All Chapters of The Debt Collector's Price: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

ISLA'S POVSouth Bronx. 12:47 PM.The coordinates lead us to a dead end of chain-link fencing topped with rusted barbed wire that looks like it hasn't cut anything but the wind for twenty years. A sign hangs crooked, the metal groaning against its bolts: Morrison Industrial Site - No Trespassing.Beyond the mesh, concrete buildings decay in silence. I see corroded iron beams jutting out like ribs, shattered windows that look like missing teeth, and stagnant water pooling in the cracked asphalt, shimmering with an oil slick rainbow.It’s the silence of a grave.Gabriel's SUV parks fifty feet from the entrance, the engine ticking as it cools. Maria Santos exits first, her tactical team flowing out behind her like water. Four o

ISLA'S POV8:30 AM. The penthouse.The lights don’t just flicker; they stutter. A jagged, electrical seizure that cuts the room into strobe-lit frames. Once. Twice.Then they stabilize, but the quality of the light has changed. Thinner. Weaker.Gabriel looks up from his laptop, his eyes narrowing. "Did you feel that?""I felt it."I pull up the Smart Grid interface on my own screen. The data isn't flowing; it’s hemorrhaging. The power consumption graph shows a spike so vertical it looks like a glitch."The building is drawing power," I say, my fingers flying over the keys. "It's redirecting the load. Pulling from the perimeter and dumping it som

GABRIEL'S POVI am standing in the mechanical heart of my own building, and for the first time, I feel the weight of it not as an asset, but as a cage.The clockwork mechanism turns beneath my feet, a rhythmic grinding that travels up through the soles of my boots and settles in my shinbones. It’s a physical vibration, heavy and relentless. My father’s legacy. Or what I thought was his legacy.The gears spin—brass teeth biting into brass teeth. The sound is a slow-motion snap, a trap closing over a limb. Michael Hunt Sr. didn't build Hunt Capital. He built a glass ornament on top of Michael Hale’s concrete foundation. Everything I inherited, every square foot of steel and ego I thought I controlled, rests on this machine.And I never knew it was here.

GABRIEL’S POVThe darkness is absolute.Not the kind where your eyes adjust. The kind that erases everything—the walls, the floor, the concept of space. It makes you question whether you still exist.I force my breathing to slow. Four counts in. Six counts out.It’s an old tactical protocol for enclosed environments: reduce oxygen consumption by forty percent. My pulse drops from seventy-two to fifty-eight, a deliberate, mechanical slowing I can feel thudding at the base of my throat.The vault is silent except for Isla.Her breathing is jagged, fast, and shallow. She is burning through our shared oxygen like it’s an unlimited resource, panic overriding the math she usually clings to."Isla." My voice cuts the dark. "Slow your breathing. Four in, six out."A pause. I hear the rustle of fabric against concrete as she shifts, but her rhythm doesn't change."I know how to breathe, Gabriel." The snap in her voice is brittle.She isn't slowing down. If anything, she’s accelerating. The mat

ISLA'S POVNYC Family Court. Room 304.The wood of the witness stand is polished slick, feeling cold and hard under my palms.Gabriel sits at the respondent's table. He isn't beside me. He isn't touching me. He is the Client, and I am the Hired Gun, positioned exactly as the contract specified we should be.Judge Miriam Castellanos reviews the evidence. The silence in the room is heavy, filled only by the rustle of paper—three weeks of depositions, exhibits, and testimonies being turned over by judicial hands.She studies the Marriage Settlement Agreement, lingering on the "Stress Test" clause. She examines the 1988 Hale-Sterling Ledger that proves Michael Hale Sr.'s blackmail operation. She holds up the polaroid of Claire Bennett and Michael Hale Sr., dated February 27, 1988. She reads the hostage exchange documents my father archived before he died.Every page has been authenticated. Every signature verified.The Judge looks up, her eyes locking onto mine. "Ms. Bennett, you entered