Page 80 of Jax (The Kansas City Reapers #3)

The room still reeked of what had happened here.

Blood. Rust. Time. The drain in the floor looked scrubbed, but not clean.

A smear of dried maroon curved toward it like the ghost of a dragged heel.

I couldn’t stop cataloguing, my mind running the inventory the way lungs remember how to breathe underwater.

Not because I wanted to. Because I had to.

But I watched her too.

Not like a threat. Not even like a rescue. I watched her the way you watch a support beam in a burning building, trying to determine if it would hold.

The longer I watched, the clearer it became: it wasn’t Deacon’s hands or Sully’s voice that had kept her standing. It was the fact that neither of them asked her to be strong. They simply made space for her to fall—and held it open until she didn’t.

A few moments later, Nikolai signaled that it was time to move out. He pointed to the left, further along the corridor. Deacon held the line behind us, Sully stayed anchored at Violet’s side, the room shifting into a new rhythm as Carrick and I moved back into the main warehouse area.

We turned and moved to the second door. This one was held shut only by a padlock. It took me all of ten seconds to pop it open with my bumper pick. I removed the lock and glanced at Carrick. He held his rifle at the ready, preparing to take point as soon as the door opened.

I quietly obliged him, and he moved into the deeper darkness of the room.

A few moments later he called the all clear, and I joined him inside, the rest of the group a few paces behind.

The space wasn’t fortified. Which made it more dangerous.

The people who used this room didn’t expect intrusion.

That meant they were confident. Protected.

Two folding tables formed a crude L-shape, cluttered with overlapping data: paperwork, flash drives, laptops still powered on.

One screen blinked through strings of Cyrillic inside a custom encryption shell I recognized from a failed intercept months ago—uncracked codebase, rerouted through four foreign embassies.

Another screen ran a logistics dashboard in English: shipment manifests, dock schedules, inbound clearance codes.

That alone would’ve been enough.

But Niko was already three layers deeper.

Carrick moved past me, silent, heading for the file cabinets. Always the hard copies. Digital trails degrade. Paper holds weight. If you want to indict a system, follow what they forgot to burn.

I took a position near the door, eyes tracking them both—their movements, the layout, the frequency of updates. Every piece of intel in this room was active. This wasn’t storage. This was live.

The first manifest Carrick pulled was shrink-wrapped in a weatherproof sleeve, the laminate frayed and smudged with fingerprints. He unfolded it and slid it across the table. My eyes moved automatically.

Crate counts. Serial ranges. Destination tags labeled by NATO region and insurgency designation. No laundering companies. No distance. Just direct lines—equipment rerouted from legitimate supply through falsified de-comm orders. Too advanced for street use. Too dirty for federal deployment.

“Not cartel,” Carrick muttered, tapping a cell listing optics systems three years ahead of what our boys were using overseas. “Not local either.”

“This isn’t Mafia-level anymore,” Nikolai said, voice lower now.

“No,” I agreed. “It’s infrastructure.”

My mind was already pulling variables: shipment delays at Gulf Coast ports, the uptick in drone interceptions near proxy zones, power vacuums in post-coup governments quietly requesting American munitions through back channels.

This wasn’t isolated. It was part of a machine. And we’d just stumbled into the wiring.

“We didn’t find a warehouse,” I said. “We found a node.”

Niko yanked open a lower drawer with more force than usual. Its contents spilled across the tile in a disorganized clatter that didn’t match his precision. Photos—dozens. Not surveillance. Portraits. Business casual, smiles, handshakes. Half were labeled. The rest didn’t need names.

These weren’t leverage targets. They were collaborators.

Middle-tier political operatives. Lobbyists. Defense contractors. One former ambassador I recognized from a flagged debrief file, “unreliable but protected.” The kind of people who didn’t hide corruption. They legalized it.

I crouched and flipped through the stack. Each face was tied to a funding source, a signature, a customs override pushed through internal channels no one expected us to trace.

This wasn’t blackmail. It was confirmation. Complicity, catalogued without shame.

“Jesus,” Niko muttered, then caught himself. “This goes well beyond anything we tagged in Rayden’s info dump.”

Carrick didn’t speak. His hand hovered over another manifest, fingertip tracing a timestamp - three weeks ago.

The delivery cleared customs in Houston and landed in Lagos by the 17th.

