Chapter 193

Ares POV

Numbers never lie.

People do. Men do. Blood does. But numbers always lead somewhere if you know how to listen.

I sit alone in the operations room long after most of the estate has gone quiet. Screens glow in the dark, washing the walls in cold light. Coffee has gone untouched beside me for over an hour. My fingers move automatically across the keyboard, chasing patterns that most men would miss.

The Broker has been careful. Too careful.

That is how I know he exists.

I replay the same financial logs again and again. Shipping manifests. Customs records. Import licenses. Charitable donations. Construction permits. Nothing illegal on the surface. That is the point. Everything clean enough to pass inspections. Everything boring enough to be ignored.

Hidden in plain sight.

I cross reference shell companies with port activity in Piraeus. Cargo listed as medical supplies. Agricultural equipment. Relief aid. The kind of shipments no one questions. The kind inspectors wave through without opening more than a crate or two.

But the numbers do not add up.

Weights fluctuate. Volumes shift. Delivery schedules overlap in impossible ways. Containers rerouted mid shipment. Bills paid by subsidiaries that dissolve within months of incorporation.

I lean back in my chair, jaw tight.

This has been going on for years.

Not months. Not since the war escalated.

Years.

The Broker did not appear overnight. He grew roots under Athens while everyone else was too busy bleeding each other dry to notice.

I pull up a map of the city and begin marking points. One warehouse near Keratsini. Another abandoned factory in Perama. A shipping depot listed as condemned but still receiving power. Another near the old railway line.

All abandoned.

All officially useless.

All still receiving shipments.

My pulse quickens.

“Son of a bitch,” I mutter.

I bring up satellite imagery. The buildings look dead from above. Roofs caving. Windows shattered. Rust crawling up metal walls. No visible guards. No cameras. No heat signatures strong enough to trigger alarms.

Ghosts.

That is the brilliance of it.

No fortress. No compound. No headquarters.

The Broker scattered himself across the city, hid his operations in places no one cared about anymore.

I trace money flows next. Payments moving through offshore accounts that touch Greece for seconds before vanishing again. The same amounts repeating every six weeks. Never exact. Always just different enough to avoid pattern recognition.

Except patterns exist whether people want them to or not.

I follow one account further than I should be able to. A dead end for most analysts. But I am patient. I peel layers slowly. False transfers. Circular transactions. Laundering inside laundering.

Then I see it.

A single constant.

A logistics firm that does not officially exist anymore.

It shut down eight years ago after a fire. Insurance fraud. The owner disappeared. No employees. No taxes. No active registration.

Yet money still flows through its old accounts.

I feel something cold slide down my spine.

Eight years.

That lines up too neatly with too many deaths.

I pull the file. The company name hits me like a punch.

Hermes Continental Logistics.

A delivery company.

Of course.

Hermes. Messenger of the gods. Carrier of secrets.

I almost laugh.

I forward the information to Demetri first. Then to Nikolai. No commentary. Just data. He will understand.

I keep digging.

Shipping codes start to reveal themselves once I know what to look for. Letters placed slightly out of sequence. Container numbers that rotate through the same three ports before disappearing inland. Receipts paid in small amounts from unrelated entities.

Weapons hidden inside aid crates.

Cash moved in spare parts.

People transported as cargo.

I stop when I see that.

I clench my fists until my knuckles ache.

“How many,” I whisper to the empty room.

How many lives passed through these warehouses without anyone noticing.

I zoom in on one location near the coast. The warehouse looks especially ruined. Collapsed walls. Graffiti. A perfect place to hide activity because everyone assumes it is unusable.

Yet power records show consistent electricity draw at night.

Generators.

I enlarge the image.

There.

A truck blur caught at the edge of the frame. License plates obscured. But the company logo on the side is familiar.

Not Hermes.

Another shell.

They use layers like armor.

I hear footsteps behind me and do not turn. I know who it is by the weight of the steps.

“You find something,” Nikolai says.

I nod slowly. “Not something. Everything.”

He comes to stand beside me. I can feel the tension rolling off him even without looking. His family is still underground. Angela is supposed to be resting. None of us truly are.

“They’ve been running coded shipments across Athens for years,” I say. “Using abandoned warehouses as transfer points. No central hub. No predictable pattern.”

“Smart,” he says quietly.

“Cruel,” I correct.

I finally look at him. His eyes are dark. Focused. Furious beneath the control.

“This is bigger than we thought,” I continue. “The Broker isn’t just funding attacks. He’s managing an infrastructure. Logistics. Transport. Finance. Information.”

“A shadow empire,” Nikolai says.

“Yes.”

I pull up another file. “And here’s the worst part. These warehouses are close enough to our old patrol routes that they watched us watching nothing.”

His jaw tightens.

“He was always one step ahead,” he murmurs.

“Because he wasn’t reacting,” I say. “He was waiting.”

Silence settles between us.

“We can hit them,” Nikolai finally says.

“Yes,” I agree. “But carefully. If we strike all at once, we risk losing the trail. He’ll vanish.”

“And if we don’t,” he replies, “he’ll keep bleeding us.”

I nod. “We track. We observe. We let him think he’s invisible.”

“And then,” he says.

“And then we collapse everything.”

Nikolai exhales slowly. “Get Ajax and Ares teams ready.”

“I am Ares,” I remind him dryly.

He almost smiles. Almost.

As he leaves, I turn back to the screens. The city of Athens sprawls before me, ancient and layered and hiding monsters beneath its bones.

The Broker thought he could disappear into the noise.

He was wrong.

I found his footprints in the dust of forgotten buildings and the silence of numbers no one bothered to count.

And now that I see him, I will not look away.

Wars are not won with bullets alone.

They are won by cutting the arteries that keep monsters alive.

And I know exactly where to cut.