Page 8 of Savage Vows

“Moved. Discreetly. No reroutes, no visibility. I want the original manifest gone, and the container reassigned before it hits the docks.”

He nods slowly, tapping his finger against the glass. “And the destination?”

I slide a folded slip of paper across the table.

He unfolds it, scans it once, then folds it again with a flick of his wrist. “That’s far.”

“Distance isn’t your problem. Delivery is.”

“Delivery takes leverage.”

“You already have it,” I say. “You’ve been sitting on it for three weeks.”

Serrano leans forward. “You don’t tell me how to move my product. You need to give me more time.”

“You have three days.”

He smirks, but it looks more like a wince. “You ask like you’ve got the muscle to enforce that.”

“I don’t ask.”

For a moment, we sit in silence, the weight of the deal settling between us. He swirls the liquid in his glass, thinking it over.

Finally, he nods once. “Fine. You’ll have your shipment. I’ll scrub the tags, change the route, and bury the records. But I’m not taking heat if something crawls out later.”

“You won’t.”

He pulls a slim folder from behind the bar and sets it on the table between us. “Everything you need. Including a number for the dockmaster.”

I pick it up, flip through the pages quickly. Coordinates, contacts, manifests. Everything we discussed.

We stand at the same time. He offers a hand. I don’t take it, just give him a quiet look and head for the door. Behind me, he mutters something under his breath I don’t care to hear.

The door clicks shut as I leave.

The hallway is quiet now. The air cooler.

Julie is gone.

Good. She shouldn’t have been here in the first place.

The club’s back door thuds shut behind me, and the noise drops like a stone.

Out here, the air is clearer, cooler. Still heavy with exhaust and hot pavement, but it beats the thick humidity inside. I walk down the narrow alley and step out onto the street, stopping at the curb, letting the city unfold in front of me like a problem I never asked to solve.

Chicago hums with that restless kind of energy I’ve never learned to like. Too loud. Too slick. Everything concrete and glass, always pretending to be something it’s not.

I light a cigarette and take one slow drag before Liam appears beside me, hands in the pockets of his coat, collar turned up, blond hair still a little damp from the shower he probably didn’t have time to take.

“You’re grumpier than usual,” he says, watching traffic with a grin.

“I don’t like this place.”

“You don’t like any place.”

He’s not wrong. Cities never sit right with me. They’re all noise and angles, full of people trying too hard to be invisible or impossible to ignore. New York is the only exception, the only place that has ever felt like home.

A van slows as it approaches the light. Plain, silver, unmarked. The window’s cracked halfway. The driver glances out once—just a quick look—and in that blink, I see her.