Centuria Books · Breaking the ICE
Breaking the ICE — Read the First Chapter
The federal agent and the mafia boss she was sworn to catch have to save trafficked children together—and the only weapon that matters is consent.
The Bullet and the Byline
The silence in the apartment isn’t peaceful; it’s thick, like settled dust. I straighten the throw pillows for the third time, aligning the corners until they are geometrically perfect. This is the routine. This is the sanctuary I spent ten years building, brick by boring brick.
But my pulse is a traitor. It hammers against my ribs, a trapped bird throwing itself against the cage.
God, I want to scream. I want to open the window and let the freezing rain ruin the hardwood floors. I starve for a mistake, for a jagged edge, for something that proves I’m actually alive and not just preserving myself like a specimen in a jar.
Yet, when the floorboards creak, I freeze. When the wind howls, I check the deadbolt. That’s the rot at the center of me—this paralyzing terror of the very chaos I crave. I am desperate to burn, to feel the heat of a real life, but I am so terrified of the ash. So, I sit. I smooth the fabric of the couch. I wait for the silence to swallow me whole, praying that today, something—anything—will finally break me open.
The phone vibrating on the coffee table sounds like a gunshot.
“Gage,” I answer. My voice is steady. The woman who just wanted to scream is gone, replaced by the instrument of the state.
“We have a hit on the Salazar safehouse. Ten miles south of the San Ysidro crossing,” Miller says. His voice is tight. “Local PD is scared to touch it. It’s quiet. Too quiet.”
“I’m en route.”
I grab my keys, my badge, and the Sig Sauer P320 waiting in the lockbox. The apartment door shuts behind me, sealing the silence inside. I don’t look back.
*
The air in the stash house tastes like copper and bleach.
It’s a standard sprawling stucco nightmare in the hills of Tijuana, hidden behind a high privacy wall and bougainvillea that looks too bright against the peeling paint. I move through the fatal funnel of the front door, weapon raised, every nerve ending stripped raw.
Silence hangs heavy here, too. But this isn’t the suffocating quiet of my living room. This is the silence of a graveyard.
Three bodies in the entryway. Cartel foot soldiers. The shots were professional. Two to the chest, one to the head. No wasted brass. The blood is tacky, turning black on the saltillo tile. Whoever did this didn’t come for drugs. They came to send a message.
“Clear,” I whisper to myself, sweeping the kitchen. More bodies. A half-eaten plate of tacos sits on the counter next to a severed hand.
I step over a dead sicario, his chest cavity ruined by a shotgun blast. My boots stick to the floor. The DHS windbreaker feels like a target on my back. I’m alone. Miller is ten minutes out with the federales, but I couldn’t wait. Protocol dictates I hold the perimeter. Protocol hasn’t saved a single victim in six months.
A sound cuts through the death.
A whimper. Low, wet, and desperate.
It’s coming from the back utility room. I stack up on the doorframe, checking my corners. If there’s a shooter left, this is where they’d be. The ambush point.
I kick the door. It swings inward, hitting the wall with a hollow thud. I pivot, sweeping the room with the muzzle of the Sig.
Empty of humans.
But in the corner, chained to a exposed water pipe, is a creature that barely resembles a dog. It’s a pit bull, grey and white, skin stretched so tight over its ribs it looks like a skeleton wrapped in parchment. One ear is torn, fresh blood dripping onto the dirty concrete. It cowers as I enter, pressing itself into the filth, shaking so hard its teeth click together.
The chain is heavy, industrial grade, wrapped around a neck chafed raw. There’s a bowl just out of reach. Bone dry.
Rage, hot and sudden, flares in my gut. I can handle the dead narcos in the hallway. I can handle the corruption, the politics, the wasted years. But this? Cruelty for the sake of cruelty?
“Hey,” I say, my voice softening. I lower the weapon. “It’s okay.”
The dog flinches. It expects a boot. It expects pain.
I holster the Sig. Bureau policy screams in my head—*never unholster in an unsecured zone.* I ignore it. I kneel on the grime-coated floor, making myself small. I pull a protein bar from my tactical vest, tear the wrapper with my teeth, and break off a piece.
“I’m not going to hurt you.” I hold out the food.
The dog stretches its neck, nose twitching. The desperation wins out over the fear. It takes the food, lips gentle against my fingers.
“Good boy.” I reach for the heavy clasp on the collar. It’s rusted shut. “I’m getting you out of here.”
I struggle with the mechanism, the metal biting into my thumbs. I’m so focused on the lock, so focused on this one small thing I can actually save, that I miss the shift in air pressure behind me.
I don’t hear a footstep. I don’t hear a breath. I just feel the sudden, crushing weight of another presence in the room.
My hand drops to my holster.
“Don’t.”
The voice is low, deep, and scraped over gravel. It commands obedience not through volume, but through absolute certainty.
I freeze. Slowly, I turn my head.
A man stands in the doorway. He fills the frame, blocking out the light from the hallway. He isn’t cartel. Cartel is flash, gold chains, and loud shirts. This man is a shadow cut from the night.
He wears a suit that costs more than my annual salary—charcoal grey, Italian cut, fitting him with a precision that borders on architectural. It’s ruined, though. Splatters of dark blood stain the pristine white cuff of his shirt and the lapel of the jacket. He doesn’t seem to care.
He holds a suppressed Beretta at his side, his finger resting casually along the trigger guard. He isn’t pointing it at me. He doesn’t need to. The threat radiates off him like heat from a furnace.
