Chapter 246 Chapter 246: Zane's POV

Chapter 246 Chapter 246: Zane's POV
Chapter 246: Zane's POV
My hands shook as I stared at the message on my phone.
The address. Three lines of text that I had been searching for across weeks of dead ends and closed doors and nights where I had to sit in the dark with surveillance footage and financial records and second-hand information, piecing together a picture of a man who had spent years making sure he couldn't be found.
I stared at it harder again, my hands clenching at the device.
"Mother fucker."
I hissed to myself. How hadn't I figured it out?
Even before the whole disaster, I should have figured it out. I should have found out that it was fucking him and I had been looking, searching for the wrong thing all along.
It had taken me standing on that bomb all along to piece everything together, to find out who had been helping Alonso.
How was I so slow?
How had it taken me this long?
I had thought he was dead.
I stopped my car in front of the building and sat there for a moment with the engine running and my hands still not completely steady on the wheel.
My phone rang.
Nikolai.
I looked at his name on the screen and let it ring out.
I knew what he was going to say. I knew exactly what he was going to tell me. Come back. He knew me, but this had always been my game, not hockey, not the game my father had forced me into. The real game was this.
"Let's plan this properly. Don't do anything alone. You have to be strategic, Zane, we need to think this through, we can't afford to make a mistake now."
I chuckled at the imagined message as I shook my head. It was too late. Too fucking late to be a caving father who wanted things done carefully. He preferred me wild. Reckless was uncanny.
I shoved the phone in my pocket.
Because if I went back and sat in a room and planned this properly, I was going to have to think about other things. I was going to have to think about the fact that I hadn't spoken to her in weeks. That I had been ignoring her calls deliberately, systematically, with the kind of discipline that had cost me more than anything I had ever done in my life.
Because that was the part nobody knew.
My phone rang again.
Nikolai again.
I didn't pick it up.
I knew I was being stupid, walking right into his den without so much as backup. But I didn't care. Not with the anger coursing through my body like a magnetic force, pulling me forward whether I wanted it to or not.
I pushed the door open.
The sound of music came blasting through immediately. The kind of music that was designed to fill space without being noticed.
The heavy smell of cigarette smoke and something sweeter underneath it, weed maybe, drifting through the air in a careful way that suggested ventilation systems designed to keep the worst of it contained.
The room was full of men who looked ordinary.
That was the tell.
In a room like this, at a place like this, at this hour of an afternoon, the men who looked ordinary were the ones you needed to watch most carefully.
The ones whose suits fit just slightly wrong because of what was underneath them. The ones whose eyes tracked movement without their heads moving.
The ones who looked like they were relaxed and weren't.
I counted them without appearing to count them.
Fifteen. Maybe seventeen. Spread through the room in positions that weren't random. Multiple angles. Strategic positioning.
"Fuckers."
I muttered, stepping through the doorway as every single pair of eyes in that room clicked to me and clocked my movement and filed me away.
It was easier to figure out who I was because I always did tend to stand out.
My eyes clocked instantly to a doorway at the back of the room which looked like where the main person was staying, and I moved toward it.
Nobody moved.
Nobody stopped me.
I pushed the door open, a rattling sound coming from inside the room which I later realized was the sound of a moaning woman who was being fucked against a wall while someone watched.
I could see the back of someone's head. The viewer.
The smoke was thicker here, curling up from something held loosely in one hand, drifting toward the ceiling in slow deliberate spirals.
Three men stood nearby. Not close enough to be obviously guards but positioned with the kind of precision that said that's exactly what they were.
And not one of them was moving to intercept me.
Not one of his men in that room, all fifteen or seventeen of them, had made a single move to stop me from walking directly toward their employer.
Which meant one of two things.
Either they had been told to let me through.
Or he had known I was coming.
I pushed past the last man between us.
"You came quite late," the voice said, as it slowly turned around. "Why did it take you so long?"
He turned around slowly, like a man who had been expecting this, who had been waiting for exactly this moment and had decided not to rush it.
He turned around and his eyes found mine immediately, without searching, without the small adjustment you made when you were surprised by who you were looking at.
He had known.
Of course he had known.
I stood there and looked at the man who had been haunting me for years.
The man I had thought was dead.
Simone Bryon.
Judy Bryon’s brother.
He looked older than I had expected. Not old, exactly, but old enough to know he had seen more in life in his eyes and carried the weight of decisions that most people never had to make.
He looked like his brother, but older.
But he was never anything like Judy.
Because he was he was the enemy.
The mastermind, the architect.