The next morning began in the same heavy way the last few had, with her body complaining before the rest of her had properly woken up. Her shoulder still ached when she moved it too quickly, and the bruise along her side had settled into that dull, stubborn soreness that never felt important enough to deserve attention but never left her alone long enough to be forgotten either. She lay still for a little while, looking up at the ceiling while the pale light from the windows slowly spread through the bedroom, and tried to decide whether she was actually tired or just sick of waking up already annoyed.
The answer, as usual, was both.
She had not slept particularly well. Part of that was the soreness, part of it was the fact that the last week had left too many moving pieces in her head, and part of it was something more irritating than either of those things. She had spent too much time the evening before thinking about Leonel, and not in any way she found useful. It would have been easier if she had only distrusted him. It would have been easier if she had only been curious. Instead, she had reached the point where she noticed too much all at once, and none of it sat cleanly.
By the time she gave up on sleep and got out of bed, she had already decided she was not going to waste any more thought on that part of her life until the day gave her no other choice.
That lasted right up until she stepped into the living room.
Coffee had already been made. Something warm was on the stove. The penthouse, which had once been so empty in the mornings that the quiet almost echoed, now carried all the ordinary sounds of someone using it properly. She still had not decided whether that was a good thing or just a practical thing, but it was there all the same. Leonel stood in the kitchen with his sleeves rolled up, cutting fruit with one hand while he kept half his attention on the pan in front of him. He looked over when he heard her, and the first thing she noticed was that she noticed him before she noticed anything else in the room.
That alone was enough to make her want to be difficult.
"You're up early," he said.
She walked to the island and reached for the coffee pot.
"You say that like I'm usually lazy."
"No," he said, going back to the cutting board. "I said it because you look like you didn't sleep enough."
She poured coffee and sat down.
"That sounded rude."
"Just an observation."
She looked at him over the mug, then looked away first because she had no intention of letting that become a conversation.
Breakfast appeared in front of her a minute later, and she started eating while the quiet between them settled into something familiar. That was part of the problem too. The silence no longer felt awkward or new. It felt lived in. He moved around the kitchen as if he had always belonged there, and she no longer had to adjust herself around his presence in the room. That should have been useful and nothing more. Instead it kept becoming something she was aware of in ways she did not want to unpack.
He reached for a plate above the sink, passing behind her just closely enough that she caught his scent again before she meant to. It was faint, clean, warm from the kitchen, and far too familiar already. She froze for the smallest second, then put the coffee down harder than she intended. He stopped and looked at her.
"What?"
"Nothing."
That answer came too quickly, and they both knew it.
He studied her for a second and then, very deliberately, stepped back to the other side of the counter instead of saying anything. The fact that he had noticed made it worse. The fact that he was polite enough not to push made it worse still.
She finished breakfast faster than she meant to, mostly so she could leave the room before she had to think too hard about why something as stupid as a man walking behind her in a kitchen had become a problem. When she stood, he glanced at her.
"You're leaving early."
"I have work to do."
"That sounds like an excuse, though."
"It is an excuse," she said, reaching for her jacket. "I'm still using it."
He gave her a look that said he understood more than he was saying, and she disliked that almost as much as the rest of it.
Headquarters was already fully awake when she arrived. Cedric was waiting outside her office, tablet in hand and expression tight enough that she knew immediately the day was about to get worse.
"You've got something," she said.
He walked in beside her.
"Yes."
"That wasn't hopeful."
"I wasn't trying to be."
She dropped her bag near the desk and turned toward him. Cedric set the tablet down and brought up a set of images she did not recognize at first. They looked like warehouse shots, dim and ugly and taken in the kind of place no one used unless they had a reason to stay unnoticed. At a glance it could have been almost anything. A storage room. A back loading area. Somewhere underused and badly maintained.
Then she looked properly. The chains bolted into the wall caught her eye first. Then the marks in the concrete beneath them. Then the water bowl shoved into a corner, the torn fabric, the old stains near the drain, the empty injector cases, and the kind of ugly stripped-down arrangement that only made sense if someone had been keeping living things there against their will. The room in her chest went cold before the anger came.
"Where?"
"South docks," Cedric said. "Warehouse Seventeen."
She looked at the images again and wished they had not made sense as quickly as they did.
"What were they keeping there?"
Cedric was quiet just long enough that she knew he already had an answer and hated it.
"We think wolves."
She lifted her eyes to his face.
"We think."
"We don't have anyone there now. The place was cleared before dawn. But the setup, the residue, the restraints, the transport notes we found in the office… yes. Wolves."
For a second she said nothing at all. There were a lot of things she could accept as part of ruling a territory. Smuggling, theft and violence. Men with too much ego and too little sense. Attempts on her life. Politics and corruption. None of that was clean, but none of it surprised her anymore.
This did. Not because the world was too decent for it. She had never been stupid enough to believe that. It shocked her because someone had built a room like that and used it under her nose, inside her territory, and had apparently thought they could keep doing it. The anger came then, and it came clean.
"Get me every lease tied to that place," she said. "Every shell company, every delivery log, every shift list, every driver who's gone near that building in the last month. I want names, routes, footage, payments, all of it."
Cedric had already started moving on the tablet.
