Page 75 of Silent Schemes

One month.

I have one month to figure out how to save us all—Varrick, Maya, and now this baby who never asked to be conceived in a war zone.

The game isn't just complicated anymore.

It's fucking impossible.

But I'm Sienna Cross.

I've survived impossible before.

I just hope this time, we all make it out alive.

Because now it's not just my life on the line, or Varrick's, or even Maya's.

It's the life of someone who hasn't even taken their first breath yet, who doesn't know their parents are killers, who deserves better than being born into this war.

I touch my still-flat stomach, make a silent promise to the cluster of cells that will become a person: I'll find a way. Somehow, I'll find a way to give you a life that isn't stained with blood.

Even if it kills me.

CHAPTER NINE

Varrick

It takes a week for the wounds we got to heal enough to feel good again and less than that to decide Sienna is the only asset in this city worth deploying.

The first job we run together is Rosetti clean-up, a minor operation, almost an insult.

My brothers think I’m playing it safe—test-driving the new model before I let her anywhere near the big leagues.

They’re wrong.

This is just a favor to the accountant.

No one expects trouble from the Rosettis—they’ve been spineless since their patriarch got bled out in a hotel sauna.

That’s why it’s the perfect place for Sienna to shine.

The night is rainless but cold.

Vancouver’s east industrial fringe.

Blocks of warehouses, rusted barbed wire, pools of standing water on blacktop.

The kind of place that doesn’t even try to pretend it isn’t a graveyard for hope.

Sienna’s beside me, dressed in black tactical: matte fabric, boots laced tight, hair in a braid that could choke out a man if you gave her a minute and a reason.

She wears it like a weapon.

We move in silence down the chain-link corridor, wind cutting straight through to the bone.

The warehouse is just up ahead, lights blinking at the entrance, no cameras, no guards posted outside.

That’s arrogance, or stupidity.

Either way, it makes my job easier.