Page 73 of The Bratva Betrayal

I’ve built a system that monitors Cady's devices and set alerts for certain keyword clusters. I’d get an alert if she found something she shouldn't have, or if she was about to do something I needed to know about before she did it.

I glance at the notification.

Search activity flagged: multiple queries, residential listings, cross-state.

Transit routes.

Low-cost accommodations.

She wasn’t searching for Benedikt. She wasn’t searching for our shipment routes, our financial contacts, or anything that would suggest she's gotten closer to what her father sent her here for.

She was looking at apartments in other states. Bus routes, cheap rentals, and cities she's never been to. She’s quietly calculating what it would take to disappear.

Something shifts in my chest.

“Anything important?”

"No.” I pocket the phone. “Routine."

He watches me for a beat longer than necessary before deciding against further interrogation.

"There's one more thing.”

"There always is,” I mutter.

"The Gallagher situation. Colin Gallagher reached out three days ago," he says.

That gets my attention. "Reached out how?”

“Through appropriate channels. Formal.” The dryness in his voice says exactly what he thinks of it. "He proposed an alliance. Not an operational or a tactical one. Something… structural."

I know what that means before he finishes.

There’s no fucking way.

“Please don’t say⁠—”

"He wants to merge the families," Benedikt confirms. “Immediately.”

"That's fuckin’ insane."

“That’s politics. The Gallaghers have reach we don’t have on the eastern corridor. Colin has been gathering leverage on Manifold for months, and if he gets what he needs, he controls the oversight structure in this city. An alliance with him isn’t nothing.”

"An alliance isn't a merger."

"No." He looks at me steadily. "It isn't."

I think about Cady in her office with her laptop, digging through Manifold's public records. I think about Cady in her penthouse, glaring at me. I think about the way she told me to go fuck myself and meant every word.

I also remember the way my face stung afterward, and how I sat on her floor thinking about her for too long before I remembered I was supposed to be working.

I think about my phone notification.

Apartments in other states.

Bus routes.

Cheap rentals.