For the first time tonight, neither of them argues. They just sit there, the silence heavy but not hostile, as if some part of them finally believes we might claw our way back to each other.
The conversation turns like a knife to the one name that has to come next. Bryce. Saying it feels like punching a hole in the night. He seems untouchable until you actually line up what he rests his crown on—fear, silence, paper. Take those away, and he’s just a man afraid of what’s left when everything else is gone.
“He’s one of the heads of the operation,” Emerson says quietly. “Cut off the head, and the rest of it thrashes.”
“And we’ve already taken his second,” I answer, because Trent is finished—a name struck from the list. Saying it out loud still tastes like victory and ash. “He tried to kill me. That’s two birds with one stone in my book. Bryce is weakened. He’ll be watching his back and trusting fewer people.”
Rowan taps the table once, twice, jaw tightening in that familiar way he gets when he’s weighing fallout instead of numbers. “He’ll expect us to come in hot,” he says. “He’ll expect retaliation where it’s loud and obvious.” His gaze meets mine, and I know exactly what he’s seeing—burning warehouses, warnings carved into brick. “So, we don’t give him that.”
We talk strategy like men who have spent too many nights learning the rhythms of risk. We throw ideas back and forth—not the how-to of it, but the shape. Make him look weak. Strip him of leverage. Cut the money he thinks untouchable by exposing the cracks he’s built his walls on. Use what we have. The footage, the paperwork, the pattern of shipments, the things Berk’s been watching on a hundred screens. Make his empire smell like rot in front of the people who matter to him. He’ll get desperate and start making mistakes.
“You think he won’t suspect us?” Emerson asks, and the question is honest. Bryce will definitely suspect us after the move with Kimber. That was the line we crossed. This isn’t a tidy revenge fantasy—Bryce is a living, breathing threat. He has eyes everywhere, lawyers on retainer, and allies who benefit from things staying exactly as they are. He’ll start by hunting for traitors, and he won’t stop until he finds one.
“He’ll suspect everyone,” I say. “That’s our advantage. He thinks he can bait us. He thinks we’re predictable. We aren’t. We use his suspicion against him. Be quiet, get clever, and let his paranoia do our work.”
Rowan leans in, voice small and cold. “We don’t move like kids who want to watch a building burn. We move like men who want to leave him with nothing to stand on. Reputation, money,protection, allies. We peel those things off one by one. When he’s exposed and alone, that’s when we strike for blood.”
Emerson rubs the bridge of his nose, thinking through angles I can’t see and yet feel in my chest. “We do it with proof,” he says. “No rumors, no half-truths. Paper, tape, witnesses. We hit him where his world needs to be airtight. If we can make the ledger breathe, make the partners nervous, make his own men doubt him—he collapses from the inside.”
“And Berk’s intel,” I add. “She’s been inside the dark for months and knows the heartbeat of this thing better than we ever did. She didn’t just stumble onto Trent; she planted herself in the network. We use her information. The footage. We expose him in ways that matter before taking him out completely.”
Rowan’s lips twist. “He won’t simply hand himself over to us. He’ll fight and try to split us apart by using Kimber or Berk or anything he thinks will tug at our chests. We have to be ready for bait—family, money, leverage—and we have to make sure we never walk where he can pull a string.”
We sit huddled around the table, the shape of revenge settling into our bones. The name on all our lips is the same one that makes the air go cold, the one we have to take apart without giving him any clean excuse to come at us hard. Bryce. Saying it aloud is like choosing the battlefield.
Emerson leans forward, fingers steepled, eyes bright with a worry that keeps you honest. “We do not let him have a single clean reason to march down on us,” he says. “No public provocation that looks like bloodlust. He needs to be eroded. We make their worldmessy, not by burning his house down but by making the people who feed him nervous. Partners, investors, the guys who move products. Make them doubt him. Make his leverage evaporate.”
Rowan snorts a low laugh and then goes quiet, folding his hands as if weighing the sound of the plan before he lets it loose. “We do it with proof,” he says. “Not gossip. Paper that bites, tape that proves, witnesses that are trustworthy. We leak an invoice here, a shipment discrepancy there. Someone on his payroll decides the risk isn’t worth the payout. When his buyers ask questions, Bryce will look around and wonder who’s pulling the rug beneath him.”
