“Don’t tempt me.” Berk flicks a sideways look at him, lips twitching, her exhaustion swallowed by the thrill of having something to tear apart. “If we broke him more, I wouldn’t be able to interrogate him later. Had to restrain myself.”
“Baby,” I murmur, “you’re lucky we restrain ourselves at all.”
She kicks me under the desk in retaliation—light, sharp, flirtatious—and turns back to the screen.
Emerson drops into his seat next to Rowan and rubs his face with both hands. He looks like a man held together with vengeance and coffee. “What’ve we got?”
Berk doesn’t look up as she answers. “Everything Jory ever touched, and a lot he thought he deleted.”
I lean closer as Berk restores his wiped texts. They flicker onto the screen one by one. Blank bubbles swell into conversations. Gray becomes black. Missing attachments reload in jagged pieces.
“Motherfucker,” I mutter, tapping the desk. “He really thought deleting the chat app was enough?”
“He deleted,” Berk says, tapping quickly. “But he didn’t overwrite. Or encrypt. Or scrub the metadata. Amateur hour.”
Rowan’s jaw ticks. “That means he isn’t the brain; he’s just one piece.”
“Middlemen always are,” I reply.
Emerson cracks his knuckles. “Good. Easier to break them when the time comes.”
Berk scrolls.
Drop logs. Timestamps. Locations.
It’s like watching a map bleed.
“There,” Emerson leans in. “Dockside bench. That’s the one Micah mentioned.”
“And the diner dumpster,” Berk adds. “The burned drive came from that one.”
She drags another window open and overlays the bank transfers. The numbers flash in a column—small deposits for months, then clusters of larger ones.
My skin prickles. I already know what’s coming.
“Horizon Logistics,” she breathes.
The room stills.
The name burns like acid in the back of my throat. The same shell company that funded the warehouse, paid Micah, and laundered Dean and Bryce’s money. The same phantom we keep circling, always close, never pinned.
Rowan exhales slowly. “These payments started years ago.”
“Shortly after they killed Reign… and when they thought they killed Berk,” Emerson murmurs, his voice going dark as the realization settles in. “This goes back much further than we thought.”
I grip the armrest to keep from punching the wall.
Berk finally leans back. Not relaxed—never that—but colder, leaner. “They expanded right when they thought they erased us. Built a bigger web. Hired runners. Increased drops. Hid deeper.”
I ask, “What’s Jory to them?”
“Errand boy,” she says. “Disposable. Paying him through the shell company means they trust him enough to use him—but not enough to tell him anything that matters.”
Rowan scrolls, eyes narrowing as the list grows. “He’s tied to at least three drops involving missing girls. Two shipments we never managed to trace.” He pauses, jaw tightening. “And one…” He squints. “Fuck. One right after the first fire.”
My stomach twists, bile-hot with hate.
Berk taps through camera footage we recovered from neighborhood Ring cams—Jory walking casually down a suburban sidewalk with a backpack full of blood money. Another angle. Another timestamp. Another location.