The Pier

By morning, Adrian's study had turned into a war room, maps of the docks spread across the desk, three of his most senior men standing around it while he traced a finger along a route marked in red.

"Halloway keeps two boats at the north end," one of the men said, tapping a spot on the map. "If we go in loud, he'll have time to pull back and regroup. If we go in quiet, before dawn, we catch him before his full crew's even awake."

"Quiet," Adrian said, no hesitation in it. "I'm not interested in a fair fight. I'm interested in ending this before it costs me anyone else."

Ivy stood near the door, arms crossed, waiting for the moment someone would notice her and try to send her out of the room. It came fast.

"Sir," the second man said carefully, "should she really be hearing all of this."

"She stays." Adrian didn't look up from the map. "We had this conversation already."

Ivy caught the flicker of surprise on the man's face and felt something steady settle into her chest despite the fear underneath it. Adrian was keeping his word, even with his own men watching, even when it would have been easier to send her upstairs and pretend she didn't need to know the shape of the danger closing in.

"I'm coming with you," she said. "To the pier."

The room went quiet. Adrian finally looked up, jaw tight. "No."

"You said I'm in every decision."

"Decisions, yes. A raid on Halloway's men before sunrise is not a decision, it's a battlefield, and you have no place standing in the middle of one." His voice stayed level, but she could hear the effort it cost him. "I go in, I end this, I come back for you after it's done."

"And if it goes wrong. If he's expecting you and you don't come back at all." Ivy stepped further into the room, refusing to be talked down to in front of his men. "I'd rather be there and useful than back here doing nothing but waiting to find out whether you're alive."

"Ivy."

"I'm not asking to be in the front of anything. Let me stay back, out of the fighting, somewhere I can actually see what's happening, not stuck pacing a bedroom imagining the worst." Her voice cracked slightly, the fear finally slipping through the argument. "Please. I can't lose someone else the way I lost my mother, not knowing anything until it's already over."

Something in Adrian's face gave way at that, the mention of her mother landing somewhere he couldn't argue past. He exchanged a look with his men, a silent conversation Ivy couldn't fully follow, then exhaled.

"You stay in the car. With two men on you at all times. The second anything looks wrong, you're gone, no arguments." His eyes found hers, hard and serious. "That's the only version of this where you're anywhere near that pier."

"Understood."

They left before dawn, the city outside the car windows still dark and half asleep, streetlights flickering against a sky just beginning to gray at the edges. Ivy sat wedged between two of Adrian's men in the back seat, watching Adrian in the front, his profile calm in a way that told her nothing about what he was actually feeling.

The pier came into view slow, a stretch of old docks and rusted cranes, water black and still beneath a thin morning fog. Adrian's men fanned out silently, moving between shipping containers like shadows detaching themselves from darker shadows, and for several long minutes nothing happened at all except the sound of her own heartbeat in her ears.

Then one of the men near her tensed, hand going to his radio. "Movement. North boat."

Ivy leaned forward despite herself, straining to see through the fog, and caught the shape of figures emerging from the boat's cabin, unhurried, like they'd been waiting. Adrian's men closed in fast, and for a moment it looked like it might actually happen the quiet way, contained, controlled, over before it properly began.

Then a second group of men appeared from behind a stack of containers on the opposite side of the dock, and Ivy's stomach dropped as she recognized the shape of a third figure walking among them, favoring one leg slightly as he moved.

"That's not possible," she whispered.

One of the guards beside her followed her gaze and went rigid. "Sir. You need to see the east side."

Adrian turned, and Ivy watched his whole body go still, the calm control finally cracking at the edges.

Walking beside Halloway, limping but very much alive, was her father.

"Dad." The word tore out of her before she could stop it, loud enough that two of Adrian's men reached for her at once, pulling her back down in the seat.

Across the dock, Richard's head turned at the sound of her voice, and even through the fog and the distance, Ivy could see the moment he found her face. He didn't look surprised. He didn't look afraid either.

He looked like a man who'd been expecting exactly this.

"He was never gone," Adrian said quietly, more to himself than to her, the pieces of something ugly clicking into place behind his eyes. "He's been working with Halloway this entire time."

Richard raised a hand, calling something across the water that Ivy couldn't make out over the sound of her own pulse. Halloway's men shifted their formation, closing the gap between the two boats, and Ivy realized with a cold, sinking certainty that this had never been Adrian's ambush at all.

It had been a trap, and they'd walked into it exactly on schedule.

"Sir." One of Adrian's men crouched lower behind the car, voice tight. "They knew we were coming. Someone told them our timing."

Adrian's jaw worked, calculation and fury warring across his face in equal measure. "Marta gave up everything she knew last night. Which means either she held something back, or Halloway's had another source in my house all along."

"Get her out of here," he said, nodding once toward Ivy without looking away from the dock. "Now, before they close the perimeter."

The guards pulled her lower in the seat, and the last thing Ivy saw before the car peeled backward into the fog was her father's face across the water, calm, unbothered, watching her disappear the same way he'd watched her disappear from his study floor weeks ago.

Like leaving her behind was something he'd gotten good at practicing.