Page 55 of Silent Schemes

I just hope we both survive it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Varrick

I’m in the penthouse, sixth floor, with the city stretching itself flat below.

Two weeks.

Two weeks of watching her.

Two weeks of waiting for her to make a move.

My steel workbench is a splatter field of rags, solvents, and open magazines.

I’m halfway through breaking down a Beretta M9, the slide balanced on my palm, a dental pick levering carbon from the pinholes.

The walls here aren’t just lined with guns—they’re a history.

Each piece is a lesson.

The SIG I used to blind a snitch at seventeen.

The AR stripped down by Korrin’s teeth during the Czech job.

My father’s Colt polished so long the grip holds like soap.

I’m finishing the cleaning when the elevator groans open and Will barrels in.

He doesn’t knock.

Never has.

If he’s decided you’re family, you’re never alone again, not even in your own skull.

His shoes leave a trail of the city wet on the marble.

He smells like sweat and cheap coffee, and the look on his face says he’s two seconds from ripping my head off and sucking out the secrets.

“Varrick,” he barks, voice bouncing around the room.

He has a folder clutched in one hand, the thick government kind that doesn’t fold easy.

I don’t look up. Just finish seating the firing pin, slotting everything together with a click. “You’re bleeding on my floor.”

He ignores it, marches across the room, slams the folder on the workbench so hard the Beretta almost tumbles off.

The sheets explode across the steel, high-gloss prints of Sienna.

Sienna in sunglasses, at a bus stop. Sienna at a table, hunched over a burner phone.

Sienna in a dark stairwell, hair in a tight knot, holding a briefcase that probably has something lethal inside.

I flip through them, slowly.

The last shot is Sienna in my own goddamn kitchen, the filtered morning light cutting across her face.

There’s a knife in her hand.