Chapter 2 - “Get some sleep. Tomorrow we figure out how to bury Thomas Keegan.”
Mave did not sleep.
At 7:00 the following morning, she walked into the main room wearing oversized gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt.
Vincent sat at the table with coffee, a laptop, and a Sig Sauer handgun.
Mave poured herself a mug.
“Status report.”
Vincent almost smiled.
Then he turned the laptop toward her.
Black-and-white surveillance footage showed the hallway outside her apartment.
At 1:15 in the morning, 3 masked men entered the frame.
One carried a crowbar.
They broke through her door.
Ten minutes later, they came out.
The last man threw a lit match inside.
Smoke began curling beneath the door.
Vincent closed the laptop.
“The fire department stopped it from taking the building. Your apartment is gone.”
Mave sat completely still.
Her clothes.
Books.
Photographs.
The armchair she had saved for.
Everything that made the apartment hers.
“Barnaby?”
Vincent nodded toward the corner.
A carrier sat beside the couch.
Inside, her orange cat glared through the metal door.
“Gabe got him at 12:45.”
Mave closed her eyes.
Vincent told her he would replace everything.
Furniture.
Property.
Whatever she wanted.
He would buy her a building in Tribeca if necessary.
“Keegan is going to bleed for this.”
Mave looked at him.
“You think this is about a couch?”
She placed the mug down hard enough to spill coffee.
“He broke into my home. He tried to erase me.”
“You’re not collateral.”
“I know.”
She stood.
“I know your businesses, your shell companies, your bribes, your enemies.”
Vincent studied her.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you’re not putting me in a corner while you run off to South Boston with guns.”
Mave reopened the laptop.
“Keegan thinks I’m your weak point.”
Her fingers moved toward the keyboard.
“He’s an idiot.”
“Give me server access.”
Vincent watched her for another moment.
Then he typed a 40-character password.
The Costa Syndicate’s financial network opened across the screen.
“Have at it.”
Mave looked at the data.
“Keegan wants your house.”
She started typing.
“Let’s see what happens when I take his.”
For the next 6 hours, Mave hunted through Thomas Keegan’s finances.
Vincent remained beside her.
He had always known she was efficient.
Watching her operate without the limitations of normal corporate work showed him something different.
She was not balancing accounts.
She was tracking prey.
“The docks aren’t his real money.”
“Laundering,” Vincent said.
“Exactly.”
Keegan’s cash moved through casinos in Atlantic City, luxury car washes in New Jersey, and real estate holdings in Manhattan.
There was no clean paper trail.
His people relied on decentralized cash movement.
“Ghosts,” Vincent said.
“Ghosts leave footprints if you know what kind of dirt to look at.”
Mave traced the physical transportation.
Cash still had to travel from casino floors to collection points.
Keegan used armored transport.
Vincent reminded her that the armored-car companies were legitimate and federally regulated.
Attacking one would bring law enforcement immediately.
“You don’t hit the trucks.”
Mave opened a map.
“You hit the schedule.”
She cross-referenced casino shift changes with the routing algorithms of 4 armored transport companies.
Keegan used a cheaper subsidiary called Ironclad.
Every Tuesday at approximately 3:00 in the morning, an Ironclad vehicle carried weekend proceeds from Atlantic City toward a sorting facility in Newark.
It followed the same route.
Route 9.
There was one particular 3-mile section through the New Jersey Pine Barrens with poor cellular coverage and no traffic cameras.
Approximately 45 seconds of digital darkness.
“Tomorrow is Tuesday.”
Mave looked at Vincent.
“That truck will be carrying more than $4 million of Keegan’s unwashed cash.”
Vincent stared at the screen.
Mave had found Keegan’s vulnerable point in 6 hours.
“You want me to rob him?”
“No.”
Her voice was calm.
“I want you to bleed him.”
Take the money.
Destroy the truck.
Leave a message.
By morning, Keegan would struggle to pay his own men.
Vincent warned her that this would begin an open war.
Mave looked again at the still image of her burning apartment.
“He already started it.”
Vincent stared at her.
Then he smiled slowly.
He covered her hand with his.
“Gabe.”
The driver appeared from another room with a sandwich in his hand.
“Call the crew. Heavy equipment.”
“Target?”
Vincent looked at the map.
“Thomas Keegan’s wallet.”
At 2:47 the following morning, Mave sat alone inside the bunker.
Barnaby slept on the couch.
A black encrypted radio sat beside her keyboard.
The armored truck appeared as a blue dot moving along Route 9.
The rain had become heavier.
On another monitor, Mave studied satellite imagery of the Pine Barrens.
Deep woods.
No shoulder.
Very little visibility.
A voice came through the radio.
Carmine.
“Approaching.”
Vincent answered.
“Hold. Let him move deeper.”
Mave leaned toward the screen.
The truck crossed into the dead zone.
“He’s in.”
She pressed the radio transmitter.
“You have 45 seconds before central dispatch pings the GPS.”
“Going dark.”
The blue dot vanished.
Mave began counting.
10 seconds.
She knew the plan.
Gabe would block the road with a reinforced tow truck.
