“You have three seconds to apologize before I break your arm.”

The words were out of my mouth before my brain caught up.

Downtown Los Angeles froze around me.

Forks stopped halfway to lips. Glasses hovered mid-air. Conversations died in neat little rows of white tablecloths and polished flatware. Even the kitchen at Vincent’s – usually a steady roar of sizzling pans and shouted orders – seemed to choke on the moment.

The man in front of me stared like I’d just spoken Martian.

Expensive charcoal suit. Watch that could pay my rent for six months. Dark hair, darker eyes, the kind of stillness that doesn’t come from yoga and meditation but from years of doing violence and walking away from it.

Four men in matching suits shifted behind him, hands dipping inside jackets.

Bodyguards. Armed. Professional.

I didn’t look at them.

I was looking at him.

Because when his shirt collar pulled just slightly to the side as he grabbed my wrist, I saw it.

A small tattoo at the base of his neck. Three intersecting circles, inked in clean black lines.

My father’s symbol.

The restaurant – a midrange “we pretend we’re old money” place on a side street off Wilshire – reeled slowly back into motion. A glass clinked. Someone gasped. I heard Sophie, my coworker, whisper my name like a prayer and a curse.

The man’s grip tightened on my wrist.

“What,” he asked quietly, “did you just say to me?”

“I said,” I repeated, steady this time, “apologize.”

Thirty seconds earlier he’d called me something I won’t repeat. The kind of word that makes old women flinch and makes you want to wash your ears out with bleach. He’d said it casually, like he’d used it all his life and nobody ever stopped him.

He was wrong about one thing.

He thought nobody would ever stop him.

My name is Camila Reeves. I’m twenty-six. I serve food and fake smiles in a city where half the people wear suits and the other half carry guns, and sometimes it’s the same people doing both. I live in a studio apartment that smells like my downstairs neighbor’s cooking oil, and I work double shifts while I search for the man who destroyed my family.

I didn’t wake up that morning planning to threaten a mafia boss in the middle of a nice American restaurant.

But that’s the thing about stories like mine.

They never start when you expect them to.

He shoved me.

It wasn’t much. Just a rough push meant to move me out of his way, the way you’d move a chair that was in the wrong place. My body reacted before my brain did, diving straight down a path worn into muscle memory years ago.

My father’s voice in my head. Don’t think. Move.

Elbow trap.

Wrist twist.

Shoulder drop.

Knee pin.

Four movements. Two seconds.

One very surprised crime boss flat on his face on the polished hardwood floor with my knee driving between his shoulder blades and his right arm locked at an angle that would snap if I leaned my weight just a little more.

That was when I said it again, louder, with the whole of Los Angeles watching:

“You have three seconds to apologize before I break your arm.”

His bodyguards drew their weapons so fast the room blurred. Silver and black flashed, a dozen customers screamed, chairs scraped. Somewhere, someone yelled “Call 911!” but my world had narrowed to one tiny patch of skin at the back of his neck and three intersecting circles in black ink.

My father’s symbol.

The symbol he’d trained his men under.

The symbol carved into his gravestone four years ago in a quiet cemetery outside the city.

“Who taught you that move?” he asked.

His voice was strained, pressed into the floor, but it wasn’t rage I heard. Not really. It was something else. Shock. Recognition.

“The same man who taught you,” I said, leaning down until only he could hear me. “My father. Adrien Reeves.”

He went absolutely still.

Not the stillness of surrender.

The stillness of a man who’s just realized his whole world might be built on lies.

“You’re Adrien’s daughter.”

Not a question.

Behind me I heard two sets of safety catches click off. Felt four pistols pointed at my spine. Sophie whispered my name again, this time like a funeral.

“Let me up,” he said. “Please.”

He added the please like it was foreign on his tongue.

Slowly, carefully, I shifted my weight off his arm and backed away, hands open. His men didn’t shoot. They were watching him, not me, waiting for the smallest gesture.

He rose to his feet with a grace that spoke of too much training and too many fights. He smoothed down his shirt, straightened his collar, brushed imaginary dust from his suit.

When he looked at me, the room disappeared.

“Your father,” he said, voice measured, “saved my life when I was seventeen. He trained me for six years. He was the closest thing I ever had to family.”

“Don’t,” I snapped.

It came out sharper than I meant, but I didn’t soften it.

“Don’t talk about him like you knew him. Like you cared.”

“I did care.” His gaze sharpened, colorless and cold and, somehow, desperate. “I do care. Camila, I heard he died four years ago. I sent money to the funeral home. I tried to find you. To pay my respects. You had disappeared.”

“I disappeared because the people who killed him were looking for me too,” I said, hands shaking now that the adrenaline had somewhere to go. “Because he died protecting me from his world. From people like you.”

