BREAK SAMPLE
CHAPTER EIGHT
The van moved deeper into East Halworth, tires whispering over slick asphalt while headlights pushed pale tunnels through the fog.
Up front, Sykes had the wheel, eyes forward, posture loose. Beside him, Rico stared into the mist. He sat motionless, grounding the cab with a silence that carried more authority than any order he could have given.
The van’s gutted rear compartment held six Vipers. They wedged their bodies against shuddering metal walls and axle housings and planted their boots on the cold steel flooring. The time for jokes had passed somewhere on the drive over. Nobody had marked the moment. They breathed the stale, recycled air and settled into the practiced calm that came before a job. Pistols stayed holstered. The only constant was the chassis grinding beneath them, broken by the occasional clink from a buckle or knife sheath. The sounds were so familiar they folded into the quiet, another layer of white noise.
Pressed between the vibrating panel and Eli’s frame, Harper hugged her knees to her chest. Each jolt of the vehicle drove the tactical belt’s rim deeper into her thigh, pressing steel against bone. She angled her face toward the window, where her breath clouded the view of East Halworth passing by. Warehouses, flickering signs, and rain-slicked backstreets slid past the glass. Though pulled taut in a high ponytail, her copper-coloured hair had begun to escape, damp tendrils clinging to her flushed skin.
Harper fidgeted with her ballistic vest, working a fingernail under the edge where it dug into her armpit. Men’s proportions, women’s body. The eternal mismatch. Most jobs she’d get lost in the work and stop noticing. Not tonight. The damn thing wouldn’t let her forget it was there. Her fingertips travelled the stitching over and over, methodical and persistent. Like she could convince it to fit if she kept at it long enough. It remained unyielding. So did the knot in her stomach.
Before they left, Dante had backed her into the doorframe, his grin full of cocky confidence. The kiss was slow, certain, a promise in itself. He murmured it against her mouth: tomorrow night, just us. Dinner. Somewhere normal.
She couldn’t build it up, but it was a small, solid thing to hold on to. She needed normalcy, especially after her birthday party. The whiskey and the heat of the room had pushed them together on the mattress they shared, friction turning urgent, desperate. But Dante had stopped. He had pulled back, his thumbs tracing her cheekbones, telling her he didn’t want her first time with him to be a drunken fumble in a crowded house. He wanted it clear. Last night hadn’t been right either. The job hung in the air, noise crowding her head. So he’d given her a promise instead.
Eli’s knee knocked her thigh, and the van ground over a pothole, dragging her out of the memory. The streetlamps stuttered overhead, painting the warehouses in that sick Halworth yellow, the kind that made skin look bruised. The warmth faded. Routine.
Her gaze tracked along the street the way it always did, logging and discarding. A dumpster. A shuttered shopfront. The dark mouth of an alley.
Then the curb’s shadow peeled back, and a black Suburban took shape inside it.
Every muscle locked. The van’s rattle went silent in her skull, drowned out by the rush of blood behind her ears. Those vehicles never just parked in East Halworth. They lurked. They were pristine machines designed to consume men and exhale nothing but silence. She’d seen them before, motors humming while Syndicate Enforcers disappeared into alleys where daylight never returned.
The van grumbled past, its movement dragging the Suburban’s rear into the stuttering amber glow, where a long, spiderweb crack marred the plastic of the taillight. Beneath a thick crust of road grime was a standard, battered civilian license plate with one number half-obscured by mud.
Breath escaped her lungs in a rush and clouded the glass. The first lesson every person in this city learned was that the Syndicate fleet of vehicles never displayed plates. Their power play. A statement that Halworth’s ordinances meant nothing to them.
Her fingers uncurled. Just another car. Filthy, broken, plated. The logic was sound. She knew it was sound. Her gaze dropped from the window. No one had noticed. They were all lost in their own versions of the quiet.
Eli pressed against her side, his knee jittering in a rapid, silent rhythm that contrasted with Willow across the bay. Willow was a still-life of indifference, her shoulder blades flat to the van wall as she picked at a loose thread on her jeans. Beside her, Ollie hummed a muted, tuneless melody while he scraped the flint wheel of a lighter with his thumb.
“You do that one more time, Ollie,” Willow muttered, “and I’m going to shove that thing so far up your ass you’ll taste butane.”
Ollie’s eyes lit up, and after a moment, he slowly did it again.
Harper almost smiled. Near the rear door, Flick scrutinized the magazine on his pistol for the third time, while Marco sat at his shoulder, arms locked over his chest, staring at the floor.
