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CIEL

F our hours of combing through footage, hacking cameras, trying to ping cell phones, doing everything I could think of—and still, nothing.

Maximiliano Volpe was in the wind.

I had to find him.

“ Mierda ,” I hissed as I pushed back from my desk and rubbed my eyes. Goddamn contacts. I tipped my head back and squeezed some drops into my eyes.

We should have expected Volpe to booby-trap the club. That was on me for not watching the club feeds long enough prior to the meeting. I made a mental note to go back through the security footage to see how and when Volpe even planted them, but that could happen after I got a lock on his location. We thought we had the upper hand because of our coordination with Makarov and Byrne, but clearly, Volpe outwitted us. That was the last time I let it happen.

But that wasn’t even what I was the most pissed off about.

When he blew those explosives, the camera feeds had shorted. I was too goddamn distracted by worry and fear for Leona’s and Ryuji’s safety that it completely slipped my mind to get them up and running. First mistake. I never let distractions impact my ability to do my job.

Then, instead of staying inside the van and paying attention, I ran inside with Caspian. I missed Volpe’s escape. So I sent Makarov on his trail instead. Second mistake.

When we got back to the van, and back to the cameras, Makarov had lost him. I’d gotten the surrounding feeds back up and running, but all their data was gone. Wiped.

Volpe could not have wiped that footage himself. He had help—and I swore to fucking God, that help would not outsmart me.

It had been twenty minutes at the most, and he slipped through my fingers like sand.

My hands returned to the keyboard, and I kept combing, widening my search radius outward from the club’s epicenter.

I should have known. I should have expected. My performance tonight did not match up to the skills I knew I had, and that was going to get one of us killed. If that happened, Leona wouldn’t trust me. My brothers would hate me. Everything would come crashing down.

Once I could locate even a hint of a trail, I could start thinking about who exactly was outmaneuvering me. Who did Volpe have on his side that could wipe these cameras faster than I could recover the data?

“Ciel?” A mess of red hair peeked its head inside my door.

“Leona,” I croaked. My throat was dry as fuck. I gulped down some of the third lukewarm energy drink on my desk. “Come in.”

Anxiety tightened my chest, and my leg started bouncing. I had failed her tonight. I was the weakest link. And my past had taught me that messing up had consequences. The scars on my back from being whipped for gathering incorrect data on a recon job for the cartel I grew up in had proven that.

“How’s it going?”

“Fine,” I lied. She didn’t need to know I was going in circles. My eyes were crossing, my body was exhausted, but I couldn’t bring myself to step away from the keyboard until Volpe was found.

Her hip leaned against my computer desk, knocking some papers to the side with a yawn. “It’s 5 o‘clock in the morning.”

I glanced at the clock in the corner of my screen. Every second that passed was more time that Volpe had to bury his trail.

My eyes jumped across the windows I had open, but even after widening the search radius, I still couldn’t find any footage from the time of the explosion and the following thirty minutes. The files skipped ahead as if those thirty minutes no longer existed. But the file itself showed no signs of editing or tampering. Someone—a skilled someone—had done extensive work to pull off this kind of data removal across so many camera feeds and so quickly.

The data wipes didn’t even follow any specific pattern—as if following Max’s trail. Sometimes people only wiped the literal path a mark took, making it exceedingly clear where to look. But nope. It was everything in the surrounding area. I’d started looking at city backup files, but someone had wiped even those.

“Have you slept?” Leona reached her hand up to my cheek and I flinched away. She dropped her hand.

“No.” I had to focus. “Have you?”

“Ryuji and I fell asleep on the couch. He’s still sleeping.”

“I’m glad you got to rest. How are you feeling?” Maybe some data got pushed to the state servers before it was wiped. I pulled up my backdoor and logged in.

She bit her lip, ignoring my question. “You look exhausted.”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s twice now, Ciel.” Her tone went hard, and I looked up at her frown. The lamp on my desk paired with the light from my computers cast a harsh glow over her disappointed face.

I blinked. “What?”

“That’s twice you’ve lied to me since I came in here.”

My hand balled into a fist against my keyboard. If I could just focus, I could find him. I knew it. Nobody could outthink me forever. My brain felt like it was overclocked, but at the same time, my body couldn’t keep up. Everything was more sluggish than normal, yet my brain flicked from thought to thought.

“Ciel, look at me.”

I shook my head, throat constricting. “I’m b—I’m busy.”

She let out a long sigh. “Can I help?”

Maybe that would be good. A second set of eyes.

But no, she needed more rest. To heal. I’d seen her bruises and Ryuji’s gash. This was my fuckup to fix. If I let her know how much I was struggling, she wouldn’t trust me next time. None of them would. And I couldn’t lose them. I wouldn’t end up alone, bleeding out in a ditch, again.

I could do this.

“No,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. She sucked in a breath and opened her mouth, but I grabbed her hand and rubbed my thumb across the back. I forced my larynx to relax. “No, it’s okay. I can do this. He can’t outrun me forever.”

This time, when she reached up to cup my cheek, I leaned into her palm. Closing my eyes, I soaked in the intoxicating feeling of her delicate touch.

“What’s the problem?” Her voice was tender. I opened my eyes. “Don’t lie to me this time.”

It was my turn to sigh. “Someone wiped the trail. All the data is gone. It’s taking some time to recover it.”

“Shit.” She chewed on her lip. “Well, maybe if you can’t follow the trail, we could skip ahead.”

“What do you mean?”

“If the footprint around the club has been erased, maybe it picked up somewhere else. Stop looking near the club. Look ahead.”

I released a breath, mentally kicking myself for being so close-minded. Of course . I should have taken that approach from the beginning.

“I’ll check all the camera feeds from the routes we tracked back when we were looking for Cas.” Leona had put a tracker in an Italian driver’s jacket, and that was what had led us to Max two weeks ago. Maybe he’d surface along those routes again. “We know Max favors that casino. Maybe he went there.”

And that also got me thinking—there was no way Max didn’t have help to extract him. I still had that Italian driver’s phone data. I could hack into his phone for its GPS location, but also grab the information from his contacts and track their GPS locations, too.

“I know that you’ll find him.” She cupped my cheeks and forced my face away from the screen to face her. “I want you to keep looking. But Ciel, you’re running on fumes. You need to rest first. You’ll think better after you’ve had some sleep.”

I pulled my face from her grasp, shame knotting in the pit of my stomach. The longer it took, the harder it would be to find him. I couldn’t waste time.

“Just another hour or two.” I glanced at the clock, then forced the corner of my mouth to quirk up. “This is easy. I’m used to staying up for days at a time. You don’t have to wo—You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Ciel—”

“Stop.” My voice came out stronger than I intended. She recoiled. “Stop, Leona. Let me work. I can do this.”

“All right.” She barely hid the hurt that flashed across her face. Pushing off the desk, she looked toward the hallway. “I’m going back to sleep. Please take care of yourself, Ciel. I need you.”

And that’s exactly why I couldn’t take a break until I found Volpe.

“Night.” I didn’t watch her leave. If I had, I would have regretted sending her away instead of scooping her up and settling into bed together. I’d been craving her since that night she slept in my bed. And I knew she spent the night before in Wynn’s room. I wanted that, too.

But I couldn’t get distracted now.

It wasn’t just Leona who needed me. All my brothers did. We all knew we’d be stepping into unknown territory when we agreed to Leona’s partnership. And I wanted to forge a new path toward a future we could all choose for ourselves.

But the only way for that future to become a reality was for me to do my job. It all rested on this. I couldn’t let them down again.