“Not like me.” His men shifted at the edge of my vision as he took a slow step closer. “Listen to me. I didn’t know what really happened to Adrien. I was out of the country. By the time I got back, he was gone. But if someone killed him, then we need to talk. Because that was not supposed to happen.”

Something in his tone made the hairs on my arms stand up.

“Your father had protection,” he continued. “Agreements. Rules.”

“Agreements,” I repeated, and laughed once, harsh. “With criminals. That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“With me.”

He said it simply.

“My name is Dante Klov,” he added. “And when I took over my organization, I made sure Adrien Reeves was untouchable. Anyone who went after him would answer to me personally. That was the deal.”

I’d spent four years studying people from the safety of a service station and the back section of a restaurant. My father had taught me how to read lies – the micro-expressions, the tension, the telltale shift of eyes.

Dante believed every word.

Which meant he was either the best liar I’d ever seen…

…or someone had broken deals powerful enough to scare a man like him.

“If you had an agreement,” I asked quietly, “then how did he die?”

“That,” he said, looking around the frozen restaurant, “is exactly what I want to know. But this…”

He glanced at the trembling hostess, at Sophie clutching a tray of glasses with white knuckles, at the elderly couple huddled behind a wine list.

“…isn’t the place.”

He slipped a hand into his jacket and my heart slammed into my throat, but he only pulled out his phone. No gun. No threat.

Just a photo.

My father, ten years younger, stood in the shot with a teenage boy whose hair fell into his eyes and whose smile was careful, like he didn’t know how to use it yet. Behind them I saw the familiar scuffed mats and worn heavy bags of my father’s downtown LA gym.

“Where did you get that?” I whispered.

“He gave it to me,” Dante said. “Along with every lesson I ever needed to survive.”

The room started spinning.

“Come with me,” he said. “Let me show you something.”

“You think I’m getting in a car with you?” I asked.

“I think,” he replied, “that you want answers more than you want to be safe.”

He wasn’t wrong.

That was how I ended up walking out of a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard with a mafia boss at my side, four guns at my back, and my entire life tilting under my feet.

Sophie grabbed my elbow as we passed.

“Camila, are you out of your mind?” she hissed. “That’s Dante Klov. He’s—”

“I know who he is,” I said. “And I think he might be the only person who can help me find the truth.”

What I didn’t know yet was that the truth was worse than anything I’d imagined. That the uncle who held me at my father’s funeral might have been lying for years. That my father was not the man I thought he was. And that the mafia boss I’d just threatened would become the only person standing between me and a very real, very American kind of death.

But that came later.

First, there was the car.

Black. Armored. Windows tinted so dark you could use them as a mirror. Parked half a block away on a quiet LA side street that smelled like exhaust and stale coffee.

The driver didn’t say a word when we slid into the back seat. Neither did the two bodyguards up front.

Dante sat beside me, looking out at the city like this was just another Thursday.

My hand drifted to the small knife strapped inside my ankle boot.

He noticed.

He didn’t comment.

“Where are we going?” I asked, watching palm trees flicker past, the glittering skyline of downtown Los Angeles rising in the windshield.

“Somewhere your father knew,” he said. “Somewhere safe.”

“Safe for who?”

He glanced at me then, and for the first time I saw something like respect in his eyes.

“You really are his daughter,” he said. “He never trusted anyone either.”

“He trusted the wrong person,” I said. “That’s why he’s dead.”

“Maybe.” Dante’s jaw tightened. “Or maybe whoever killed him wanted you to think it was someone from my world.”

The car turned off the freeway onto a stretch of warehouses tucked between the LA River and the aging industrial skeleton of the city. We pulled up beside a brick building that looked abandoned – barred windows, faded paint, doors that had seen better decades.

The inside told a different story.

The air smelled like sweat, leather, and the faint metallic tang of gun oil. The concrete floor was covered in training mats. Heavy bags hung from steel beams. Racks of training weapons lined one wall. And at the center, lit by a wash of soft light from above, was a memorial.

My father’s face, printed larger than life, stared down at me. Strong. Focused. Alive.

Candles burned beneath the photograph. Flowers. A perfectly folded black belt. A pair of worn gloves I recognized – the stitching on the knuckles still dark from a long-ago fight.

My knees almost buckled.

“I built this six months after he died,” Dante said quietly behind me. “Every man in my organization trains here. Every one of them learns his principles. Discipline. Respect. Control.”

“Don’t,” I said, voice breaking. “Don’t turn him into your patron saint of crime.”

“I’m not.” His tone sharpened. “I’m telling you I loved your father too. That his death matters to me. That finding who killed him matters.”

I turned, spine straightening.

“Then start talking,” I said. “All of it.”

