Sean sat alone at the head of the mahogany table, nursing a cup of black coffee that tasted like battery acid. The physical toll of the cartel shootout was gone, healed by the raw belief of Julian Hayes and his board. His left eye was clear. His right leg was solid. But the "Static" in his head felt different today.

  Sean rubbed his temples and pushed the cold feeling away, blaming it on the sheer volume of energy he was processing. He didn't have time for ghost stories. He had a war to win.

  The heavy sacristy door clicked open.

  Marcus walked in, looking sharper than he had in years. The tailored navy suit fit him perfectly, the hollow, jaundiced look of his failing liver entirely erased. He carried a sleek leather briefcase and walked with the quiet, absolute confidence of a man who owned the building. Behind him trailed Chloe, scrolling furiously on her tablet, and Lyra, carrying a fresh carafe of water. Javi brought up the rear, his dark eyes sweeping the empty corners of the vaulted ceiling before he took his post near the shattered front entrance.

  "Take a seat," Sean said, his voice carrying easily in the quiet acoustics of the church.

  Marcus took the chair to Sean’s immediate right. He popped the latches on his briefcase and pulled out a slim, matte-black laptop.

  "Hector is going to hit back," Sean said, cutting straight to the point. He looked around the table. "He lost face. He lost men. If we wait for him to kick the doors in again, someone in this room is going to catch a bullet. We aren't playing defense anymore. We're going to break his legs."

  Chloe looked up, her PR instincts instantly flaring. "Sean, if you start dropping cartel lieutenants in the streets, Detective Vance won't need a warrant. He'll call the ATF and the DEA. We can't afford a public bloodbath the week we open the Society."

  "I'm not going to touch his men," Sean said coldly. He turned his head. "Marcus. Where does it hurt him the most?"

  Marcus smiled. It was a calculating, ruthless expression. He spun the laptop around so Sean could see the screen. It displayed a satellite map of San Antonio, dotted with red markers.

  "If you want to break a cartel CFO, you hit his ledger," Marcus said, tapping a large red cluster near the southern industrial district, right off I-35. "Hector’s power is his supply line. He uses a front company called Alamo Freight to move product north from the border. He has twenty eighteen-wheelers sitting in a secure lot right now, loaded and scheduled to move by noon."

  Marcus leaned forward, resting his forearms on the mahogany table. "If those trucks don't leave the lot, Hector misses his delivery window to the distributors in Dallas. If he misses Dallas, he bleeds millions in product, and his bosses south of the border will start asking very painful questions about his competence. We don't need a shootout. We just need a parking lot full of broken machinery."

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Sean looked at the map. It was brilliant. It was clean, untraceable, and devastating. He gave his right-hand man a sharp, approving nod.

  "Javi," Sean called out.

  The soldier stepped away from the door, his posture rigid. "Boss."

  "Take the rental. Drive out to the Alamo Freight lot," Sean instructed. "Don't engage. Don't even let them see your taillights. Just find a vantage point and get me a visual on the trucks. Keep your phone line open."

  "You're going to hit them from here?" Javi asked, his dark eyes widening slightly. It was ten miles away.

  "I need an anchor," Sean said. "You're my anchor. Once you have eyes on the engines, I'll handle the rest."

  Javi nodded once, turning on his heel and heading for the door.

  For the next forty minutes, the church was quiet. Chloe drafted non-disclosure updates, and Lyra polished the silver, her dampening field keeping the ambient noise of the city at bay. Sean sat with his eyes closed, gathering the immense, golden reservoir of faith the billionaires had left inside him.

  The burner phone on the table vibrated. Sean put it on speaker.

  "I'm in position," Javi’s gravelly voice crackled through the speaker. "Overpass looking down on the yard. Twenty rigs. Cabs are hitched. Drivers are doing their walk-arounds. They're getting ready to roll out."

  "Look at the engines, Javi," Sean whispered. "Visualize the block. The starter motors. The spark plugs."

  Sean reached out. He didn't send his mind flying across the city; he just used Javi's proximity as a bridge, pulling the probability of the freight yard into the Static surrounding the church. He felt the heavy diesel engines in his mind—solid, complex blocks of mechanical order.

  If A happens, then B happens, Sean thought.

  He didn't twist reality violently. He just nudged it. He grabbed the statistical probability of mechanical failure and spiked it to one hundred percent. He visualized the fuel lines pinching. He visualized the starter solenoids fusing together.

  Shift.

  A wave of golden warmth washed over Sean's chest as the order imposed itself. It cost him very little energy, fueled by the millions sitting in their shell accounts. But right at the edge of his perception, that cold, hollow Void pressed against his mind again, a freezing phantom breath against his neck. He gritted his teeth and held the Shift, locking the broken probability into place.

  "Status, Javi," Sean rasped.

  On the other end of the line, Javi let out a low whistle. "Drivers are getting in the cabs. They're turning the keys... Boss, nothing is catching. I'm seeing smoke from three hoods. Two guys are kicking their tires. The whole fleet is dead in the water. It sounds like a junkyard."

  Sean exhaled slowly, opening his eyes. "Good work. Come back to the church." He ended the call.

  Chloe let out a breath she’d been holding. Lyra offered a small, rare smile.

  "Clean," Marcus said quietly, closing his laptop. "Hector is going to be answering phone calls from very angry people all afternoon. He won't have the manpower or the focus to look our way."

  The women excused themselves to handle the front-of-house preparations, leaving Sean and Marcus alone at the massive table. The silence of the church rushed back in.

  Marcus poured two fingers of bourbon from a crystal decanter and slid a glass across the wood to Sean.

  "That was surgical," Marcus noted, taking a sip of his own drink. "But you look pale."

  "It's just the distance," Sean lied, ignoring the lingering chill of the Static in the back of his mind. He picked up the glass. "You mapped that out perfectly, Marcus. Hector is blind right now."

  "He's a businessman," Marcus said, his eyes hard and loyal. "You take away his product, you take away his power. Let me handle the human variables, Sean. You just focus on the miracles. We own the board now."

  Sean took a slow sip of the bourbon, letting the burn ground him in the physical world. He looked at Marcus, his closest friend, the man whose life he had saved, and realized he finally had the empire he had always dreamed about.

  "Yeah," Sean whispered, staring into the amber liquid. "We own the board."

  But as he stared at his reflection in the glass, the cold draft in his mind whispered that the board was a lot bigger than San Antonio.