Powerful MAFIA BOSS Bought A Helpless Military Dog At Auction — What He Saw That No One Else Di

Chapter 8

“That’s not possible,” Diego said, staring at the frozen frame. “Victor’s been with us eighteen months. I vetted him myself.”

“That’s exactly the point,” Cole said quietly, his voice carrying a fury more dangerous for how contained it remained. “Hayes didn’t just plant a tracker in a dog and wait three years for luck to bring him back into play. He planted a man inside my organization to make certain that if Titan ever surfaced again, someone loyal to Hayes would already be positioned close enough to finish what the barracks attack failed to do.”

Diego’s face had gone pale. “He recommended two of our warehouse security upgrades. He had access to shipment schedules. He was in the room three months ago when Hayes made his original offer.”

“Which means Hayes has known, since that very meeting, exactly how I’d respond, and exactly how much danger that response would put me in,” Cole said. “The two lieutenants who died in ‘gang violence’ two weeks after I refused Hayes — Victor would have known their movements. Would have known which routes they took, which nights they traveled light on security.”

The pieces assembled themselves with sickening clarity. Victor Ashe hadn’t simply been feeding Hayes information passively. He had been the instrument of the retaliation Cole had suspected but never been able to prove, embedded close enough to Cole’s own operation to select targets with intimate precision, and patient enough to wait, doing nothing further to draw suspicion, until the day a stray purchase at an underground auction finally gave Hayes his opening to reclaim what he’d spent three years trying to permanently erase.

“Where is he now?” Cole asked.

Diego checked his phone, already dialing. “Should be at the east warehouse. Night shift oversight.” A pause, longer than it should have taken for a simple location check. Diego’s expression shifted. “He clocked out two hours ago. Said he had a family emergency.”

“He knows,” Cole said. “The moment we accessed that footage, whatever backup channel he’s been using to communicate with Hayes would have alerted him.” He looked at Titan, who had gone rigid with the particular stillness that Cole now recognized as the dog’s genuine combat readiness rather than his old performed passivity. “Which means the twelve men Hayes is presumably already mobilizing aren’t approaching a compound that thinks it’s dealing with a curious gangster and his impulse purchase anymore. They know we know.”

“That changes the timeline,” Diego said grimly.

“It changes everything,” Cole agreed. “But it doesn’t change the outcome. Move up the perimeter positions. Assume Victor has already given Hayes our security rotation, our camera blind spots, everything he’s had eighteen months to learn. We adjust around what he knows, not what we planned before we knew he existed.”

Within the hour, Cole’s compound had been reconfigured entirely — new rotation schedules, new positions that deliberately contradicted everything Victor Ashe would have reported to Hayes, redundant security systems Victor had never been given access to, held in reserve for exactly this kind of contingency. Cole had built his empire on the principle of never trusting a single point of failure, and that principle, tested now in the worst possible circumstances, held.

Victor Ashe himself was found two hours later, not fleeing the city as Diego’s initial search assumed, but waiting calmly in his own apartment, having concluded, with the particular resignation of a man who understood the mathematics of his situation, that running from Marcus Cole’s reach was not a realistic option regardless of which direction he chose to run.

“You’re going to want answers,” Victor told Cole, when Diego’s men brought him, without violence, into Cole’s presence. “I’ll give you what I can. It won’t change what happens to me, but it might help with Hayes.”

“Why?” Cole asked simply.

“Money, at first,” Victor admitted. “Then leverage he had over my brother’s immigration status once I was already in too deep to walk away cleanly. I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m telling you the mechanics of it because the mechanics are useful to you now.” He gave them exactly what Cole needed — the specific channel Hayes used for updates, the code phrases, the dead drop locations, information considerably more valuable delivered willingly than it would have been extracted through methods Cole, in his old life, would not have hesitated to use.

“What happens to Hayes’s brother-in-law leverage over your family?” Dr. Whitfield asked quietly, the only person in the room who seemed troubled by the particular human cost tangled up in Victor’s betrayal.

“That’s handled separately,” Cole said. “Immigration status is fixable with the right lawyers and the right pressure applied to the right people. It’s not Victor’s family’s fault what Victor chose to do with the leverage Hayes built against them.” He looked at Victor directly. “Your cooperation buys your family that consideration. It does not buy you anything for yourself.”

Victor nodded, understanding the terms without needing them explained further.