He led me to a small office in the back – concrete walls, a battered desk, a laptop, and an entire wall covered in photos, notes, and red strings.

A murder board.

My father’s murder board.

“I’ve been investigating for four years,” Dante said, taking a seat behind the desk. “The official story? Single-car accident on a dark stretch of road outside LA. Wet pavement. Excessive speed. Tragic and unfortunate.”

I’d memorized the language from the report.

I’d never believed it.

“Adrien was too careful,” Dante continued, pulling up a file on the laptop and swiveling it toward me. “Too skilled. So I started digging.”

Police photos. Grainy images of twisted metal on a California roadside. Autopsy notes. Statements from the responding officers.

“Look there,” he said.

I saw it as soon as he pointed.

The brake lines. Cut. Cleanly. Not frayed or corroded. Severed.

“This wasn’t an accident,” I said.

“Exactly.” He clicked to another file. “The mechanic who worked on the car? Disappeared two weeks later. The officer who filed the report? Transferred to another state within a month. The witness who called 911? Paid off and relocated out of California.”

He opened a spreadsheet full of transactions.

“So I chased the money,” he said. “Three shell corporations, all cycling funds through Nevada, Delaware, overseas accounts. Took me two years to punch through the layers.”

“And?” I asked.

He clicked again.

One name sat highlighted at the top of the document.

“Victor Volov,” he said. “Your uncle. Your father’s oldest friend.”

The room tilted.

“No,” I whispered. “You’re wrong. Victor loved my father. He’s been helping me. He gave me safe houses. Money. He’s the only reason I’m still alive.”

“Is he?” Dante stood slowly, moving with the careful calm of someone approaching a wounded animal.

“Or has he been keeping you close so he can monitor you?”

I thought of the calls every few months. The way Victor would always ask what I remembered, what I’d found among my father’s belongings, who I’d been talking to. I’d thought he was being protective.

Suddenly, it didn’t feel like protection.

It felt like surveillance.

“Why would he kill his best friend?” I demanded, voice shaking. “Why would he kill my father?”

“I don’t know.” Dante pulled up another set of documents. “But three months before Adrien died, they had a public fight. Witnesses say they were shouting. Your father said something about betrayal. Trust being broken. Around that same time, three million dollars went missing from an operation they ran together.”

He clicked to a bank statement.

“Victor claimed the money was seized by the feds,” he continued. “Except there’s no seizure on record.”

I sank into the chair across from him. My legs didn’t trust me anymore.

Four years of rage. Four years of imagining a faceless enemy. Four years of trusting the one man left from my father’s world.

And now Dante was telling me that man might be the one who’d ordered my father’s death.

“There’s more,” Dante said.

“Of course there is,” I muttered.

“Two weeks ago I got access to some of Victor’s private communications,” he continued. “He’s planning something big. Something that requires clearing loose ends.”

He looked directly at me.

“The kind of loose end who knows too much about what happened four years ago.”

My mouth went dry.

“He’s planning to kill you,” Dante said.

I swallowed.

“He invited me to his house tomorrow,” I admitted. “Said he had new information about my father’s death.”

“Then you can’t go,” Dante said immediately.

“Of course I’m going,” I shot back.

“You can’t take him on alone.”

“Good thing I’m not alone then,” I said. “Right?”

I saw something flicker behind his eyes. A calculation. A decision.

“You said you loved my father,” I continued. “You said you wanted justice. Prove it. Help me take Victor down.”

He stared at me for a long moment, weighing my words.

Then he nodded once.

“All right,” he said quietly. “But we do this smart. Victor isn’t going to confess because you show up with a few documents.”

“I know,” I said, standing and walking to the wall of photos. Victor’s face stared at me from a dozen angles – laughing in some, deadly serious in others. I traced the red strings with my eyes, following connections between Vegas, Seattle, New York. Between names I recognized from whispered conversations in the restaurant and names I’d only seen in case files.

“We don’t just need evidence,” I said. “We need leverage. Something he cares about more than his own life.”

“He doesn’t care about anything more than his own life,” Dante said.

“Everyone cares about something,” I replied. “We just have to find his.”

We spent the next three hours planning.

Dante showed me everything – accounts, call logs, surveillance photos. I learned more about my uncle in one night than in twenty-two years. He wasn’t just a criminal. He was a builder of criminal empires, the man people from Las Vegas to Miami called when they needed money cleaned or problems made to disappear.

By the time Dante dropped me off outside my apartment in a quiet LA neighborhood of cracked sidewalks and flickering streetlights, my head felt like it might split.

He handed me a small, still-boxed phone through the open window.

“Burner,” he said. “Unregistered. My number’s in there. You need anything, you call.”

“Why are you helping me?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate.

