Chapter 287: Ava Voss

The government had been watching Vincent Castellano for years.

Private military companies—PMCs—wore the respectable mask of contractors: ex-soldiers peddling security, training, logistics. Plausible deniability for governments with dirty hands. Vincent had shattered that mask. His PMCs were corporate raiders armed with assault rifles. Hostile takeovers that meant exactly that. Executives of resistant companies suffered "accidents" in regions where Vincent’s mercenaries answered to no one.

The Department of Defense averted its eyes when the victims were foreign. But when American CEOs began dying in "random street crimes" on U.S. soil? Someone finally remembered ethics.

Enter Ava Voss.

Deputy Director of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division at thirty-four—youngest in history. Pulled from counterterror operations spanning six continents to neutralize Castellano. Not because she was Helena’s sister. That was merely convenient cover. No. Ava Voss was chosen because she’d erased seventeen high-value targets across three war zones without leaving a forensic whisper.

If Helena was a sledgehammer, Ava was the scalpel. And the government required precision: excise Vincent without triggering an economic collapse that would gut half the Eastern Seaboard.

I stepped into the Ritz-Carlton bar knowing this, courtesy of ARIA’s violation of every classified database in existence. The moment I entered, the atmosphere curdled. Conversations thinned to silence. A woman at the bar fumbled her martini glass, shattering crystal on marble. The bartender paused mid-pour, liquid frozen in stream.

Subtlety is a casualty of godlike enhancement. My presence crashed into the room like a gravitational anomaly—pheromones, magnetism, whatever alchemy ARIA had engineered. Every woman turned. Half the men did too, brows furrowed at their own involuntary reaction.

I smiled—a thin, private amusement—and threaded through the frozen tableau toward the corner booth. There sat Ava Voss, alone, eating oysters and drinking vodka as if it were water.

She did not look up. Did not flinch.

Interesting.

Ava’s skin glowed like polished bronze under bar lights. Her face was long, dimpled faintly when she deigned to smile. Eyes like chips of obsidian. Lips the red of spilled wine. Her nose was small, delicate; ears hidden by a cascade of black hair falling to her waist. My gaze skimmed her form—slim, lethal in a pale green top that clung like a second skin. No bra. The cotton strained over her breasts, teardrop-shaped, shameless. She seemed indifferent to the covetous stares. Below, tactical black cargo pants rode low on her hips, exposing the sculpted plane of her stomach. A perfect, lethal curve meeting at her waist.

Attraction? Certainly. But that wasn’t why I’d come.

"Mind if I sit?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, still focused on her plate. "But you will regardless."

I slid into the booth. Up close, Helena’s fear made sense. Where Helena radiated frayed nerves and desperation, Ava exuded stillness. The serenity of a bomb disposal expert mid-wire. Her aura wasn’t merely dangerous—it was steeped in violence. This woman had killed more people than small platoons. Bare hands as often as blades.

"You’re immune," I observed, more of a whisper to himself than to her. "To my presence."

She finally looked up. Grey eyes, cold and focused as a sniper’s scope. "I’ve been conditioned to resist biochemical manipulation, pheromonal warfare included. Your... charisma... may impress civilians. I am not civilian."

"Thank God," I said. "At last. A woman whose thoughts don’t drift below my belt."

A ghost of a smile touched her lips. "Who says they aren’t drifting?" She speared an oyster with unnerving precision. "I simply don’t let them dictate strategy. There’s a difference."

I chuckled—a genuine note of admiration. "Touché."

She took a measured sip of vodka. "So. Who are you? And why disrupt my dinner?"

"Someone offering solutions to your Vincent Castellano problem."

The air between us turned arctic. Her hand remained motionless beside the oyster fork. No weapon needed. This woman could gut me with a cocktail napkin if she chose.

"We have nothing to discuss," she said.

I set the thumb drive on the scarred tabletop between us. Not like evidence. Like a detonator. "Seventeen shell companies. Forty-three subsidiary meat-puppets. Every bribe, every threat, every wet-work order Vincent dispatched through his private army of psychos.

"Plus, Dmitri Volkov’s ’travel agency’ – routes, contacts, poor bastards he treats like inventory. Antonio Rivera’s little side hustle selling state secrets to China and Russia. The whole goddamn nest of vipers. All here." Spelled out.

She stared at the drive like it might spontaneously combust and take her pension with it. "Who the hell are you?"

"Someone who shares your deep, abiding desire to see those three malignant tumors carved out of the body politic. But I require your... particular brand of bureaucratic sanitizer

"Cleanly." She tasted the word like spoiled milk, spat it back like a grenade pin. "Nothing about this disease is clean. You’re talking about three men who collectively float nearly twenty billion in ill-gotten booty."

"Eighteen point five billion," I corrected, deadpan. Because precision matters when playing God with other people’s empires. "And yes. I already have it."

Her blink wasn’t metaphorical. It was literal. Composure shattered like a cheap vase. "You what now?" Her voice climbed an octave, disbelief wrestling with sheer, unadulterated avarice.

"Sitting pretty in a digital war chest, just itching for a new home. Every dime they stuffed into offshore cockroach motels? Gone. The bribe money? Poof. The trafficking proceeds? The weapons deals slush fund? Mine. Or yours. Assuming you play nice."

"You’re offering me eighteen billion dollars that you stole when you can take it and no one would know?" Her voice sliced the air, a scalpel dipped in suspicion. "Why?"

"Because the state wants Vincent’s assets when he does his inevitable faceplant. They want his stable of hired killers absorbed, declawed, turned into paperwork. They don’t want highly trained, unemployed psychoponds freelancing as birthday clowns for dictators. You, my dear, are the government’s chosen janitor.

"The one sent to make it happen legally, officially, with paperwork and subpoenas. I give you the smoking gun in easy-open packaging; you make the asset grab bulletproof. Or tribunal-proof. Whatever floats your sinking bureaucratic boat."

She studied me with those storm-grey eyes, like she was scanning barcodes for expiration dates and hidden motives simultaneously. "You know an awful lot for someone who doesn’t register on my radar."