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Leon watched the monitors like they were a slow-motion clock, as if the flicker of a camera feed could speed up an answer he already feared. The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and lemon polish; sunlight pooled on the tile in stubborn rectangles, indifferent to the violence that had threaded itself through their family. Ivon slept in the shallow way of the wounded, breath shallow and fingers twitching every other minute as he fought his demons.

He had nothing to do.

That was the part that gnawed at him—more than the blood, more than the press, more than the way Leo had turned the whole damn thing into a lecture about failures. Motionless in the vinyl chair, Leon felt the weight of the house push down through his bones: the impossible, stupid expectation that someone—him—should always be ready to answer a problem before it had the chance to become a catastrophe.

His phone buzzed, a call from Luis - someone who knew how to use a fucking gun, thank God! “Two men at the entrance. Sayin’ they’re press. Holding.” Leon responded immediately “Keep them off the doors. No one in.” He didn’t need the panic in his chest to know the cameras still liked blood.

Ivon’s eyelids fluttered. He muttered something that might have been a name. Leon’s throat tightened.

“You’re going to ruin my life,” Ivon rasped, eyes still closed. “Always the melodrama.” He offered a crooked, exhausted smile that did nothing to convince Leon.

“You live to provide it,” Leon said, voice low. He reached out and took Ivon’s hand, a habit he hated and found himself doing more than not in just a day that he had been kept in the hospita;. “Sleep. Let me get the doctor. Don’t try to be brave in front of me. Does anything hurt?”

“You sound like Grandpa,” Ivon mumbled. “Tell him I miss his yelling when he calls to ask about an update.”

“Noted. I’ll pass it on,” Leon said. The lie had an edge of truth—Leo’s rage was a fuel they had all learned to use. But now that the old man had stormed back into the world, his fury was a compass that pointed nowhere Leon wanted to go.

The nurse came in—young, efficient, and tired in a way that made him think she’d worked three night shifts in a row. She checked the monitors, adjusted an IV, made small talk about Ivon’s stable vitals in the tone professionals used to cage dread.

“You need anything?” she asked, pausing when she noticed the dark under his eyes.

“Coffee,” Leon said, surprising himself with the smallness of the request. “And ask security to sweep the surrounding areas. No one is allowed near this room without clearance.”

She glanced at the door and gave a curt nod. “Already done. We’ve increased patrols since the afternoon.”

He watched her go, then turned back to Ivon. The boy—man—who’d been shot in a crowd of vultures and witnesses still looked fragile. It felt obscene to talk about charts and power plays when his brother had been put under a scalpel, but that was the floor they lived on: calculus wrapped in a bed sheet.

Luis’s face appeared in the doorway before the knock. “Sir,” he said softly. “We’ve been tracking Aielle’s bike. The device pinged.”

Leon didn’t move at first. The word pinged through him like a bullet rifling the air. Aielle. The woman who’d been in his house, in his brother’s orbit, who had knocked him unconscious twice and once had slipped a knife into his back in different ways. The same woman he wanted guilty and couldn’t reconcile with the evidence that contradicted his gut.

“Where?” He heard the steel in his voice and liked it less than he expected.

Luis walked to the foot of the bed and pulled up a live feed on his tablet. Tiny icons crawled across a city map—streets, lanes, the little green line that meant movement. “Pinged thirty minutes ago. They thought the battery was dead, but it tossed a signal. We triangulated three minutes later. She’s on the eastbound side of the industrial belt—near container rows, close to the freight yards.”

Leon felt the room tilt, a private tilt of the planet as decision forced itself into the space between him and the bed. “Are you sure it’s active? Could be a glitch.”

Luis jabbed a thumb at the map. “Not a glitch. Device flashed. We’ve got three men on it now. I can get you coordinates—exact block.”

He wanted to tell Luis to wait. He wanted to tell himself to do nothing, to sit like a rock and let his men find her and bring her back tied and beaten and explain everything in a confession soaked with fear. He wanted to be the man who could burn someone’s life down because it made sense.

Instead he closed his eyes and let the dread catch like a net.

“Have the team stay mobile. No engagement unless she runs or is compromised. If Leon’s men roll in heavy, it looks bad—makes the papers feed on the drama.” He hated the way strategy always tasted like compromise.

Luis’s jaw tightened. “Understood.”

The nurse came back in, fresh chart in hand. “The doctor will be in for the morning round soon,” she said. “How long do you think he’ll—”

“Keep him sedated until the doc says otherwise.” Leon spoke for his brother’s safety, but the statement was a lie. He would keep watching until Ivon opened his eyes and cursed him for the fuss. He would be there if his brother woke in the middle of the night with a fever and asked for water. He would be there because there was no one else he trusted.

The door clicked. Leo? No—his grandfather’s absence had been a temporary mercy. He didn’t need another lecture. But the man who stepped in wasn’t Leo. It was Abdul—Shadow's childhood something—brought by Luis as additional quiet muscle. He crossed to Leon and whispered one word.

“Coordinates.”

Leon breathed out. “Give me the block.”

Abdul punched them in. A map number, an address. A stretch of rusted containers. The place Aielle had likely thought to run to, or a place he suspected she would go.

He imagined her—hair plastered to her skin, breath fast, scuffed shoes. He imagined the slick intelligence in her, the way she crawled through systems and codes and men as if she’d been born with the knack. He imagined the gun in a stranger’s hand; he imagined her face when the man had pointed and not pulled.

“You sure it came from the bike?” he asked. “Not someone carrying it?”

Luis tightened his mouth. “Tracker spikes were consistent with the vehicle signature. GPS lock matched the bike’s MAC. It’s her ride.”

Leon’s chest tightened. Evidence. Movement. A clean line he could follow. It alleviated nothing. If she’d been the shooter, this was where he’d put a mercenary on her trail. If she hadn’t, this was where the real killer would be caught — or vanish.

He pushed himself up. The chair squealed on gleaming tile. Ivon’s fingers twitched; the man let out a small, sleep-rough laugh and then fell quiet again. Leon looked back and felt something like regret. “Keep her—no, not keep. Follow. Eyes only, trailing two minutes behind. No direct engagement unless she’s marked.”

Luis nodded. “We’ll ghost her. Two men on bikes, two in a car shadow. We’ll keep comms clean.”

Leon grabbed his jacket from the coat rack. He didn’t like the idea of leaving the room—of leaving his brother—but he also didn’t want to be the man who sat while someone walked away with answers. He had to see it through.

At the doorway he paused. For a beat he let the fluorescent light wash over him. The world unrolled in tiny, ugly increments: a paper’s headline, a bodyguard’s whisper, a masked shooter in a crowd. The family’s name would be used and abused by people who wanted a spectacle. He'd seen how quickly myth eclipsed truth.

He straightened, jaw set. “If she’s at that location and the tracker confirms, bring her in alive,” he said. “I want to hear her own version. I want to look into those eyes and see if she’s a liar.”

Luis’s lips twitched; he knew the truth. “Understood.”

Leon stepped into the hall. As the door closed behind him, the room shrank around Ivon’s sleeping shape. The monitor’s beeps kept time like a metronome for someone else’s fate.

Outside, the city breathed on. His men were already moving like chess pieces. The GPS coordinates blinked on a screen in his palm, a clean, mathematical answer to a blood-scented question.

He didn’t know if he wanted justice. He didn’t know if he believed in it anymore. But he did know this: the night had given him a thread, and he was going to follow it until it led him to the person who’d fired into his family—whatever that person looked like, masked or unmasked.

His phone buzzed again. The word on the screen was simple, brutal.

“Active. She’s on the move.” Time to roll