Page 79 of Deception & Desire

They brought this violence on themselves the second they attacked my family.

I don’t stop. I don’t sleep. I live in the Guild’s warehouse, where we’ve set up a war office that can accommodate the combined forces of both Teo’s men and mine.

Teo sits in the corner, surrounded by monitors, tapping away, looking at security feeds and encrypted servers. Hisknack for digital warfare is unmatched, and he finds the cracks in the Cartel’s armor before they even know they’ve exposed themselves.

“Their shipment lands at Pier 27 tomorrow night,” Teo says one evening, his voice flat but focused. “Weapons. High-end. Heavy.”

I nod, already planning. “Rocco, get your people on the dockworkers’ union. I want eyes and ears before they unload a single crate.”

Rocco leans back in his chair, cracking his knuckles. “Done.”

Dante handles the international angles, his connections running deep in shipping and logistics. When the Cartel reroutes their product through the ports in Jersey, Dante has their smugglers cornered before they even leave the harbor.

“We’ve got a freighter with their name on it,” he tells me, his tone smug. “Offloaded on our doorstep by mistake. Shame, isn’t it?”

Even Max, recovering from his head injury, refuses to sit idle. He spends most of his time glued to my side whenever I’m not out in the field myself, contributing where he can.

“We’ve cut off most of their resources now,” he says one night, his voice still a little rough, one eye perpetually sagging under his wound. “It’s only a matter of time before desperation weeds out their weaker foot soldiers. Rubio can’t keep them paid.”

But this war is more than tactics and alliances. It’s a grind.

Months of bloodshed, back-and-forth battles, and neighborhoods turned into war zones. Businesses pay the price of our aggression. Families hide behind locked doors.

And through it all, I miss her.

Mia.

Four months of nothing but a hard cot and a dozen other men snoring in my ear, and I can still imagine her tucked beneath the blankets of my king-sized bed at the Brownstone.

Our bed.

My one reassurance is that she’s safe, hidden in a bunker far from the chaos. She might hate me for it; likely, she’ll never forgive me for locking her away again. But theirs are the three heartbeats that I refuse to put at risk.

But every day without her feels like a knife twisting in my chest. When the silence falls at the end of each long night, all I can think about is her voice, her touch.

I think of the way she used to look at me in those brief moments when I thought we could be something important.

“Heads up.” Rocco drags me from my brooding to draw my attention back to the war room. “Teo’s found something.”

The Cartel pushes back harder every week, desperate and cornered.

But I push harder.

When they try to open a new drug route through Brighton Beach, I have Max and Dante shut it down before the ink on their contracts dries. When they threaten one of Teo’s cyber operatives, Rocco has the man relocated and safe within hours.

Move. Countermove.

But no matter how many victories I win, the weight never lifts. Not when every choice I make seems to drive us deeper into the trenches. When every success leads me further from Mia.

Yet I cling to a notion, a plan that’s been weeks in the making. Every detail, every contingency, is hammered out with precision.

I don’t leave anything to chance—this isn’t just about winning. It’s about crushing the Cartel so thoroughly that Amos Rubio has no choice but to retreat to his fortress. One blow big enough to corner him for good. The beginning of the end.

Teo finally joins us at the table, spreading out the maps he’s been working on before us—the Cartel’s remaining operations are like a spiderweb stretched across the city.

“They’ve centralized,” he says as he taps at the map. “One location, high risk, higher security. They’re desperate.”

“Good. That makes them predictable.”

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