Page 68 of Hard Bargain

“That’s a lot of expectation.”

“Yes,” Dominic said simply. He held Knox’s gaze a beat too long. Long enough that it stopped feeling like business. Long enough that Knox’s chest did that inconvenient thing.

Then Dominic stepped back, breaking the tension. “Finish your food,” he said. “Then shower. Car’s downstairs in fifteen.”

Knox blinked a few times. “Right.”

Dominic picked up his coffee and didn’t look at him again.

Chapter 19

Knox

Two weeks passed without Dominic. Not a single appearance at the warehouse, not even a quick check-in to see how things were going. Knox told himself that was normal. Dominic didn’t hover. Men like him didn’t need to stand in the middle of a room to control it.

Still, he had started noticing the absence the way you notice a missing sound—not loud, just wrong.

The warehouse ran with mechanical precision. Forklifts moved through the aisles, paperwork changed hands, and trucks were loaded and cleared without anyone raising their voice. Mendez kept the entire operation running without seeming to rush once.

The first two days, Knox watched more than he spoke. By the third, he started asking questions Mendez didn’t brush off. By the fifth, it was clear: the pills were just one artery. There were crates that didn’t rattle like tablets, shipments that required colder storage than ecstasy ever would, containers that moved under heavier guard and changed vehicles twice before reaching their final destination.

He watched how money was counted and how numbers were verified without ever being written down. He began to see the lattice beneath it all—the part that kept everything insulated. Every handoff had layers of separation and deniability built in.

He was being shown the parts that would destroy him if he mishandled them.

By the end of the first week, he’d stopped being surprised by what emerged whenever a crate was opened. He watched, he learned, and he adjusted. And every night, once he was back in his apartment, he’d lie in the dark and replay the map in his head: routes, names, patterns, the invisible architecture of it all.

That evening, Knox sat at the edge of his bed, freshly showered, elbows braced on his thighs. The apartment was quieter than usual, his mother having gone to sleep early. He should have been exhausted. The past two weeks had been long, and he’d learned more in those fourteen days than he had in the past year of his life.

His mind wouldn’t settle. He checked his phone again. Nothing.

Dominic had truly gone quiet.

But that was the point, wasn’t it? Dominic had built his entire empire so he never needed to touch the day-to-day directly. People handled things for him.

So why did the silence feel personal?

He dropped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. Two weeks ago, Dominic had looked at him like someone worthy of his time. And then he’d stepped away. Knox didn’t know what unsettled him more: the intensity of that last interaction, or the absence that followed it like a door closing.

He pushed off the bed and paced once across the narrow bedroom, then back again. The apartment felt too still. He hated that feeling. The sense of being suspended.

He grabbed his phone again, thumb hovering over Dominic’s name.

No.

He shoved it into his sweatpants pocket. If Dominic wanted silence, fine. That was fine.

The energy in his chest had nowhere to go. It pressed at him, restless and infuriating. Sitting in this apartment turning it over wasn’t helping. He needed noise. Movement. Anything that didn’t feel like waiting.

He reached for his phone. Miguel would be with Logan. They usually were this time of night, drifting between bars or parked outside one arguing about music.

Miguel picked up on the second ring. “What’s up?”

“You and Logan out?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Can you come get me?”