“Because your father saved my life,” he said. “Because Victor made a fool of me. And because I’m tired of good people dying while men like Volov stay comfortable in hillside mansions.”

He paused.

“And because,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “you’re Adrien’s daughter. He would want me to.”

I walked up the stairs to my apartment with my father’s ghost at my back and a mafia boss in my corner.

It was a strange kind of comfort.

I didn’t sleep.

Instead I dragged the dusty boxes out from under my bed – the ones I’d avoided opening for four years. My father’s journals. Training notes. Old photos. I spread everything on my tiny kitchen table and started reading.

At three in the morning I found the letter.

It was tucked into the spine of his favorite training manual, sealed with a blob of black wax pressed with the three interlocking circles I’d seen on Dante’s neck.

My hands shook as I broke the seal.

Camila,

If you’re reading this, I’m gone.

I’m sorry.

I tried to keep this world away from you, but it found us anyway.

Victor is not who you think he is. He’s not who I thought he was. The brother I trusted, the partner I built everything with, has been working against me for years. Stealing. Lying. And I have proof he’s planning something that will hurt a lot of innocent people.

I can’t let that happen.

Tomorrow I’m going to confront him. If something happens to me, don’t trust him. Don’t believe his tears at my funeral. Don’t accept his help.

Run, Camila.

Run far and never look back.

And if you can’t run – if you’re reading this because you chose to stay and fight – then know this:

You’re stronger than he is. Smarter. You have something he never will.

Use it.

Make me proud.

I love you.

Always.

Dad

The paper crumpled in my fists.

He knew.

He’d walked into it anyway. Because that’s who he was – a man who could stand against monsters for other people but never quite for himself.

By the time the sun edged pale gray over the Los Angeles skyline, the cold rage in my chest had sharpened into something else.

Focus.

At noon I drove out of the city to Victor’s estate in the hills – the kind of place that shows up in glossy magazines, all glass and stone and manicured lawns with a postcard view of downtown LA floating in smoggy haze below.

The guard at the gate smiled and waved me through.

Of course he did.

Victor met me at the front door himself. Tall. Broad. Salt threaded through dark hair. Expensive casual clothes and a face trained into warmth.

“Camila,” he said, pulling me into a hug that made my skin crawl now that I knew what I knew. “There you are. You look tired, little one. Come. I made your favorite tea.”

“My favorite tea?” I asked as he led me through high-ceilinged rooms full of art and furniture that cost more than my entire apartment building.

He chuckled.

“You forget,” he said. “I’ve known you since you were born.”

His study looked like a professor’s office – floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, leather chairs, a fireplace, framed degrees. No hint of the man who laundered millions and called hits on people across state lines.

“You said you had information,” I reminded him as I sat.

“Yes.”

He poured tea into fragile china cups my father had always hated.

“I’ve been patient,” Victor said, settling in his chair opposite mine, steepling his fingers in that way my father used to do. “I wanted to give you time to grieve. But I think you’re ready now to hear the truth about what happened.”

My heart hammered so hard I was sure he could hear it.

“I’m listening,” I said.

He took a slow sip of tea, like this was just another afternoon.

“Your father got involved in something very dangerous,” Victor began. “He discovered a trafficking network moving children through Los Angeles to other cities. Terrible things. I told him to stay out of it, to let law enforcement handle it. But you know your father. He couldn’t stand by.”

Every muscle in my body screamed.

Not because I didn’t believe the trafficking. That part was too easy to believe in a country where vulnerable kids disappear every day from bus stops and foster homes and cheap motels along the interstate.

It was the way he said it.

Like he was building something. A story.

“And they killed him,” Victor continued. “These people. These monsters. They killed him for interfering. I’ve been trying to find them ever since. To make them pay for what they took from us.”

“Have you?” I asked. “Found them?”

“I’m close,” he said, leaning forward. “That’s why I wanted you here. There’s a meeting in three days. I need someone on the inside. Someone they won’t suspect. A grieving daughter, perhaps.”

There it was.

The trap.

“Just observe,” he said when I stayed silent. “Record conversations. Get names. Then get out. I’ll have my best men watching over you. You’ll be perfectly safe.”

Perfectly safe.

In the hands of the man my father had warned me about.

“Can I think about it?” I asked.

Something cold flickered behind his eyes and was gone.

“Of course,” he said smoothly. “Take all the time you need. But Camila,” he added, his tone sharpening just slightly, “I have to ask. Has anyone talked to you about your father’s death? Anyone from…other organizations?”

“Like who?” I asked lightly.

“I’ve heard Dante Klov has been asking questions,” Victor said, turning his cup in his hands. “Digging into your father’s accident. Has he contacted you?”

This was the real reason for today.

He knew Dante was circling.