Rico pivoted in the passenger seat. His silhouette cut a stark shape against the misted windshield, and his voice filled the compartment without him needing to raise it. “We’re twenty minutes out. Last check, people.”
His gaze tracked across the six figures hunched in the cargo area. “Southern entry. Eli and Willow, you’re first out. Secure the gate, watch for tails, and cover our exit.”
Willow murmured her agreement, while Eli confirmed with a single knock of his knee on the metal frame.
Rico’s eyes swept the remaining faces. “The rest of you will deploy with the vehicle. Ollie takes the west, Flick covers the north, and Marco has the east. I want constant surveillance. Sykes parks at the loading point. Harper, you’re with Sykes and me on the containers. We verify the contents, load, call perimeter back, then we vanish.”
Each word landed precise and measured.
“Stick to the plan,” he added, his gaze connecting with each face. “Clean and professional. Ten minutes. That’s it.”
Marco’s boot struck the floor once. It was a dull punctuation mark that left the van silent, save for the engine’s steady drone.
Harper’s attention returned to the window. The Suburban had disappeared into the fog, but the back of her neck hadn’t gotten the message. The skin there stayed tight, prickling under her ponytail, refusing to settle. She shifted her eyes to Rico, still angled toward them, his expression unreadable in the dark.
A quick, lopsided smile broke through the darkness. “Don’t get cocky just ’cause it’s routine.”
She couldn’t tell if he had missed the Suburban, or if he had chosen to ignore it.
In and out. Ten minutes.
Behind the tinted, grime-streaked glass of the black Suburban, Brock tracked the van as it rolled by, slow and unguarded. It matched the make and model from the intel, though the rusted-out wheel well was a detail the report hadn’t needed to mention. Just another testament to the decay of the crew inside. The partial plate number. Forty-eight hours of it. He didn’t need to recheck the file. He was already thinking past the gate.
The girl in the back with the copper hair glanced up as they passed. For a half-second, Brock’s gaze met hers through the tint. She couldn’t see him, but he saw everything. He remained perfectly still. Her eyes moved across the vehicle, from the caked-on mud and cracked taillight to the standard-issue plates. The tension in her shoulders held, then released. She dismissed them and turned her head away. The van continued without even slowing down.
It was the easiest, most reliable trick in the book. You let them see you, but you let them see a car so dirty and civilian that it blended seamlessly into the city’s decay. You let them see the plates and feel safe, knowing that unplated cars were for parades while this was for an execution.
Brock leaned forward as the taillights receded. “That’s them.”
The cab had gone the particular kind of quiet that only came from people who knew how to wait. At the wheel, Nolan grinned, a flash of teeth that had nothing friendly in it. “‘Bout time.”
Vale sat directly behind Brock, his eyes fixed on the headrest in front of him while he gnawed at the scar tissue along his knuckle. Beside him, Mason reached out and tapped Vale’s hand in a silent, brotherly order to stop the nervous habit. Vale exhaled and dropped his arm, settling into the seat while Mason turned to his throat mic, the faint scratch of static leaking from his earpiece.
In the third row, the energy was looser, grounded in the camaraderie of men who had spent too many nights waiting in parked cars. Keller nudged Slade’s shoulder, nodding at the phone screen glowing in the other man’s lap.
“Did she text back yet?” Keller whispered.
Slade shook his head, sliding the device into his tactical vest with a sigh. “Nah. Said she’s working late.”
“Likely story,” Keller murmured, checking the safety on his rifle. “Focus up. You can beg for forgiveness after we get home.”
Brock rested his own carbine across his thighs and slid the bolt with a clean, metallic snap. In the cab’s hush, it was an order all on its own. They were here to end this.
He keyed his radio. The call went out to the two other SUVs already staged near the dockyard. “Target confirmed. Passed checkpoint one. They’re blind and on schedule. We are moving to primary. Hold the perimeter and wait for my signal.”
A double-click came through his earpiece, confirmation from the teams waiting in the shadows.
The SUV remained frozen on the curb, engine idling low. Brock waited, methodical and patient, letting the van take the fog and giving it a two-block lead. He didn’t want to tail them; he wanted to keep them on a leash.
Nolan glanced at him, the split in his lip catching the light as he spoke. “They’re taking the long way. We’ll beat ’em by ten.”
Brock nodded while his eyes stayed on the empty road where the Vipers had been. Their lumbering, twenty-minute crawl was a joke compared to the route he had mapped. “Go.”
Nolan dropped the Suburban into gear and yanked them off the curb, tires biting the asphalt in a spray of gritty water. He took the first left, a turn away from the Vipers’ path that cut deep into the industrial grid.