No listed buyer. No inventory offload. Just a final note: Diverted to Private Storage—Location: Ashfall. Obviously a codename.

We weren’t standing in a dead drop. This was a live system, embedded just deep enough to be ignored, but not so deep it could hide from itself.

Every scrap of intel we touched fed something bigger: supply lines, falsified customs entries, ghost accounts funneling funds to shell companies that didn’t officially exist but kept surfacing in foreign conflict zones with unnerving regularity.

Carrick straightened, thumb dragging a slow line across the edge of the desk, eyes fixed on a thought he hadn’t voiced.

Niko kept typing, cycling through one data cluster while isolating another.

I scanned the mismatched monitors, each blinking its own story, trying to decide which thread was most dangerous to pull.

By the time Quinn arrived, we already had Violet clear of the building.

Sully had her wrapped in a wool blanket, propped in the back of the SUV with a steady presence at her side.

Deacon crouched a few feet off, posture loose but deliberate, scanning the tree line as if he could will any threat to break cover.

The storm still clung to the sky, spitting rain across the asphalt, but the perimeter was secure.

Quinn didn’t barrel in. He never did. He came straight from his vehicle, pace clipped, eyes already moving over Violet before he’d taken three steps.

He’d waited for the all-clear before coming in, but even with that, his arrival carried weight.

His gaze swept past the rest of us, landing only on her.

“Vitals?” he asked. Voice low. Professional. Not fragile.

Deacon straightened, giving the readout clean. “Stable. Mild dehydration. Tremors. No major injuries. She’s responsive.”

Quinn gave one tight nod. Then he knelt—not dramatically, not broken, just moving fast enough to meet her where she was. He didn’t reach for her, didn’t press. He kept his hands loose on his thighs, posture a mirror of hers, eyes locked steady.

“Violet,” he said. Just her name. Testing the ground before either of them stepped farther.

Her eyes rose slowly, cautiously, like she was measuring reality against memory.

She didn’t fold into him. Didn’t cry. But something in her posture shifted, as if the weight she’d been carrying found a fraction less resistance.

Her lips parted, cracked and pale, and her voice rasped out, hoarse. “My sister… where’s Stella?”

Quinn’s jaw ticked once, the smallest fracture in his stillness, before he answered.

“Safe,” he said quietly. “She’s safe.” Nothing more.

No promises he couldn’t guarantee. Just the truth she needed to breathe.

Violet sagged an inch deeper into the blanket, her eyes closing briefly like those two words had bought her a fragment of strength.

I hung back near the tail of the SUV, watching them both while Carrick moved up beside me. He didn’t lower his voice when he spoke. “We found more inside. Not people. Stockpiles.”

Quinn’s head turned, slow and sharp. “What kind?”

Niko stepped in, pulling his phone from his pocket and holding the screen out.

Images flicked past—rows of crates, steel racks lined wall to wall, weapons stripped of markings.

“If I were a betting man, my money would be on this district being one of their hubs. They’ve got enough firepower stashed in there to arm a small army. ”

Quinn took the phone, his eyes tracking the photos, jaw tight.

He didn’t rush, didn’t react. Just absorbed.

Each image tightened something in his posture.

He didn’t need to say what we all knew, that this wasn’t the end of the line.

It was the first real fracture in a case that had been stonewalling him for years.

I logged every detail—the stockpiles, Violet’s pulse still fluttering too fast, Quinn’s silence carrying more weight than any order. We hadn’t broken the city open tonight.

But we’d found the crack.

And that was enough to keep going.

“Before I call this in to the Chief, I need to see it with my own eyes.” Quinn said, glancing towards Violet. “Deacon, Sully, do you mind staying out here and keeping the perimeter secure while the guys take me inside?”

Sully gave a nod, his attention focused mostly on our rescued hostage.

“We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.” Deacon said matter-of-factly.

“Alright, Niko, let’s see this weapons cache and the records room.” Quinn motioned for us to lead the way. We retraced our steps with him in tow, and in a much shorter timeframe than our first walk through the building, we were back in the office we’d found.

Quinn started scanning the files, photos, and manifests, his mouth tightening into a shape I’d only seen once before, after the failed raid on a contractor-owned weapons lab outside Fallujah. Same posture. Same stillness. Same low-burn fury. But this time, it wasn’t just rage.

It was recognition.