Loose Ends

Part 12

The Devil’s Sons are dead, slaughtered in a night of silence and steel.

Detective Castillo watches the footage and sees a ghost from her past.

Grayson Gats, long presumed dead, moves through the chaos like a shadow.

Old love and old blood haunt her in every blurred frame.

Chief Novack scrambles to hold a city crumbling under invisible war.

Allies become suspects.

Cartels brace for retaliation.

Viktor, the Russian wolf, smells blood

The call clicked to life on the other end.

Novack closed his eyes for a beat, and a thick Russian accent answered, calm and unbothered.

"Novack."

"We have a problem," Novack replied.

Novack clenched his jaw. "The Devil's Sons were wiped out last night."

"All of them?" Viktor inquired.

Novack ran a hand down his face, his fingers digging into the lines of exhaustion that had settled there over the years. "I have cops at the scene right now. Red Jack's and their HQ, both destroyed. Someone cut through them like they were nothing."

The Russian on the other end, Viktor, a man who did not rattle easily, exhaled sharply. "Who?"

"That's the problem. No one knows. My detectives have surveillance footage, but whoever did this was fast. And one of my detectives reacted like she knew something but wouldn't talk." Novack proclaimed.

There was a pause, the quiet hum of the international call stretching thin between them.

Then Viktor muttered something low in Russian, something Novack couldn't quite catch but didn't need to.

"Then we prepare," Viktor said at last, his voice steady, deliberate.

Novack nodded, already calculating their next move. "I'll have officers detail your locations, buy us time until we figure out who Ade's contact was for the gun."

"If they come to us," Viktor said slowly, "vee will be ready."

But Viktor wasn't a man who liked to sit and wait.

He knew better than to let an unanswered threat linger, festering into something uncontrollable.

The streets was about sending a message before the streets decided they smelled weakness.

And right now, the only person who had reacted like they knew something was Janna Castillo.

"Castillo," Viktor repeated, considering the name. "She hesitated?"

Novack exhaled, already knowing where this was going. "Yeah. But don't get excited. She's a tough cookie. Smart. Not easily swayed."

Viktor hummed in thought. "Even the toughest have pressure points."