I push my chair back and walk in a slow circle. The idea sits in my gut like a grenade you can’t quite defuse. Expose him, isolate him, strip his support until he stands naked and alone. “He expects fireworks,” I say, low and steady. “He expects a show—an obvious, loud answer that plays right into his script. So, we don’t give him one. We feed his fear and let him flinch first. Make him scramble, second-guess his men, cut friends off at the knees.” Their faces tighten as they picture it, and I let the silence hang long enough for the image to settle in. Then I push it further. “Let him unravel himself. Make him panic, patch holes, and point fingers until he serves us the openings on a platter. While he’s busy fighting fires, he and Dean won’t see us coming—and they certainly won’t know Berk’s risen from the dead until she strikes.” A hard, ugly grin curls at the corner of my mouth—something more animal than human—and I can feel the feral satisfaction roll through me. The thought of them unraveling, of the two men who thought they wereuntouchable being forced to play defense, lights something in my chest that hasn’t burned in a long time.
Emerson rubs his temple, a tired edge to his voice. “Remember that Bryce already knows we have Kimber. He will be extra venomous because he thinks that gives him leverage. Don’t forget we burned the house and moved locations. He will read that as an act of war and answer in kind. Dean might already know more than we think.” He looks at us as if daring us to pretend otherwise. “We have to assume every move we make is being watched. That means plausible deniability in public and precision where it counts.”
Rowan’s jaw tightens, and his hands curl until his knuckles pale. “She stays hidden,” he says flatly. “No parade. No public appearances. Not until we pick the moment and the way to show her without giving him a beacon. She’s too valuable to throw into the open. We protect Berk with everything we have, not because she’s leverage, but because she’sours.”
I can feel the needle of anger settle into a steady hum. “We already hit his second,” I remind them again. “Trent tried to kill me. Taking him out removed one dangerous piece and gave us a window. Now we use that window to show the world the cracks we’ve been sitting on for years.” My voice stays hard—there’s a grim pleasure beneath it, but mostly a cold, methodical hunger.
Emerson shakes his head once, hard. “We push where it hurts. Make his partners nervous. We do not hand him the narrative that we’re irrational. We make him look guilty of his own habits. When the people who back him pull away, he’ll implode.”
Rowan nods and adds something that cuts sharper than any knife. “We move in circles he doesn’t expect. Use Berkley’s eyes and our history to craft the hits. We leak proof, not accusations. He’ll double down, and every time he tries to punish us, he’ll expose himself more.”
Berk will stay in the shadows, eyes on everything. She’s already crippled their network by taking out the men who thought they were untouchable and torching the warehouses that made their ledger breathe. Let her keep watching. Let her keep compiling the footage and the little honest receipts that will make our case when we need to shove it in the light. Emerson takes the paper trail. Legal is his battlefield now, the quiet warfare of signatures and filings and the little irregularities that make a clean ledger crack. He’ll pull at threads the way a surgeon teases a single stitch, and when a tidy surface peels back, the rot underneath will show. Rowan and I handle containment and consequences. We’ll be the blunt instrument that makes sure any move they make will have a cost. We’ll strike with teeth and then vanish before they can spin the story into something that paints us as monsters. If Bryce tries to cast us as the villains first, we’ll have the proof, the witnesses, and the pressure to bury his lies in public.
Emerson looks up at me, the exhaustion in his expression raw. “Dean will try to use Kimber to bait us into mistakes. We do not let him. We make him the one who looks reckless.”
Rowan’s voice drops to a hard whisper that still carries through the room. “And if he moves at her,” he says, “we do not give him the satisfaction of chaos. We respond with consequences.Take his ability to hide behind fear. We strip him of allies, so he has no hand to lift against her.”
We keep talking, pushing at edges and closing off escape routes in theory only, refusing to step into specifics that would turn this from fiction into a how-to. The mood changes from grief and confession to a cold, shared resolve. Each of us adds a small piece to the architecture of their dismantling until we have a map we can all understand.
When we finally lean back, the room is quieter but sharper. We know what we want, and we know a war is coming, but we will not provide the ones we love as pawns. Instead, we will be slow, precise, and relentless, exposing them the way light finds rot. Berk sits in the center of it now, the eye of the storm and the hand that will pull threads until their empire unravels.
We set the rules. No reckless noise. No traceable phones. The fallout house becomes the hub. Berk’s network feeds us targets, and we build cases on each one—proof laid bare, their crimes exposed for exactly what they are. We apply pressure first. Make them shift. Make them panic. We don’t step into the open for some melodramatic endgame. We strip away their allies one by one and let the empire rot from the inside until there’s nothing left standing to shield them.
Unfortunately for Bryce, fate handed him the short straw, and that makes him our unlucky next target.
“And if he makes a move?” Emerson asks.
“We respond,” I say, unflinching. “Not fast. Not loud. We make him feel it later. Every move becomes a lesson. He’ll come to dread the moment his choices catch up with him.”