Chapter 166: The Countermove

Dexter set his phone face-down on the table, the glass catching the last of the desk lamp’s light."It’s done." Liam didn’t look up from the window. "All of it?"

"Three properties seized. Two accounts frozen before he could move the money out. His people in the river district have gone quiet, which either means they’re gone or they’re smart enough not to answer a number that’s being watched." Dexter paused. "Derek’s disappeared."

"Disappeared, or ran?"

"Does it matter?"

Liam turned from the glass. It should have felt like winning. Instead something about the shape of it sat wrong, too complete, too fast for a man who’d spent days building layers around himself.

"How many of his people put up a fight?"

Dexter thought about it. "None."

That was the wrong answer, and they both knew it.

Harrison poured himself a drink in a room that no longer had staff to bring him one, the bottle’s neck clinking once against the rim before he set it down.

Derek stood near the door, coat still on, like he hadn’t decided whether he was staying.

"You knew he’d do this."

"I was counting on it." Harrison didn’t look up from the glass.

"You just handed him everything. The properties. The routes. Two years of work."

"I handed him a version of me that was already finished being useful."

Derek’s jaw tightened. "You could’ve killed him already. Twice, if you’d wanted to."

"That’s not what I want."

"Then what do you want?"

Harrison finally looked at him, and there was nothing dramatic in his face, just a kind of settled patience that made the answer worse than if he’d shouted it. "I want him to understand what it costs to take something from someone."

Derek didn’t ask him to explain further. He’d heard enough of the old story to know he didn’t need the rest of it tonight.

"So what’s left?" he asked instead.

Harrison set the glass down. "One thing. And it isn’t a building."

Liam was back at the villa before midnight.

The gates opened the way they always did. Security moved through the same rotations, boots crossing the same stretch of gravel they crossed every night.

Nothing about the driveway looked different, and that was exactly what made him slow the car before he reached the door.

Jessica wasn’t at the entrance.

She was always at the entrance, tablet under her arm, some version of a report ready before he’d even parked. Tonight the foyer was empty, the lights on a low evening setting nobody had adjusted.

"Where’s Jessica?" he asked the guard near the door."Off duty since six."

"She’s never off duty at six."

The guard didn’t have an answer for that.

Liam checked the internal log himself in the study, the one Jessica updated obsessively, sometimes three times an hour. The last entry sat at 5:52 p.m. Nothing after it. Not a note, not a handoff, nothing.

He called her number. It rang twice and dropped to voicemail, the flat, immediate kind of drop that meant the phone had been powered off, not just unanswered.

Jack found him there a few minutes later, still in the doorway like he wasn’t sure whether to come in. "Everything okay?"

"Jessica’s not answering."

"Maybe she stepped out."

"She logs everything. Even stepping out." Liam looked at the empty entry on the screen, the cursor still blinking where the next line should have been. "She didn’t log leaving."

Jack’s easy expression thinned out fast. "You think" I don’t think anything yet. Liam was already moving toward the door. "I want her car checked. Now."

It took four minutes to find it, parked exactly where it always was, untouched, locked, keys nowhere near it, the paint still beaded from the evening’s rain.

Her tablet sat on the passenger seat.

Screen cracked, a single spiderweb of fractures spreading out from one corner.

Liam stood there a long moment, looking at it through the window without opening the door, the rain starting up again faint against the glass, because he already understood what it meant before he confirmed it.

This wasn’t the watcher leaving him a message anymore.This wasn’t a countdown, a phone ringing in an empty room, a photograph slipped between the pages of a notebook.

This was Harrison, finally moving the one piece he had left.

Dexter arrived within the hour, headlights sweeping briefly across the study window before the engine cut, and for once he didn’t open with a report.

"Talk to me," he said instead.

"Jessica’s gone. Her tablet was left in the car, screen broken. No struggle at the gate, no alert from any of the cameras between five and six."

Liam’s voice stayed level, but something underneath it had gone very still, the way water goes still right before it’s about to move fast. "Which means whoever took her either knew exactly when the blind spots rotate, or someone here told them."

"You think it’s someone inside?"

"I think Harrison’s better at this than we gave him credit for." Liam looked at the cracked screen still sitting in evidence on the desk.

"He let us take everything he had because none of it was the plan. She was the plan."

Jack came in from checking the perimeter a second time, his face harder than Liam had seen it in weeks, rain still darkening the shoulders of his jacket. "Nothing on the east side. Whoever did this didn’t leave through the grounds."

"They didn’t need to," Liam said. "They already had someone who could walk her out the front."The room went quiet with that.

Liam picked up his jacket. "This part’s mine."

Dexter didn’t move from where he was leaning against the desk. "Personal doesn’t mean you go alone."

Liam looked at him.

"You’ve been doing this a long time," Dexter said. "I’ve been doing it longer. Harrison wants you walking into whatever he’s built for you thinking clearly and thinking alone. Don’t give him the second part."

Liam held his gaze a moment, then nodded once, the kind of nod that wasn’t agreement so much as acceptance that arguing would cost more time than it was worth.

"Then let’s go find out what he’s built."