Chapter 104 Ren

Chapter 104 Ren
Ren

The location comes through on Matteo's phone a little after midnight. A dock warehouse on the edge of the city, the kind of place that stopped seeing legitimate cargo years ago. I memorize the address and don't write it down anywhere.

I leave the warehouse a little before ten the next night. Valentino walks me to the car and doesn't say much, just checks the weapon holstered under my jacket and nods once, like that's the only send-off either of us knows how to give.

"Call the second it's done," he says. "Whatever happens."

"I will."

"And if it goes wrong....."

"It won't."

"That's not what I asked." He holds my eyes a second longer. "If it goes wrong, Ren, get out. Don't be a hero about it. She needs you alive more than she needs you dead trying to save her."

I don't answer that directly. I just get in the car and drive.

The dock is quiet when I arrive, most of it dark except for a single security light buzzing over a loading bay two hundred feet from where I park. I get out and walk the rest of the way, hands loose at my sides, nothing obviously armed about how I'm carrying myself, though the weight under my jacket says otherwise.

A man's already waiting inside the warehouse when I step through the gap in the rolling door. Older than I expect, gray at the temples, dressed plain, nothing that marks him as anyone important. He doesn't offer a name. I don't ask for one.

"You're punctual," he says. "I appreciate that in a client."

"I'm not your client."

"You're the man paying for information. Close enough." He gestures toward two crates set up like makeshift chairs, and I don't sit, just stand across from him with my arms crossed. He shrugs, unbothered, and leans against a support beam instead. "Fine. Business, then. You're looking for a woman."

"You know something about a broker moving people through the Gulf."

"I know the broker's name. I know who he answers to. I know the man currently overseeing the transfer you're chasing." He watches my face carefully while he says it, gauging exactly how much that lands. "That's worth considerably more than the price you offered."

"Name your number."

"I already told you, that's not how this works. I don't want money from a man who burns cities down when he doesn't get what he wants. I want a favor. Something I can call in later, whenever I need it, no questions asked."

"Fine. You have it."

"Just like that." He raises an eyebrow, surprised by how fast I agree.

"I don't have time to negotiate over a favor I can pay later. Give me the name."

He studies me a moment longer, then nods slowly, satisfied. "The handler's name is Ashen. Former military, works for whoever pays best these days. He's currently overseeing operations for an organization that calls itself the Syndicate. Never heard of anyone actually running it, just people who work under its name. Ashen's their logistics man. Moves people and cargo, keeps his head down otherwise."

"Where."

"A compound somewhere in the Gulf. I don't have exact coordinates, but I know the region, and I know it used to be something else before the Syndicate took it over. A research station, from what I've heard. Isolated enough that nobody asks questions about what actually happens there."

Something in my chest goes tight and cold at that. It matches everything Valentino guessed from the shipping code. It matches the fuel logs. Two separate threads finally lining up into something solid enough to actually chase.

"How current is this information," I ask.

"Current enough. I heard it inside the last week." He crosses his arms. "That's everything I've got. The rest, you'll have to find yourself."

"I need more than a region and a name."

"That's more than you had an hour ago." He straightens off the beam, adjusting his jacket. "I'm not a treasure map, Moretti. I'm a man who happened to hear things. Take what you're given and be grateful for it."

I want to push harder, want to shake more out of him, but something in the set of his shoulders tells me I've already gotten everything he actually has. Pushing further wastes time I don't have to waste.

"Fine," I say. "The favor's yours whenever you need it."

"I'll remember that." He starts to say something else, and that's when the side of his head opens up in a spray of red, the crack of the shot arriving a half second behind it, and he's on the ground before I fully register what just happened.

I move on instinct, dropping low and throwing myself sideways behind a stack of pallets as a second round punches through the metal wall inches from where I stood a moment ago. Dust and splinters rain down around me, and I press myself flat against the concrete, heart slamming, ears ringing from how close that second shot actually came.

Sniper. High angle, given the trajectory, which means a rooftop somewhere across the dock, or one of the cranes lining the waterline. I don't have a visual, and I'm not about to expose myself trying to get one.

A third shot hits the pallet stack above my head, close enough that a chunk of wood splinters off and catches my forearm, tearing through my jacket and opening a shallow line across the skin underneath. I bite down against the sting and keep moving, staying low, working my way toward the far end of the warehouse where a second door hangs half open.

More shots follow, spaced out, methodical, someone taking their time instead of spraying wild, which tells me whoever's up there is trained, patient, exactly the kind of shooter you hire when you actually intend to hit your target instead of just scaring him.

I make it through the door and out into a narrow alley between two containers, sprinting now, no more room for careful movement. Another round cracks off the container beside me, and I cut sharp right, putting the container fully between myself and whatever angle the shooter's working from.

My car sits exactly where I left it, and I don't slow down until I'm behind the wheel, engine turning over, tires spinning briefly against loose gravel before catching and throwing me forward out of the lot.

I don't look back. I don't stop until I'm four blocks clear and the streets around me have gone back to ordinary, empty and quiet, nothing chasing me that I can see in the mirrors.

My arm throbs where the splinter caught it, blood soaking slowly through my sleeve, though it's shallow enough that I know it doesn't need more than a bandage. My hands are shaking on the wheel anyway, adrenaline burning through me faster than I can process it.

The man is dead. Whatever else he might have known, whatever more he could have told me given time, that's gone now, taken out by a single round before he finished a sentence. Somebody didn't want him talking to me. Somebody knew exactly where and when to find him.

That thought sits colder in my chest than the fear does.

I drive straight back to the warehouse, checking my mirrors obsessively the entire way, and by the time I pull up outside, my hands have mostly steadied, though the graze on my arm has soaked a dark patch clean through my jacket sleeve.

Valentino's outside before I've even fully parked, crossing the field fast, and Matteo and Marco aren't far behind him.

"You're bleeding," Valentino says, reaching me first, grabbing my arm before I can wave him off.

"It's shallow. Splinter, not a bullet."

"Splinter from what."

"Gunfire." I pull my arm back gently, though I let him get a look at it first, confirming for himself that it's nothing serious. "The contact's dead. Sniper took him out mid-sentence. Second shot nearly caught me instead."

The color drains slightly from Valentino's face. "You were ambushed."

"He was ambushed. I was collateral, or the actual target, depending on how you read it." I walk past him, heading for the warehouse door, and the others fall in step behind me, question after question building in the tight, tense silence.

Inside, Marco pulls out a small first aid kit from one of the crates without being asked, and I let him clean and wrap the cut while I lay out everything the contact told me before he died. The name. The organization. The region. The research station.

"That matches everything," Alessandro says quietly, already pulling up the satellite data he'd been cross-referencing earlier. "The Gulf. A former research facility. This could actually be it, Ren."

"It could be," I say. "Assuming the information was real, and not something they wanted me to hear before making sure the source never talked again."

Silence settles over the room at that, everyone turning the same uncomfortable thought over at once.

"Somebody knew where that meeting was happening," Marco says slowly, finishing the last wrap on my arm. "Somebody knew when. That's not the kind of information that leaks by accident."

"The contact could have been followed," Valentino says, though even as he says it, I can hear how little conviction sits behind the theory.

"Maybe." I flex my hand, testing the bandage. "Or maybe whoever's holding Amelia already knew we were meeting him before I even walked through that door."

Matteo goes very still near the crates, and I watch something calculate fast behind his eyes.

"The only people who knew that meeting's location," he says slowly, "were standing in this warehouse a few hours ago."

Pardon me for the short chapter, I'll try to make the next chapter longer.