Page 91 of Silent Schemes

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I just pray this time, it won't be Varrick's.

Or our child's.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Varrick

Night is the only thing that makes this city honest.

Rain slicks the towers, makes the windows shine with the lights glinting off the surface.

I sit above it all, behind glass thick enough to survive a bomb, and stare at the lightshow while my phone vibrates Morse code across the desk.

It’s late.

Too late for anyone but the desperate or the dead.

The glass box I call my office is empty, except for me, a whiskey, and a line of sight into every high-rise worth owning in Vancouver.

On the black desk: two guns, a notepad with a single word scribbled: “Cross,” circled and underlined, and the phone, still alive with new pings.

I swipe it open, thumb flicking through the text chain.

Cyrus:

Cross family moved five crates from Richmond. Heavy. No manifest.

Korrin:

Give the word. We can end this tonight.

I stare at the messages until the next one pops.

Cyrus again:

They’re arming up. Thirty, maybe forty bodies. Sienna is MIA.

Korrin:

Don’t wait, Varrick. Don’t get soft.

I type back:

Hold. One more day.

No one responds for a long beat, but the blue ellipsis lights up.

Korrin is pissed, probably pacing in his own glass box across town, sharpening knives and grudges.

I can feel the pressure, the way old wounds flare before a storm.

I set the phone down and pour another whiskey, neat, no ice.

I need it. I need to feel the burn.

The room hums.

You can hear the city even up here—sirens, a freight train, distant echoes of someone’s last fuck or first murder.

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