Page 61 of Tag
Tag shook his head. “No. Graves doesn’t bargain. He eliminates. Which means there’s something you have that he needs.”
“I don’t—” I stopped, because the lie was too easy. “There’s nothing.”
Tag’s expression told me he didn’t believe that for a second.
Callahan, still tapping away on her laptop, broke the silence. “I finished parsing the rest of the drive data. Graves has been tracking you for months, Aponi. Every move. Every address. Your old cases, your contacts, even your family history.”
My pulse thudded in my ears. “Why?”
“Because somewhere in your past,” she said, “is something he can’t get without you.”
I sank into a chair, my mind flashing through years of cases, old evidence files, and people I’d tried to forget. One name surfaced, unbidden, and my gut turned to stone.
Tag crouched in front of me, his voice low. “You think of something?”
I met his eyes. “If I’m right… then Graves doesn’t just want me alive. He wants me to lead him straight to the only thing that can burn his whole operation to the ground.”
53
Aponi
The name sat on my tongue like poison.
I didn’t want to say it. Saying it made it real—made it something we couldn’t just walk away from. But the way Tag was watching me, steady and unblinking, I knew he wasn’t going to let it slide.
“Who?” he asked.
I swallowed hard. “Calder Voss.”
The room went still. Even Callahan stopped typing.
Gideon frowned. “You’re telling me Graves is tied to Voss? That’s not possible. Voss vanished eight years ago.”
“He didn’t vanish,” I said. My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “I put him away. Or… I thought I did.”
Tag’s brows drew together. “You arrested him?”
“I built the case. My first major bust as a detective. He ran a smuggling ring that didn’t just move drugs and weapons—they moved people. Kids. We caught him in a sting, and he flipped on his suppliers to cut his sentence. Then one day, transfer orders came down… and he was gone. No trial. No prison time. Just gone.”
Callahan cursed under her breath. “Witness protection.”
“Or Graves’ protection,” I countered. “Voss knew the locations of every dead-drop, every safehouse, every offshore account. He kept ledgers—handwritten, coded. He didn’t trust anything digital.”
“And you know where those ledgers are,” Tag said. Not a question.
I nodded once. “Voss told me before the arrest—said if anything happened to him, the ledgers were my insurance. I buried the location in my memory and never wrote it down. I figured it was just another con.” I met Tag’s eyes. “Now I’m not so sure.”
Tag pushed to his feet. “If Graves gets those ledgers, he consolidates power across half the black market. If we get them first—”
“We burn him,” Gideon finished.
Callahan was already pulling up maps. “You said you memorized the location. Where?”
I hesitated, because saying it out loud would start the clock. The second we moved, Graves would know.
“An abandoned silver mine,” I said finally. “Outside Redwater, Nevada.”
Tag’s expression hardened. “Then we leave tonight.”
