Silence claims the room.
Rafe stares at the silver drive resting on the dusty wood, the combat knife still gripped loosely in his large hand.
Nick freezes. His dark, calculating eyes drop from my face to the small silver object. He stares at it as if it might detonate.
Kaila halts mid-step. Daniel stares in pure shock.
The entire room understands exactly what the cartel princess just slammed onto the table.
“I did not leave that compound empty-handed,” I say, my voice ringing clear and steady over the crackling fire. “I knew exactly what Dominic was planning. I stole his master ledger from his private safe yesterday morning.”
Shock transitions into feral, undeniable respect.
Nick’s focus snaps back to my face. A slow, deeply possessive smirk spreads across his hard features. The arrogant Commander is captured by the lethal Queen standing in his territory.
Rafe lets out a low, rough laugh from the sofa. His golden eyes flare with dark, burning pride. The beast recognizes the monster hidden beneath the silk dresses.
“You stole the holy grail,” Rafe growls with pure approval. “You robbed the Costa empire blind while dancing in a ballroom.”
“I am not a liability.” I hold Nick’s intense gaze without flinching. “I am holding the nuclear codes. We do not just hide in the mountains. We bleed him back together.”
The tension in the room shatters, replaced by aggressive tactical energy.
The rustic cabin transforms into a high-tech war room.
Kaila and Daniel move with practiced, terrifying speed. They unpack heavy, encrypted laptops from their metal cases. They turn the scarred dining table into a digital command center in under three minutes. Tangled wires and glowing screens replace the quiet isolation of the mountains.
“My phone,” I say, my voice tight. “The GPS?—”
“Is dead,” Rafe rumbles, his broad, bare chest brushing against my shoulder as he passes. The heat radiating from his skin is a visceral reminder of how he felt buried deep inside me. He points to the digital hub where the crushed tracking chip already sits next to Kaila’s laptop. “I told you in the alley, Firebird. We’re off the grid. Kaila is just finishing the burial.”
Kaila picks up the tiny chip with a pair of silver tweezers. Her sharp eyes gleam with dangerous excitement.
“Dead right now,” Kaila says, a wicked smile curving her lips. “But we are going to resurrect it on a different continent.”
Kaila and Daniel go to work. Their fingers fly across the keyboards in a rapid blur of code and encrypted servers.
They wire the tiny tracking chip into a specialized burner rig. They boot up a massive, illegal web of international VPNs and ghost servers.
“Dominic’s tech team is going to scramble the second this signal pings,” Daniel mutters, his eyes locked on the scrolling green code. “We need to build a flawless digital illusion. If it looks too clean, they will know it is a spoof.”
They fabricate a masterpiece of digital misdirection.
Kaila hacks into the secured database of a private charter flight company operating out of a small airfield three hours outside the city. She creates a fake flight manifest. She logs Lucia Costa and Tyra Costa as official passengers on a Gulfstream jet that departed exactly two hours ago.
“Flight destination?” Daniel asks, his fingers hovering over the keyboard.
“Rome, Italy,” Nick orders from his position near the stone fireplace. “Make him think she used his offshore accounts to flee the country.”
Daniel inputs the coordinates. The fake passport pings.
When Dominic’s elite tech team locates the resurrected GPS signal, it will not ping from a freezing, isolated cabin in the North Ridge mountains. It will ping from a secure, untraceable server in the center of Rome, Italy.
The cartel boss will waste millions deploying heavily armed assassins to hunt digital ghosts across Europe.
The real targets sit safely hidden in the freezing silence of the mountain woods.
The digital illusion is executed. The hunt is diverted.