He wanted to know if I’d already been caught in his orbit.

“The mafia boss?” I laughed. “Why would he call me?”

Victor smiled, but his jaw tightened.

“Because your father trained him,” he said. “Years ago. And Dante has a tendency to attach himself to the past.”

“I haven’t heard from him,” I lied.

“Good,” Victor said. “Dante is dangerous. If he approaches you, you tell me immediately. He’s not interested in justice. He wants control. Power. What is yours.”

He rose and walked to the bookshelf behind his desk, sliding his hand along the spines.

“Come,” he said. “Let me show you what I’ve found about the men who killed your father.”

For the next hour he laid out an intricate web of lies. Names, locations, printed emails, surveillance photos – all pointing to a phantom group that didn’t exist. It was detailed, impressive. He’d had four years to perfect it.

I asked all the right questions, nodded in all the right places, took notes like the eager niece he expected me to be.

All the while I searched for something real. Something he hadn’t meant for me to see.

I found it when he turned to pour more tea.

A photograph half covered on his desk.

My father and Victor stood in front of a warehouse I recognized from some of Dante’s pictures – a hub in Victor’s operations somewhere outside Las Vegas. They were younger. Laughing. My father held something in his right hand – a set of keys or a piece of paper. It was hard to tell from that angle.

The photo was lying face-down.

I could see writing on the back.

My father’s handwriting.

The day Victor asked me to help him build an empire.

The day I said yes to the devil.

My blood ran cold.

“Camila?” Victor said, noticing my distraction. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just…a lot to process. I should go. Think about everything.”

“Stay for dinner,” he urged. “We can talk more. Plan.”

“I can’t,” I said, rising. “I have a shift tonight.”

Another lie. I’d called in sick two hours ago.

Something dropped in his expression. The warmth cooled. The concern sharpened into something else.

“Camila,” he said, stepping between me and the door. “I think you should stay.”

“Are you ordering me to stay, Uncle Victor?” I asked quietly.

“I’m protecting you,” he replied. “From Dante. From your own impulses. From a truth you’re not ready for.”

“What truth?” I asked, fingers inching toward the knife at the small of my back.

His mask cracked.

“That your father wasn’t a hero,” Victor said flatly. “He was a criminal. A killer. He built half of what I have. Trained my men. Took blood money and pretended it was clean. When he decided he wanted to walk away, to burn it down and act like he was righteous, I had to stop him.”

“You killed him,” I said. My voice shook. Not with fear.

With rage that had waited four years for a face.

“I did what had to be done,” Victor said. “And now I have to do it again.”

The door opened behind me.

Two of his men stepped in. Guns. Calm eyes.

“I’m sorry, Camila,” Victor said. “I truly did love you. But you’ve been talking to Dante. Asking questions. You know too much. I can’t let you leave this house.”

My father’s voice echoed in my head again.

When you’re outnumbered, Camila, don’t fight fair.

“Do you know why I’m telling you all this?” Victor asked. “Why I’m not worried about you calling for help?”

He smiled.

“Because Dante Klov isn’t coming,” he said. “He’s been working for me the entire time. The investigation. The memorial. The murder board. All of it. A pretty little play designed to lead you here.”

He laughed.

“Did you really think a crime boss would spend four years investigating one man’s death out of loyalty?”

For a second the ground vanished under my feet.

Then I smiled.

“You’re right about one thing,” I said. “I have been learning.”

He frowned.

“You assumed Dante was the only person I told about coming here,” I continued. “You assumed I walked into this house blind.”

I pulled my phone from my pocket. Not Dante’s burner.

My phone.

“I set a dead man’s switch last night,” I said. “An email full of documents Dante collected. Bank records. Names. Connections to federal judges in Nevada and senators in D.C. It’s set to send to every investigative reporter in Los Angeles, a couple in New York, and three of your least favorite rivals in Vegas in…”

I glanced at the screen.

“Fifty-eight minutes,” I finished. “Unless I stop it.”

“You’re bluffing,” Victor said.

“Maybe,” I replied. “Do you really want to test it?”

His men looked at him, hesitation breaking their professional blankness.

Victor’s jaw clenched.

In that moment, all of us heard it.

Distant.

The low whump of an explosion.

The house shook.

The nearest window shattered inward in a rain of glass.

Gunfire erupted outside – a staccato rhythm as familiar to me as my own heartbeat after years with my father.

Not Dante working for Victor.

Dante coming for war.

The next few minutes were chaos.

Shots cracked through the doorway as one of Victor’s men went down. I dropped, rolled, kicked the other’s knee out from under him. He fired wild, bullet chewing a hole in the ceiling instead of my skull.

Victor dove behind his desk, yelling into a phone I hadn’t seen him pull.