Carmine would disable the tires.
Vincent would breach the rear.
At approximately 30 seconds, gunfire erupted over the radio.
Then an explosive charge.
“Rear doors breached.”
More shots.
A heavier weapon answered.
“Gabe’s hit.”
Mave’s body went rigid.
“Shoulder,” someone shouted. “He’s up. It’s a graze.”
Vincent’s voice cut through the noise.
“Grab the bags. Leave loose cash. Move.”
“5 seconds until dispatch pings,” Mave warned.
“Let them ping.”
Then the engines disappeared into static.
The timer passed 45 seconds.
A warning flashed.
Ironclad’s dispatch system attempted to contact the truck.
No response.
Automatic emergency protocols began.
State police notifications went out.
Vincent’s team was already gone.
Approximately 40 minutes later, the bunker garage opened.
Mave stood.
Vincent entered first.
His white shirt was soaked from the rain.
His left sleeve was torn.
Blood ran from a jagged cut in his forearm.
He carried 2 heavy black canvas bags.
They hit the floor with a dull thud.
Gabe followed, supported by Carmine.
His left arm was secured against his chest with a belt.
The bullet had passed through the muscle of his shoulder without breaking bone.
Vincent ordered Carmine to treat him.
Mave retrieved the trauma kit.
Carmine took it.
“You handle the boss.”
Vincent stood beside the stolen cash with his chest still rising rapidly.
His eyes were wide from adrenaline.
For a moment, when he looked at Mave, he seemed not to recognize where he was.
Then his shoulders lowered.
“It’s done.”
The truck had been burned.
A green shamrock pin had been nailed to the dashboard.
Keegan would understand exactly who had taken his money.
Mave saw the cut on Vincent’s arm.
“Sit.”
He obeyed.
Mave knelt between his knees with gauze, water, iodine, and tweezers.
She cleaned mud and blood from his skin.
A fragment of windshield glass came free.
Vincent flinched.
“I shouldn’t have brought you into this.”
Mave dropped the glass into a tray.
“I should have sent you to London the minute Keegan looked at you.”
“I don’t run.”
“This isn’t logistics. It’s war. People will die.”
“I know.”
Vincent looked down at her.
“You sit behind a screen. You don’t smell people burning.”
Mave stopped working.
“Don’t condescend to me.”
Her voice remained low.
“You brought the violence into my home. Keegan burned everything I owned. He would have killed Barnaby. He would have dragged me into some warehouse and used me to get to you.”
She dropped the bloody towel.
“I didn’t pull a trigger tonight. But I loaded the gun. I aimed it. I know what I am.”
She leaned closer.
“Don’t try to protect me from the monster when I’m the one feeding it.”
Vincent stared at her.
Something between them broke.
The desk.
The employer.
The secretary.
The years of controlled distance.
He gripped the back of her neck and pulled her closer.
“You are a terrifying woman.”
“Good.”
Vincent kissed her.
There was nothing cautious about it.
Three years of suppressed attraction and one night of violence collapsed into a single desperate moment.
Mave responded with the same intensity.
Vincent pulled her onto his lap.
She held him by the shoulders.
Neither pretended the boundary between them remained intact.
When they finally separated enough to breathe, Vincent rested his forehead against hers.
“If we do this, there is no going back to the desk. No clean books. You’re in all the way.”
“I burned the desk tonight.”
Mave touched his jaw.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Vincent lifted her and carried her down the narrow hallway.
The bedroom door closed behind them.
The bunker offered no romance.
Only concrete walls, darkness, and the need to confirm that both of them were alive.
Their intimacy was urgent and unguarded, stripped of titles and hierarchy.
For the first time, neither was the mob boss nor the secretary.
They were simply 2 people whose old lives had collapsed in the same night.
When Mave woke, there was no sunlight because the bunker had no windows.
She heard a television news broadcast and smelled fresh coffee.
She wrapped a sheet around herself and walked into the main room.
Vincent sat at the table wearing dark jeans and a black shirt.
His injured arm had been bandaged.
The stolen cash had been moved.
He looked at her differently now.
Not like an employee.
Not exactly like something he owned.
Like someone standing beside him.
“Coffee?”
“Please.”
Mave sat down.
The news showed the wreckage of the Ironclad truck on Route 9.
Authorities were describing it as a highly organized syndicate-level hijacking.
“Everyone knows it was us,” Vincent said.
“Has Keegan called?”
“Not yet.”
“He lost more than $4 million.”
Vincent looked at her.
“What?”
Mave opened a browser window.
While Keegan’s people were distracted by the hijacking, Mave had entered the gaps in his digital defenses.
She could not steal the Cayman funds directly because the accounts required biometric access.
She had not needed to steal them.
She had destroyed their usefulness.
“I flagged every shell company for international terrorism financing.”
Vincent stared at her.
“I created a digital trail connecting his real estate companies to a sanctioned arms dealer in Damascus. Then I anonymously sent the routing information to IRS Criminal Investigation and the FBI.”
“The accounts?”
“Frozen at 6:00 this morning.”
May you like
Keegan’s legitimate companies were locked.
His accessible digital liquidity was gone.
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