Chapter 120: Damon Moves

Chapter 120: Damon Moves
Max had been sitting in the chair for almost two hours. The room was still dark, the compound lights outside doing very little against the early morning, and Valerie was asleep on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek, and the robe pulled up to her shoulder.
Max had watched the sky outside the window go from black to the specific dark blue that came just before dawn, and he'd been thinking through the same set of problems in rotation, and when the knock came, he was already standing before the sound finished.
He crossed to the door and opened it.
Lydia stood in the corridor. She had her tablet under her arm, her hair pulled back, and the look on her face that meant something had come in that couldn't wait until morning.
"I specifically said not to bother me when I'm in this room," he said.
"That's why it's me knocking," she said, "and not anyone else. And I’m not here to bother you, sir."
He looked at her for a moment. Then he stepped out and pulled the door behind him until it was almost closed, and he followed her down the corridor.
He didn’t lock it.
They went to the east wing sitting room rather than his office—closer, and Lydia preferred to deliver bad news somewhere she could pace if she needed to. She didn't pace often. She stood near the window, pulled up something on the tablet, and turned it toward him.
"The Meridian warehouse," she said. "Forty minutes ago."
He looked at the screen. Surveillance footage, timestamped, showing the warehouse exterior — a large industrial building on the edge of a port district, two stories, shared wall with a logistics unit the Cardini used as a front.
Then the footage showed the explosion.
"Anyone inside?" he said.
"Two night staff. Both are out with minor injuries. They were in the front section."
"The inventory?"
"Eastern shipment staging," Lydia said. "Three weeks of consolidated product for the distribution chain. Gone. And the logistics unit next door took enough structural damage that we're pulling it from operation."
Max handed the tablet back.
The Meridian warehouse was not his most critical asset. It sat in the middle tier of the eastern operation—not irreplaceable, not something that would stall the whole chain if it went dark for a few weeks. But that was the point.
Damon hadn't hit something vital. He'd hit something visible. Something that said he had better intelligence on the Cardini's physical infrastructure than Max had previously credited him with, that he was willing to use it, and that this was an opening move rather than a full hand.
"Who else knows the location of that building?" Max said.
"Fourteen people on our end," Lydia said. "I'm already pulling the list."
"And on Damon's end."
"Working on it."
"I want it in an hour."
"You'll have it in forty-five minutes," she said.
Then Max was in his office by five in the morning.
He made four calls in the first hour, each one short, each one to a different part of the organization. And each call ended with a set of specific instructions and a time check.
Then he sat at his desk and worked through what Damon actually knew.
The warehouse location was one data point. The question was whether it was an isolated piece of intelligence — bought from one source, a one-time shot — or whether it was part of a wider picture that Damon had been building. If it were the latter, then the fourteen people who knew the Meridian address were only the beginning of the problem.
He was still working through it when the sun came up properly, and he kept working through it after that. The hours were disappearing without feeling like they'd passed.
Lydia came back at a quarter to twelve.
"She's up," she said from the doorway.
Max looked at the time on his desk. He closed the file he had open.
"Put her in the dining room," he said. "I'll be ten minutes."
Lydia left. He picked up his phone and made one last call, and then he put the phone in his pocket and left the office.
Valerie was already eating when he came in.
She was in silk pajamas—pale blue, clearly from the wardrobe—and she had her hair loose, and she'd pulled the chair slightly away from the table at an angle.
He sat down across from her.
She didn't look up immediately. She reached for the water glass, took a drink, set it back down, then looked at him, furious yet pretending to be merely indifferent.
"Good morning," he said.
"Is it?" she said.
He put food on his plate.
"I’m still pissed—" She stopped and picked up her fork. "You know what, it doesn't matter."
"Val."
"I said it doesn't matter." She pointed the fork vaguely in his direction. "Eat your food."
He looked at her. She stabbed a piece of fruit on her plate with more force than was strictly necessary and ate it. He watched her do it, and for a couple of minutes, they just ate, and the dining room was quiet.
Then he set his fork down.
"Damon blew up one of my warehouses last night," he said.
She looked up.
"A staging facility on the eastern side," he said. "Port district. He used enough to make the point without taking out anything adjacent." He kept his voice even. "Two of my people were inside. They're okay."
She had stopped eating and looked at him. She was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car moved somewhere on the property, and then it was quiet again.
"Lindsay," she said. "What does this mean for Lindsay?"
He looked at her across the table.
"And what are you going to do?" she added. "What happens next?"
He picked his fork back up. He looked at his plate and then back at her.
"Things are going to move faster now," he said. "That's what’s going to happen next."
It wasn't the full answer, but the way he said it—flat and certain and with no patience left in it at all—told her more than the words did.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she picked up her fork again, slowly, and went back to her plate, and the dining room stayed quiet, and neither of them said anything else.