I snatched the fallen gun, slid behind a heavy bookshelf, and pumped three rounds into the doorway where another of Victor’s men appeared.

Smoke. Shouting. Footsteps thundering.

“Camila!” a voice bellowed over it all.

Dante.

“Here!” I yelled back.

He burst through the door with two of his own men on his heels, moving with that controlled violence I’d seen in his training warehouse. He took in the room in a single glance – the bodies, the broken glass, the gun in my hand, Victor crouched behind his desk with blood blooming on his sleeve.

“Everybody still breathing?” he asked.

“For the moment,” I said.

“Then we move,” he replied. “We’ve got Koreans in the yard and local cops on the way. We can shoot it out here or we can leave.”

“Koreans?” I repeated.

Victor cursed in Russian.

“They’re early,” he snarled.

“Who?” I demanded.

“The trafficking syndicate I told you about,” he snapped, blood on his teeth. “They wanted Adrien dead. Now they want me. And now they know about you.”

Of course.

Because nothing in my life could ever be simple.

The next hours blurred into a running firefight.

A hidden escape tunnel behind Victor’s shelves.

An armored SUV barreling through three black sedans with Washington plates on the wound-up LA freeway as we headed into the industrial district. A shootout in an abandoned factory lot somewhere near the Port of Los Angeles – rusted buildings looming against the orange city glow as we scrambled up a fire escape and turned a rooftop into a warzone.

By the time the smoke grenades rolled in and the Korean hit squad’s leader had a pistol pressed to Victor’s head, my clothes were soaked with sweat and someone else’s blood and my arms shook from recoil.

“Everyone drop your weapons,” the man called, accent rough but understandable. “Or he dies.”

He nodded at Victor.

“I know him,” the man continued. “He took our money. Promised us Adrien. Lied. So we came to finish it.”

The world narrowed.

“You killed my father,” I said.

He looked at me, and I saw it.

Recognition.

“The daughter,” he said. “Adrien’s girl. Yes. We killed him. He was a problem. Always a problem.”

My hands burned with the need to pull the trigger. To end him right there on that tar-covered rooftop under the California night.

But even then, even with the word killer hanging between us, the story still wasn’t done twisting.

Because Victor – bleeding, on his knees with a gun to his head – smiled through red teeth.

“I warned him,” he rasped. “I told Adrien they were coming. I told him to run. He didn’t listen.”

“You’re lying,” I whispered.

“I’m not,” he said. “Read his letter again. All of it. He never said I killed him, Camila. He said I wasn’t who you thought I was. He knew I was dirty. He didn’t know I was trying to keep both of you alive.”

I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

I only knew I wasn’t going to get answers if the man with the gun pulled the trigger.

It ended fast and ugly.

Smoke.

Shots.

A brief, brutal scramble.

Victor shoving the Korean leader backward.

Me and Dante moving at the same time, bodies slamming into bodies. The leader’s boots skidded on the gravel. For one heartbeat he balanced on the roof’s edge, arms pinwheeling.

Then he fell.

The sound his body made when it hit the concrete five stories below still lives in the back of my skull.

We survived.

Most of us.

The Koreans didn’t.

By the time we got to the “neutral” site – a private airfield forty minutes outside LA where sleek private jets usually ferry executives to New York and Vegas – my entire world had been ripped apart and rearranged twice.

We sat at a polished conference table meant for bad corporate decisions and offshore accounts, not murder debriefs. Victor on one side, Dante and I on the other.

“This,” Victor said, sliding a tablet across the table, “is the real journal.”

Pages of my father’s handwriting filled the screen. Dates. Meetings. Movement of money. Notes about deals, operations, people he liked, people he didn’t trust.

I scrolled.

My stomach turned.

This wasn’t the father I remembered teaching neighborhood kids how to punch without hurting themselves.

This was a man embedded in criminal networks that stretched from LA to Seoul to Seattle.

“He made money,” Victor said quietly. “From drugs, protection, sometimes worse. Then he used that money to build legitimate businesses. To create exit routes for people who wanted out. To fund shelters. To help victims disappear. It was never clean. But it was something.”

“He was playing both sides,” I said.

“He was gathering intelligence,” Dante corrected. “For two years he fed the Koreans false information. Rerouted their shipments. Slowed them down. Saved people they never even knew existed.”

“He knew they’d come for him eventually,” Victor added. “He knew he’d probably die for it.”

I found the entry that proved it.

The Koreans approached me today. Want me to help them move kids through the West Coast again. Offered two million.

I said yes.

Then called Victor.

If we play this right, we can watch them. Hurt them. Maybe stop them.

If it kills me, at least I’ll go down swinging.

My throat closed.

Victor pulled up a video file.