"I've got teams on the lease trail and security headed there now."
"I'm going."
He did not argue. That alone told her he understood exactly what kind of mood she was in.
The drive to the docks took too long. She sat in the back with Cedric beside her and looked out the window while the city gave way to metal, concrete, stacked containers, and low industrial buildings that all looked the same if you did not know where to look. That made her angrier. A place like that disappeared by blending in. It survived because people only saw what they expected to see.
By the time they arrived, the first team was already there, and the building itself looked exactly like every other tired warehouse in the row. Nothing about it stood out. Nothing about it should have told anyone, from the outside, what was inside.
She got out of the SUV and started walking before the driver had fully killed the engine. Cedric was beside her immediately. A second later another door opened behind them, and she turned just enough to see Leonel getting out as well.
She stopped.
"What are you doing?"
He closed the door.
"Coming in."
That answer should have started an argument. It almost did. Then one of the officers from the entry team came hurrying toward her with a folder in hand and a face that said things were only getting worse. She chose the warehouse over the argument.
Inside, the smell hit her immediately. It was old concrete, damp wood, rust, chemical residue, stale fear, and something sour underneath it that had sunk too deeply into the room to be cleaned out in one rushed night. The place had been emptied fast, but not fast enough. Not if you knew what you were looking at.
The back room was even worse in person than it had been in the images. The chains were real. The marks on the floor were real. The restraints were set at different heights, which told her more than she wanted to know in one glance. The water bowl was scratched badly enough that whatever had been kept there had not gone quietly, and the injector wrappers in the corner still held traces of wolfsbane residue when one of the officers tested them.
For a while she said nothing. She just stood there and looked at it properly.
Cedric stayed close enough to speak if needed but far enough not to crowd her.
"They moved out before dawn," he said quietly.
"I know."
"We found records."
She turned toward him. The office at the side of the main floor held ledgers, coded route sheets, one broken burner phone, and a lockbox with enough cash in it to suggest this had not been some desperate side job run by fools. Someone had paid for order. Someone had planned this to last.
She went through the ledgers herself. It did not take long to understand the pattern. Pickups, drops, holding periods. Notations that made her skin crawl.
"Alive."
"Moved."
"Ready."
"Unbroken."
Every page made her angrier, but by the third page the anger had sharpened enough to become useful again.
"This isn't a small setup," she said.
"No," Cedric replied.
"They've been doing it for a while."
"Yes."
She kept reading. The names were mostly fake. The routes were coded. But the structure was there, and structure was enough. She could work with structure.
One of the officers stepped closer.
"There's a dock worker outside who thinks he knows one of the men who used to come through here."
She looked up.
"Bring him in."
The dock worker was young enough that he still looked nervous in the wrong places. He did not want to be there, and he definitely did not want to be standing in that office with her staring at him while a security team filled the doorway behind him.
"I don't know much," he said quickly.
"You know something," she replied. "Start there."
He swallowed.
"There was a guy. Called himself Bren. He came through a few times. Not regular. Just enough that people noticed him."
"What did he do?"
"Checked manifests. Talked to drivers. Thought he was smarter than everybody."
She held his gaze.
"And where do I find him?"
The young man hesitated, and that was all she needed to know before he even answered. He was afraid. Not of Bren but of whoever stood above Bren.
"He was down near Pier Nine last night," he said. "Might still be around there."
Cedric looked at her. She looked at him.
"Send teams to Pier Nine," she said. "Quietly. If he runs, I want him followed, not spooked. If he's there, I want him breathing when they bring him in."
The officers moved immediately. Only once they were gone did she realize Leonel was standing in the office doorway, silent as usual and watching her with a face that gave away nothing except that he had taken in every part of the room already.
She looked at him.
"You shouldn't be in here."
He looked past her once, over the chains, the ledgers, the room itself, and then back to her.
"No," he said. "I probably shouldn't."
That answer irritated her more than if he had argued. She came around the desk, the ledger still in her hand.
"This was happening in my territory."
"Yes."
"They've been moving wolves like cargo."
"Yes."
His voice had changed. Only slightly, but enough. The calm was still there, but it had gone harder around the edges.
"You look angry."
He held her gaze.
"I am."
The answer hit somewhere she did not have time to think about. Before she could decide what to say to that, Cedric stepped back into the office with an update from the teams already moving toward Pier Nine. Bren had been seen there before. One of the outer dock cameras had picked up a vehicle tied to the same false accounts they were already tracing. It was enough to move.
She let the ledger drop back onto the desk.
"Fine," she said. "Then we start with Bren."
As they walked back through the warehouse and out into the open air again, the wind off the water hit her face hard enough to clear some of the smell from her lungs, but not the anger.
This was not one room. Not one set of people. Not one dirty side business someone thought they could slip through her territory while she was busy dealing with attacks and politics and the rest of the usual nonsense. This was bigger than that.
And for the first time in days, what sat in her chest most clearly was not the pressure of being watched, not the frustration of half-answers, not even the growing tension she had no interest in naming between herself and the man who kept turning up in her kitchen every morning.
Someone was selling wolves in her territory.
Now that she knew, she was not going to let them keep breathing comfortably for much longer.