Across the heavy mahogany desk from me, Dominic methodically reviewed a heavily encrypted dossier on a laptop.

Our people hadn’t breached the hotel room, and they wouldn’t need to.

Dominic possessed a predator’s patience. He preferred to let them exhaust themselves against the bars of a cage they couldn’t even see. Overnight, Silas’s team had done the surgical work.

They’d legally secured the hotel’s surveillance footage through a corporate contact before the Plaza’s own security could quietly lose it.

They had Lily’s timestamped injuries, photographed and documented by a physician. They had the fire-escape maintenance logs showing exactly where she’d climbed down in the rain.

And a discreet audio device, planted during a “maintenance visit” to the suite’s ventilation the night before, was capturing every arrogant word the two of them said—admissible, warned, and lethal.

We listened to the unraveling. Preston was pacing the penthouse, screaming at a phone that had no signal. He’d spent the last six hours discovering there was no cellular service, no Wi-Fi, and a hotel landline that had gone conveniently dead.