Devin stepped fully into the living room, his leather shoes crushing the scattered shards of crystal from the shattered whiskey glass. The crunch of crystal under his heel was sharp and grating, the sound cutting through the wet stickiness of spilled liquor on the floor. It was a harsh reminder of the violence that had just occurred. He held Kenzie tight against his chest, his arm a steel band around her small body.
The apartment smelled of spilled liquor and GHB. It was a sickly sweet chemical odor that coated the back of the throat. Arthur and two other men in black suits were tearing the place apart. They yanked open drawers, dumping the contents onto the floor. Designer handbags and silk scarves piled up on the Persian rug like garbage.
Sterling sat on the white leather sofa in the study area, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clutching his head. His body shook. It wasn't just a tremor; it was a full-body vibration of delayed shock and revulsion. The polished Wall Street elite was gone, replaced by a man who had just looked into the abyss.
"Boss," Arthur called out, pulling a lockbox from under the bed. He used a tactical knife to pry it open. Inside were stacks of cash and several unmarked pill bottles. "We've got a stash here. And the bedroom closet is clean."
Devin didn't respond. He watched Arthur's men toss a Chanel jacket onto the growing pile of debris. They were searching like bulls, relying on force, not finesse.
Kenzie turned her head in Devin's arms. Her dark eyes, still slightly glazed from the fever and the telepathic strain, scanned the room. She wasn't looking at the mess. She was looking at the architecture. The sightlines. The shadows. Her tactical mind, honed over a decade of leading the Aegis Alliance, kicked into gear.
"A bunch of idiots," she thought, her mental voice dripping with disdain. "They only know how to rummage through drawers. A blackmailer of this caliber? She wouldn't leave the backup in a shoebox. She'd have offline redundant feeds. Hidden probes."
Devin's stride faltered for a fraction of a second. He heard the thought, clear and sharp over the noise of the ransacking. His icy gaze swept the room, looking past the obvious chaos.
Sterling lifted his head. His eyes were bloodshot, the skin around them pale and slack. "Devin," he said, his voice hoarse. "It's clean. They cleared it out. She wouldn't dare keep anything else here."
Kenzie rolled her eyes internally. "Fool's logic," she scoffed in her mind. "That woman's heart is colder than a snake's. Third row of the bookshelf. The green spine of The Great Gatsby. There's a micro-camera embedded in the binding. Independent power supply. It's pointing right at where you're sitting."
Devin's pupils contracted. He didn't hesitate. He shifted Kenzie to his left arm, securing her against his hip, and walked directly toward the mahogany bookshelf against the far wall.
Sterling watched his brother's sudden movement, confusion twisting his features. "Devin? What are you doing?"
Devin ignored him. He stopped in front of the third row. His long, elegant fingers reached out and bypassed the financial textbooks and art folios. They closed around the worn green cover of The Great Gatsby. He pulled it out smoothly.
The book felt slightly off. Too light in the center. Devin turned it over. On the spine, nestled perfectly into the fabric pattern, was a tiny black dot. It was no bigger than a pinhead, almost invisible unless you knew exactly what to look for.
He used his thumbnail to pry back the thin layer of cloth covering the dot. A miniature lens glinted under the apartment's lights. A faint red light blinked steadily. It was live. It was transmitting.
Sterling gasped. The sound was sharp, like he'd been punched in the gut. He scrambled off the sofa, his legs unsteady, and stumbled over to look at the book in Devin's hand.
"A camera," Sterling choked out. His face drained of all color, leaving him looking like a ghost. "She was... she was watching?"
"Recording," Devin corrected, his voice flat and lethal. He tossed the book to Arthur. "Trace the IP address. Find the receiving end. Hack the cloud server. I want every byte of data pulverized. Now."
Arthur caught the book, his face grim. He barked orders into his wrist comm, pulling a ruggedized laptop from his tactical bag and dropping to his knees on the carpet.
Sterling stared at the blinking red light. The reality of how close he had come to total destruction hit him like a physical blow. His stomach heaved. He clamped a hand over his mouth, his body convulsing as he fought down the bile. He stumbled backward and collapsed back onto the sofa, his head hanging between his knees.
