How’s the countdown going?”

My grip tightened around the phone. “What do you want?”

“That’s the wrong question.”

His amusement made my blood heat. I wanted to reach through the phone, drag him into the room, and make him regret every word.

“And what’s the right question?” I asked.

The line went quiet for a moment.

Then the voice answered.

“Who dies next?”

The call ended.

Every muscle in my body locked.

The room felt colder after the line went dead. Zariah watched me carefully, her face pale but her expression steady. She was scared. Anyone with sense would be. But she didn’t look away.

“What happened?” she asked.

I didn’t answer immediately because I knew what the countdown meant now. It wasn’t counting time. It was counting people. Someone was crossing names off a list, and we didn’t know who was on it.

Yet.

Two hours later, nobody had slept. Nobody had even pretended to try.

The penthouse had become a war room. Laptops covered the dining table, security footage played across multiple screens, and phones rang constantly as my people checked every corner of my operation. The attack had exposed more than a breach. It had exposed weakness.

That could not stand.

I stood near the window overlooking Atlanta, one hand in my pocket, the other wrapped around a glass I hadn’t touched. The city looked peaceful from above, all lights and moving traffic. It was a lie. Beneath those lights, men were plotting, enemies were moving, and someone I hadn’t yet identified had decided to turn my past into a weapon.

A soft voice interrupted my thoughts.

“You should sit down.”

I turned.

Zariah stood behind me holding a mug of coffee. Her hair was pulled back loosely, and she looked exhausted, but there was something stubborn in her eyes that made her seem stronger than anyone had a right to be after the night she’d had.

I raised an eyebrow. “Is that an order?”

Her lips twitched. “No.”

“Good.”

She handed me the mug anyway.

I accepted it mostly because she looked proud of herself, and that annoyed me enough to distract from everything else for half a second.

For a few moments, neither of us spoke. The silence between us felt different now. Comfortable in a way I didn’t trust. Comfort made people careless, and carelessness got people killed. Especially around women like Zariah Brooks.

“You blame yourself,” she said.

I looked down at her. “What?”

“The guard.” Her eyes met mine. “You blame yourself for what happened.”

I didn’t answer.

I didn’t need to.

The guard had died protecting someone under my protection. That responsibility landed on me whether it was fair or not. Fairness had never mattered much in my world.

“People die in my life,” I said.

The words came out colder than I intended.

Zariah didn’t flinch. “And you think that makes it easier?”

I looked away first.

Because no.

It didn’t.

Not even a little.

Before she could say anything else, Darius cursed from across the room.

Every conversation stopped.

I turned. “What?”

Darius stared at one of the monitors, his face pale in a way I had rarely seen. Not afraid. Shocked.

“What is it?” I repeated.

Slowly, he turned the monitor toward us. A video file played on the screen, timestamped three hours earlier. The footage showed the hallway outside Zariah’s room. The same hallway from the night she escaped. The same hallway where everything had started spiraling out of my control.

A figure appeared on screen.

A man wearing a baseball cap walked carefully down the hallway, his face lowered. He moved like someone who knew the cameras were there, like someone who understood exactly where to stand and where not to. When he reached Zariah’s door, he stopped.

Then he looked up.

Straight into the camera.

As if he wanted us to see him.

The man slowly removed his cap.

The room froze.

No one spoke.

No one breathed.

Zariah made a sound beside me, small and broken. “No.”

My blood turned to ice.

Because the man staring back at us from the screen was David Brooks.

Zariah’s father.

The man we had buried six days ago.

The man who was supposed to be dead.