Grainy footage from my father’s gym in downtown LA, dated the day before he died. My father walked into frame. Dante was already there, hair shorter, body bulkier, eyes exactly the same.

They talked – no audio, just gestures. My father handed him an envelope. Then they hugged.

“My last time seeing him,” Dante said.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out a worn envelope.

My name was on the front in my father’s cramped handwriting.

I opened it with fingers that felt numb.

Camila,

If this reached you, you know more than I ever wanted you to know about me.

Victor and Dante should be with you. If they’re not, yell at them for not following instructions.

I’m not a good man. Not the way people in nice houses in nice neighborhoods mean it. I’ve hurt people. Broken laws. Done the wrong thing for the right reasons more than I care to admit.

But I tried, Camila.

I tried to tilt the scale.

I took money from bad men and used it to help their victims. I pretended to work for monsters while sabotaging them. It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough to fix everything. But it was something.

The Koreans found out what I was doing.

They’re coming.

By the time you read this, they will probably have succeeded.

So I made arrangements.

Victor knows my operations. He’s ruthless, but he loves you in his way. He’ll keep you off their radar if he can.

Dante has resources your old man never did. He moves in the shadows I couldn’t reach. I made him promise to protect you.

Trust them.

Not because they’re pure.

Because they care.

Don’t waste your life chasing revenge for mine.

I chose this.

Be better than me.

Or, if you can’t, if you read this and feel the same fire I did, then finish what I started.

But don’t forget why you’re fighting.

It was always for you.

I love you.

Dad

When I looked up, the room was blurry.

“The Koreans think they finished what they started,” I said. “They’re wrong.”

Victor’s eyes were tired.

“Park Han runs the West Coast side,” he said. “Seattle base. Legitimate shipping. Illegitimate cargo.”

“Then we go to Seattle,” I said.

“You understand what you’re saying?” Dante asked quietly. “This isn’t one raid or one shootout. This is a war. Across states. Against a network embedded in American ports, American companies, American courts.”

He wasn’t wrong.

But the thing about having your father murdered, your life burned down and rebuilt on lies, your world turned inside out…

You stop being afraid of the size of the enemy.

“I’m my father’s daughter,” I said. “What do you think?”

That was how I ended up in a cold, wet Seattle warehouse two weeks later, staring at blueprints of a downtown nightclub called Exodus and an old military facility converted into a server farm.

That was how I met Yung Le – ex-Korean intelligence, current freelance problem solver, whose sister had died trying to leave Park Han’s empire.

That was how we planned a coordinated assault that would make any federal task force in the United States look slow.

Two strikes.

One against the club where Choi, Park’s second-in-command, handled trafficking routes for kids moved through ports from Tacoma to Long Beach.

One against the secure data center where Park kept his insurance files on American judges, mayors, CEOs – the powerful men who bought his silence with theirs.

“It’s air-gapped,” Yung said, tapping the map with a pen. “No outside connection. No hacking from a distance. We get in boots-on-the-ground or we don’t get in at all.”

“I’ll handle it,” she added. “I know their systems. I helped design half of them when I still wore a government ID.”

“And I get Choi,” I said.

“Get him alive,” Dante reminded me. “We need his testimony. His files. His access codes.”

The night Exodus turned into a battleground, the rain came down sideways off Puget Sound. Neon spilled off wet pavement outside the club, reflecting in puddles and on the faces of kids lined up in borrowed dresses and fake IDs.

We didn’t use the front door.

We went in through the alley – Los Angeles habits following me north – with Dante’s men and Victor’s crews moving like shadows through the steam coming off Seattle’s manhole covers.

Two guards at the service entrance went down fast – one to Dante’s silenced shot, one to a nerve strike my father had drilled into me until my arm ached.

That should have been the hard part.

It was the easy one.

Within minutes, alarms were screaming, red lights strobed, and the top floor of Exodus – the executive level where Choi pretended to be a legitimate businessman – shook with gunfire.

Choi stood behind his desk when we blew his door off its hinges.

He had a pistol in his hand and four guards around him.

“I wondered when Adrien’s daughter would come,” he said in English that had been polished in American schools. “Park said you’d be trouble.”

He was right.

What he didn’t see coming was what happened thirty minutes later on the main floor – the part the drunk Seattle tech bros would never forget.

Because that was where Park himself showed up, dragging a bleeding Yung by the hair into the center of the dance floor, turning the music off with a gesture while confused club kids looked on, thinking this was some kind of performance.

It was. Just not the kind they were used to.

He gave me five minutes to trade my life for hers.

I came down the stairs with my hands raised and a gun pressed to my back.

I walked through a crowd of kids who smelled like vodka and cheap perfume and TikTok fame, and stared down a man who’d built an empire on the broken backs of the vulnerable.

