Lily trembled against her.
“Savvy,” she whispered, “where’s Mr. Biscuit?”
Savannah’s mind jumped to the laptop bag on the couch.
Then the front door splintered.
Two gunshots cracked through the apartment.
Clean. Close. Suppressed.
Silence.
A low voice called from the living room.
“Miss Rhodes. It’s Cross.”
Savannah opened the bathroom door slowly.
Damon stood in the center of her apartment. His black coat was marked with blood that was not his. A pistol hung low in his right hand. Two men lay near the entry. One was still making a sound.
Damon kicked a weapon away from the man’s hand without looking down.
His eyes found Savannah.
Then Lily.
For one brief second, something moved across his face. Something human enough that he immediately buried it.
Savannah stepped in front of her sister.
“Did you come for me or for the money?”
Damon lowered the gun.
“Both. At first.”
“And now?”
“Now I came because you were right.”
Police sirens rose somewhere in the distance.
Damon looked toward the window.
“You need to come with me.”
Savannah almost laughed. “You fired me this morning.”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t let me finish a sentence.”
“I know.”
“You humiliated me in front of a room full of men who were too scared to think for themselves.”
Damon took it without flinching.
“Yes.”
Lily stepped from behind Savannah and tugged once at the hem of his coat.
“Mister?”
Damon looked down.
Lily studied him with the merciless honesty of six years old.
“Are you a good person or a bad person?”
For the first time in years, Damon Cross did not know how to answer.
The black SUV waiting in the alley had plates registered to no living person. Anton sat behind the wheel, expression unreadable. He took one look at Damon’s coat, one look at Savannah’s shaking hands, and drove.
Lily sat between them with Mr. Biscuit clutched to her chest. Savannah had grabbed the laptop bag on the way out.
Damon looked straight ahead.
“The system is compromised,” he said. “Fourteen million gone. More moving.”
Savannah closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the exhaustion was still there, but the fear had stepped aside for function.
“Get me to a machine with root access.”
Damon nodded.
Lily tilted her head.
“Savvy, is this your boss?”
“My old boss.”
Lily turned to Damon.
“Were you nice to my sister?”
Damon breathed once.
“I’m trying.”
Lily frowned.
“Trying isn’t enough. You have to actually do it.”
Savannah made a sound that almost became a laugh.
Damon looked at the little girl longer than he meant to.
The safe penthouse sat on the thirty-eighth floor of a Gold Coast tower owned by a shell company three layers removed from Damon’s name. Floor-to-ceiling glass overlooked the lake. The furniture was expensive and severe, like nobody had ever spilled juice there.
Lily walked a slow circle around the guest room.
“I like it,” she announced. “But I’m still mad at you for firing my sister.”
Damon stood in the doorway.
“You have every right.”
“I’ll stop being mad when you say sorry properly.”
“All right.”
In the office, Savannah sat before a high-powered workstation. Damon authenticated her into the full Cross network.
Her fingers moved.
“Who gave the restart order?”
“Hutchins. Marcus was present.”
Her hands stopped for one breath.
Then continued.
Damon noticed.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I need to stop the bleeding first.”
For three hours, she spoke only in commands.
Isolate outbound traffic. Mirror the path. Do not sever yet. Build manual failover. Re-key the authentication layer. Pull internal SSH fingerprints. Route suspicious traffic into observation.
Damon assembled a remote team. Savannah chose Eli Park to coordinate, because he had been the only person who tried to remember her warning.
At some point, Damon placed an espresso beside her hand.
She drank it without looking up, then realized it was made correctly. Cup warmed. Crema intact. Not bitter.
She had not expected a man with blood on his sleeve to know how to pull an espresso.
She filed that away and kept working.
When the bleeding finally stopped, Savannah leaned back and felt exhaustion return like a wave.
Damon set water in front of her.
“Drink.”
She drank.
Then he sat across from her.
“I owe you an explanation.”
“You owe me an apology.”
“Yes,” he said. “That too.”
He told her about Evan. About the warehouse. About the man who had fallen asleep for four minutes. About a rule made beside a coffin and carried like a debt.
Savannah listened.
It did not absolve him.
But grief, she knew, could make people cruel in ways they mistook for discipline.
“I am sorry,” Damon said finally. “I was wrong. I almost lost everything because I was too proud to listen.”
Savannah looked through the glass wall toward the guest room, where Lily slept with Mr. Biscuit tucked under her chin.
“What do you want from me now?”
“I want to hire you directly. No broker. No Marcus. You work remotely. Lily gets protection. When this is stable, I’ll help fund your own legitimate security firm. You can walk away anytime.”
“I can’t live as a criminal,” she said. “And Lily doesn’t deserve that life.”
“I know.”
Savannah pulled a legal pad from the desk and wrote three conditions.
One: Lily never learns what the Cross Syndicate really does. As far as she knows, you are a hotel developer.