Page 101 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Wolf accepted that without asking for the unfinished version. His eyes passed over me once more before he followed the others toward the yard.

The door closed behind him and I stared at it for a second too long.

Raven whispered, “Don’t.”

I looked over. “Don’t what?”

“Make yourself responsible for the temperature of every room in this building.”

“I wasn’t.”

He raised one eyebrow.

I took a drink of coffee and waited for him to return to the screen but he didn’t.

“Fine,” I said, turning back toward him. “It feels like I walked into something that worked before me and managed to put a crack through the middle of it in less than a week.”

Raven leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “It looks to me like Wolf put the webbing on you and Jackal reacted to it. Neither of those decisions belonged to you.”

“They barely speak now.”

“They have had worse fights than the one you saw.”

I glanced toward the yard windows, where Hawk’s blond head disappeared behind the concrete training structure. “Then why did he look like he wanted to tear Wolf apart over my wrists?”

“If Jackal wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

“You know, though.”

“Some of it.”

“And you’re not going to tell me.”

“No.”

I knew there was nothing defensive in the refusal since he simply turned back to the monitor and opened the valet log from the estate.

“We live on top of each other here,” he said. “There isn’t much privacy left once six people know what you eat and how badly you sleep. Shared showers take care of most of the rest, especially when Jackal keeps stealing shampoo, so the things people choose to keep for themselves matter more.”

I thought about Jackal sitting in the dark with the red ribbon curled inside his hand, humming quietly enough that he had probably believed nobody would hear him.

“Fair.”

Raven glanced over. “You’re admitting something is fair? That sounded painful.”

“You and Wolf spend way too much time together.”

He smiled, and then we went to work.

The party gave us enough raw material to occupy the rest of the morning. Aster had issued temporary credentials to eighty staff and contractors, while the guest network recorded hundreds of devices during the event. Valet logs added vehicles belonging to people who never connected a phone, while Luca Bellandi’s social circle dragged us through property firms and private investment vehicles, then into holding companies nested inside ownership chains that seemed designed to exhaust and confuse anyone trying to follow them.

Raven handled the devices and access records while I rebuilt the human side. Luca’s introductions were crucial because they told us which names existed in the same social space without proving those people worked together. The useful pattern only emerged once we stopped treating each record as a separate event.

A vendor at the Stuttgart estate had also serviced an Aster event in Lyon. A chauffeur company used by one of Luca’s guests shared an invoicing address with a transport broker already sitting on the edge of a Cerberus financial chart. Temporary security badges issued at two different events traced back to the same contractor.

Morgenstern Sicherheitslogistik kept returning no matter which side of the party records we approached. At Stuttgart it appeared as a subcontracted security provider, a detail too ordinary to mean much on its own. The same company had also billed for venue protection at the Lyon event, while an executive transport invoice placed one of its drivers near the Prague courier several weeks before he changed hotels.

Raven enlarged the company registry. “Legitimate licensing, Austrian headquarters, offices in Graz and Munich, plus enough real clients that nobody looking at one invoice would care.”