Standing in the middle of a Seattle nightclub, under cold American emergency lights, surrounded by men with guns and kids with camera phones, I realized something that made me almost laugh.

My father had spent his life trying to wage quiet wars in the shadows.

I was about to blow one up in public.

“You look like him,” Park said, studying my face. “Same eyes.”

“You killed him,” I said.

He smiled.

“He was a problem,” he said. “So I solved it. Now I solve you.”

Maybe he would have.

If the lights hadn’t gone out.

If Dante hadn’t killed the power from the breaker room.

If Victor’s men hadn’t blown open two side entrances.

If gunfire hadn’t erupted in the dark like a thunderstorm inside that club.

If we hadn’t spent weeks planning every second of that night.

In the end it came down to something simple.

Park running toward a back door.

Me chasing him, rain-soaked, bleeding, furious.

Two of us stumbling out into an alley behind Exodus that smelled like rot and garbage and the ocean and America all mixed together.

He swung.

I blocked.

Every move my father had taught me in that LA gym came back, muscle memory overriding exhaustion. Park went down hard, gasping in a puddle.

“It’s over,” I said, chest heaving. “The FBI has your files. Your second is talking. Your world is burning.”

He laughed, even with broken ribs.

“You can’t kill me,” he spat. “Not if you want your precious evidence to stand up in court.”

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “I’m going to let the system you corrupted take a bite out of you for once.”

Sirens wailed in the distance.

Closer.

Louder.

Dante and Victor melted into the shadows before the first Seattle PD cruiser rounded the corner, leaving me in a torn dress and a borrowed jacket, looking like just another club girl in the wrong place at the wrong time while federal agents hauled the trafficking king of the West Coast off wet asphalt and into the back of an unmarked SUV.

It wasn’t justice.

Not really.

But it was leverage.

Three days later, sitting in a rented space in an anonymous office building back home in LA, that leverage turned into something bigger.

“The Reeves Foundation,” Victor read off the whiteboard, raising an eyebrow. “Not very subtle.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” I said.

The room smelled like fresh paint and stale coffee. Maps lined one wall now – ports on the West Coast, trucking routes through the Southwest, flight paths out of small regional airports across the United States. Red pins marked places where kids had disappeared and nobody had cared enough to make the news.

“We use what we have,” Dante said, arms folded. “My transport routes. Victor’s contacts. Yung’s intelligence. We turn what we are into something useful.”

“Still criminals,” Victor reminded us.

“Some of the best people I know are criminals,” Yung said, not looking up from her laptop as she traced new supply lines with her cursor. “What matters is what we do with it.”

We built something.

Sixteen safe houses in three states.

Forty people on payroll, half of them with records that would never pass a background check at a legitimate American nonprofit.

Dozens of kids moved quietly out of bad situations and into new lives.

Three separate trafficking networks disrupted before they could replace what Park had lost.

It wasn’t clean.

It wasn’t perfect.

It wasn’t enough.

But it was something.

And for the first time since my father’s car went off that California road, I felt like maybe – just maybe – my life was pointed toward something that wasn’t just survival.

Then, two months in, Dante burst into our LA office with panic written all over his very controlled face.

“We have a problem,” he said. “A big one.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Choi’s dead,” he said. “Killed in his cell last night. They’re calling it a suicide. The wounds say otherwise.”

My stomach dropped.

“And Park?” I asked.

Dante’s jaw clenched.

“He escaped federal custody three hours ago,” he said. “Walked out of a high-security holding facility in Tacoma like it was a mall in the Valley.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “Not in this country. Not under federal guard.”

Victor pulled up a grainy security video on the screen.

Three “guards” in federal jackets. IDs on their chests. Walking into Park’s cell. No struggle. No alarms.

They walked him out like it was a transfer to court.

“Those badge numbers don’t match any active agents,” Dante said. “They’re ghosts.”

“Somebody wanted him free,” Victor said. “Somebody with serious American connections.”

We watched the footage in silence.

“The story isn’t over,” Dante said finally.

No, I thought.

Not even close.

Because this wasn’t just about my father anymore.

It wasn’t just about one Korean syndicate, one American crime boss, one letter from the grave.

It was about a system.

A country that let monsters buy their way out of cages and let kids fall through cracks big enough to swallow entire neighborhoods.

And like my father – like the man I thought I knew and the man he really was – I had a choice.

Walk away.

Or step fully into the fire.

I looked at the screen, at the open door of that federal cell somewhere in Washington State, and felt the decision settle in my bones.

Adrien Reeves had tried to bend the shadows into something better.

Now it was my turn.

In Los Angeles, in Seattle, in every American city that pretended the worst things happening inside it belonged to someone else’s country.

This was my world now.

My war.

And for the first time…

…I was ready.