Novels by neerfa0905

Ethan's POVThe walk from my desk to the conference room felt much longer than it actually was.Every step seemed to echo inside my head, accompanied by the same thought that had been bothering me since morning.You'll have to face him.By the time I stopped outside the glass door, my palms had already begun to sweat. Through the frosted panel, I could hear muffled voices and the occasional laugh. It sounded like any ordinary meeting.For everyone else, it probably was.I tightened my grip around my laptop and drew in a slow breath.Just go in.Pushing the door open, I stepped inside.The room quieted for a brief second.It wasn't because everyone had been waiting for me. Most of them barely looked up before returning to their conversations. But one pair of eyes did.Leon's.The moment our gazes met, my heartbeat stumbled.He was already seated near the head of the table, files spread neatly before him, dressed in a crisp charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. His exp

Ghost Rider's POVFailure was an unpleasant thing to acknowledge, but refusing to acknowledge it was what got people killed.The operation had been planned for months. Every possible route Adrian could take had been studied, every contingency weighed against another until the odds leaned in my favor. It had never been about predicting the exact road he would choose. Adrian wasn't foolish enough to make himself that easy to read.No, the real game had always been understanding the man behind the decisions.Most people believed Adrian's greatest strength was that he was unpredictable. They looked at the empire he had built and assumed every victory came from instinct alone. They admired his ability to improvise under pressure, convinced that no one could ever stay one step ahead of him.They were wrong.No one, no matter how intelligent, escaped their own nature.Adrian always had priorities. Protect the consignment. Keep casualties within his own ranks to a minimum. Preserve an escape

Adrian's POVBy the time we reached the estate, the sky had fully surrendered to morning.The mansion was already awake. Guards moved through the compound with quiet efficiency, replacing the night shift while others secured the vehicles returning from the operation. To anyone else, it would have looked like another ordinary morning.There was nothing ordinary about it.I hadn't bothered changing. The dried blood beneath my jacket had stiffened against my shirt, and every step reminded me that Damian had been right—I needed stitches. That could wait.Answers came first.The two men captured during the ambush had already been taken below the mansion, into the basement holding rooms. They'd been searched, restrained, and separated before we arrived. Standard procedure. If they had rehearsed a story, isolation would make it harder to stick to it.Damian caught up beside me as we descended the concrete staircase."The doctor's waiting upstairs.""He can keep waiting."His jaw tightened."

Adrian's POVWe came through the service road's exit and rejoined the main route at exactly 6:14 in the morning.Seven minutes inside Castellano's delivery window.It wasn't perfect, but it was close enough. In my world, close enough only mattered when the result spoke louder than the delay.The airstrip lay beneath a gray, colorless dawn, wrapped in the kind of silence that only arrived after a violent night. Not because nothing had happened, but because everything had already happened somewhere else. The aftermath lingered in the air while the world quietly moved on.Castellano's private cargo plane waited on the tarmac, its engines still silent beneath the glow of floodlights that had yet to be switched off. Four of his men stood near the perimeter fence, dressed in dark suits, their expressions unreadable. None of them shifted impatiently. None glanced at their watches. They simply waited.Professional men knew waiting was part of the job.Beyond them, another cargo aircraft taxied

Adrian's POVIt didn't go cleanly.It never did.For a brief moment, I'd allowed myself to believe tonight might be one of those rare operations where every piece fell exactly into place. Experience should have told me better. Plans weren't made because they worked perfectly—they were made to give you something to adapt from when everything inevitably went wrong. No operation ever survived first contact with the enemy exactly as imagined.Tonight proved that once again.From inside the surveillance van, I watched the live feeds from the port through six different monitors mounted across the wall. One camera tracked Noah's convoy as it approached the main route while another overlooked the overpass. The remaining screens covered the loading docks, container yard, and the cargo ship where the final transfer would take place. Every movement was being monitored."So far, so good," Reeves murmured from beside me, his eyes fixed on one of the screens.I gave a small nod but didn't answer.T

Adrian's POVThe way I sensed it before it happened. The calm before the storm has finally taken a blow. Awakening me from the relaxing slumber I was drifting too.The call came at 4:47 in the morning.I was already awake.I had not slept, not properly, but had my eyes closed. As I had been at my desk since two in the afternoon, going over the route maps Damian had sent through, tracing the transfer points with a finger that kept stopping at the same stretch of road. The eleven kilometer corridor between Porto Castellano's private freight dock and the airstrip. Flat terrain. Three blind curves. One overpass.It was the overpass that bothered me.I had looked at it for almost an hour before the phone rang. Something about it sat wrong in my gut, the way a bad feeling sits before you can name it. I told myself I was being careful. I told myself that was the job. Still, I had circled it twice in red ink before I even knew why.When my phone lit up with Damian's name, I already knew it wa