《Owned In Silence》全部章節：第 1 章 - 第 5 章

The men came on a Tuesday, which Tobin Leith would later find almost funny, because Tuesdays had always been the most unremarkable day of his week. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his brother's apartment, cleaning a handgun that didn't belong to either of them, when the front door opened without a knock and three men in dark coats walked inside like they owned the air in the room.Jude was on the couch. Tobin didn't need to look at his brother to know what was happening to his face, because he had seen that particular shade of terror before, the colour draining from the skin so fast it looked like someone had pulled a plug somewhere underneath. Jude owed the Saal syndicate an amount of money that he could not pay in this lifetime or the next, and these men were here to collect something other than cash.The tallest of the three did the talking. He explained, with the bored patience of someone who had delivered this speech many times, that the debt had matured past the point of

Tobin waited until 2:17 in the morning, when the security rotation left a four-minute window between the east corridor camera sweep and the nearest patrol's return circuit. He moved barefoot down the hallway, staying close to the wall where the floorboards were less likely to creak, carrying nothing but the tension wrench and a thin flat tool he had fashioned from the metal clip inside his paperback's spine.The Kaba lock was a seven-pin configuration, and Tobin had trained on locks far more complex than this during his military intelligence certification. His hands were steady and his breathing was controlled, and the first three pins set within forty seconds. The fourth pin gave him trouble, a spool driver that required a specific tension angle he needed a moment to find, but by the ninety-second mark the lock turned with a soft click that sounded, in the silence of the sleeping estate, like a gunshot.He eased the door open and stepped inside. The office was large and dark, lit onl

Tobin did not sleep that night. He lay on the bed with the ceiling pressing down on him and the contents of that file rearranging everything he had built over the past two years. Every piece of intelligence he had gathered, every hour of planning, every cold and careful step that had led him to this estate had been aimed at one man, and that man turned out to be the wrong one.Emeric Saal had not ordered the raid that killed his mother. He had not known about it until it was over, and when he found out, he had punished his brother and launched an investigation. The civilian casualty report was clinical and brief, the kind of language that reduces a human life to a line item, but it existed, which meant someone inside the syndicate had at least acknowledged that a woman had died who should not have died.The person who should be sitting at the other end of Tobin's fury was Nikolai. The brother with more ambition than patience, the one who left his bishop exposed and ran unsanctioned op