Kenzie watched him, a flicker of pity crossing her mind. "He's broken," she thought. "But better broken than dead." She shifted her gaze to the mantelpiece above the fireplace. "And there's one more."
"That antique clock," she projected to Devin, keeping her mental tone calm and instructional. "The brass one. There's something inside the pendulum housing."
Devin turned on his heel. He crossed the room in three long strides. He reached up and stuck his hand into the narrow space behind the swinging brass pendulum. His fingers brushed against the smooth metal, then shifted. He felt a cold, angular object taped to the inner wall.
He gripped it and ripped it free. A second device. This one was a storage drive, slightly larger than the camera, designed to record locally if the Wi-Fi went down. A failsafe.
Devin held it up between his fingers, staring at it with cold disgust. He threw it onto the coffee table. It skidded across the glass and stopped next to Arthur's laptop.
Sterling looked at the second device. The last thread of his denial snapped. He covered his face with his hands, a raw, broken sound escaping his throat. It wasn't a sob; it was the sound of a man realizing that not a single second of his relationship had been real.
"She never..." Sterling moaned, his voice muffled by his palms. "Not even for a second."
Devin walked over to his brother. He looked down at Sterling's hunched, shaking form. There was no comfort in Devin's posture, only a harsh, unyielding reality.
"Realizing it now is better than dying by her hand," Devin said. His voice was severe, but underneath the ice, there was a thread of pain. It was the pain of an older brother watching his sibling learn a cruel lesson.
He turned away from Sterling and looked at Arthur. "Take him back to his safe house. He doesn't step outside without my authorization."
Arthur nodded. He signaled two of the men. They hauled Sterling up from the sofa. He didn't resist. He moved like a zombie, his eyes vacant, his feet dragging across the carpet. They led him out of the apartment, leaving the door hanging off its hinges.
The room fell silent. The only sound was the rapid clicking of Arthur's tech guy on the keyboard and the faint hum of the apartment's ventilation system.
Devin stood in the center of the chaos. The ransacked furniture, the scattered clothes, the blinking lights of the tech equipment-it all faded away as he looked down at the baby in his arms.
Kenzie stared back at him. Her dark eyes were clear, assessing. She had dropped the innocent act. In this moment, she was his partner, his scout.
"How did you know?" Devin asked. His voice was low, barely above a whisper. "How did you know they were there?"
Kenzie blinked. She couldn't exactly say, "Because in my past life, I trained my operatives to hide bugs in the exact same spots." She needed a cover. She needed something that sounded plausible for a three-month-old.
"I'm a genius," she thought, projecting the thought with a haughty, arrogant flair. "Bad guys have a smell. I can sniff them out. Do I need a reason?"
Devin heard the thought. The sheer, unapologetic arrogance of it. A baby, claiming she could smell espionage. It was absurd. It was ridiculous.
A tiny, almost imperceptible curve touched the corner of Devin's mouth. It wasn't a smile, not really. It was a crack in the ice. He raised his free hand and brought his index finger down on Kenzie's forehead. He flicked her gently.
"Little monster," he murmured. "Stop looking at dirty things."
Kenzie's head jerked back slightly from the impact. It didn't hurt, but it was annoying. She scowled, her tiny face scrunching up in displeasure.
"Hey!" she yelled in her mind. "Stop flicking! You're going to break my skull! Child abuse!"
Devin heard the complaint. The crack in his ice widened just a fraction. He let out a soft breath that might have been a laugh in another life.
"Cloud data is wiped, sir," the tech guy announced, looking up from the screen. "No backups. The feed is dead."
Devin nodded. He didn't say anything else. He just adjusted his grip on Kenzie, tucking her more securely inside his coat, and turned toward the shattered doorway. He stepped over the broken door and walked out into the hallway.
As they moved toward the elevator, Devin pulled out his phone. He dialed a number from memory. It rang once.
"This is Devin Ayers," he said, his voice echoing in the empty hall. "Notify the legal team. Initiate full prosecution against Desiree Dillon. I want her locked away for the rest of her life."
He hung up and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He looked down at Kenzie, who was yawning, her eyes drooping.
"Round one is over," he thought, though whether the thought was his own or a whisper from the baby, he couldn't tell anymore.