My eyes travel up. He’s tall, over six-two, with a build that suggests violence isn’t just a trade, but a religion. Broad shoulders taper to a trim waist. His face is a ruin of handsome features—sharp cheekbones, a strong jaw darkened by stubble, and a scar that slices through his left eyebrow, vanishing into hairline.
But it’s the eyes that stop my heart. Dark, intelligent, and devoid of anything resembling mercy.
He steps into the room. I tense, ready to draw, ready to die in this laundry room if I have to.
He ignores me completely.
He holsters his weapon in a shoulder rig beneath his jacket, the movement fluid, practiced. He walks past me, lowering himself to one knee beside the dog. The expensive fabric of his trousers meets the filth of the floor.
The dog, which had been trembling at my touch, suddenly goes still. It sniffs the man’s hand. The man’s knuckles are bruised, split open from fresh violence.
“Ciao, bello,” the man murmurs. The harshness of his voice evaporates, replaced by a low, rumbling warmth. He runs a massive hand over the dog’s head, careful of the torn ear. “They didn’t feed you, did they? Bastardi.”
He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a precise folding knife. With a flick of his wrist, the blade locks. I flinch, hand tightening on my grip.
He doesn’t look at me. He slides the blade between the dog’s neck and the rusted collar. With a single, controlled twist, the leather snaps. The chain falls away.
The dog leans into him, letting out a long, heavy exhale. The man scratches behind the dog’s ears, his expression softening into something that looks painfully human. For three seconds, he is gentle. For three seconds, the monster in the suit is kind.
Then he stands up.
The change is instantaneous. The warmth vanishes. The humanity snaps shut behind steel doors. He turns to me, and the temperature in the room drops twenty degrees.
He looks me over, starting at my boots and ending at my eyes. It’s not a sexual appraisal; it’s a tactical dissection. He is weighing my worth and finding it lacking.
And God help me, my body betrays me.
Even covered in blood, even radiating a lethal aura, the man is a masterpiece of masculine aggression. The suit jacket strains across a chest thick with muscle. His hands, now hanging loose at his sides, are large, veined, capable of snapping a neck as easily as he cut that collar. There is a kinetic power to him, a vibrating potential energy that makes the air feel thin. He is danger personified, and my traitorous brain floods with adrenaline and something darker, heavier. I want to know what those hands feel like when they aren’t being gentle. I want to know if that rigid control ever breaks.
“You flagged the fatal funnel when you entered,” he says. His voice is ice now. “Your footsteps are heavy. You breathe too loud.”
My jaw tightens. “Federal Agent. Hands where I can see them.”
He doesn’t move his hands. He tilts his head, a dark amusement lighting his face. “If I wanted you dead, Agent, you wouldn’t have heard me come in. You would have bled out on the floor thinking about your pension.”
“Who are you?” I demand, standing up. I keep my hand near my weapon, though I know, with sickening certainty, that he’s faster than me.
“Someone doing your job,” he says. He glances at the dog, then back to me. “The Cartel left this house an hour ago. You’re late. The government usually is. Always chasing ghosts, always burying the bodies after the fact.”
“I have backup en route,” I lie. “Heavily armed.”
“You have two federales who are on Salazar’s payroll and a partner who handles paperwork better than a pistol,” he counters smoothly. He knows. How does he know? “Take the dog. Leave the premises. This place is going to burn in five minutes.”
“I’m not going anywhere. You’re a suspect in a multiple homicide.”
He steps closer. The scent of him hits me—sandalwood, gunpowder, and the metallic tang of blood. He invades my personal space, towering over me, forcing me to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact. I refuse to step back. I refuse to show him the fear coiling in my stomach.
“I am not a suspect,” he says softly, his voice dropping an octave. “I am the consequence. And you, tesoro, are out of your depth. Go back to your desk. Go back to your reports. The world has teeth, and you are soft.”
“I’m not soft,” I snap.
He looks at my hand, hovering near my gun. Then he looks at the dog, now free and nudging my leg.
“You stopped for a dog in a kill zone,” he says. “That is soft. It is also the only reason you are still breathing.”
He turns his back on me. The dismissal is total. It stings worse than a slap.
“Wait!” I shout.
He pauses at the door. “Five minutes, Agent Gage. If you are here when the accelerant catches, not even your badge will protect you from the heat.”
He disappears into the dark hallway.
I stand there, heart slamming against my ribs, the taste of copper in my mouth. My name. He knew my name.
I look down at the dog. It looks up at me with large, trusting eyes.
“Come on,” I whisper, grabbing the scruff of its neck. “Let’s go.”
We run. We clear the front door just as the first whoosh of ignited gasoline sucks the oxygen out of the house. The windows blow out, showering the driveway in glass.
I drag the dog to my SUV, shoving him into the back seat. The heat from the fire beats against my face, hot and furious. I watch the flames crawl up the stucco walls, devouring the evidence, devouring the bodies.
A black sedan idles down the hill, watching the fire. As I look, the tinted window rolls up, and the car slips away into the night, a shark disappearing into black water.
Dario Ferri.
I know the face now. I know the scars. The Capo of the West Coast. The ghost the agency has been trying to pin down for three years.
He called me soft.
My hands grip the steering wheel until my knuckles turn white. The fear is gone, burned away by the fire and the insult. In its place is a cold, hard resolve.
I am not soft. I am the Shield. And if he thinks he can burn down my city and walk away, he is going to learn that the Shield can be used to bludgeon, too.
I start the engine. The dog puts its head on my shoulder, letting out a long sigh.
“Yeah,” I tell him, watching the fire reflect in the rearview mirror. “I hate him too.”
*
The drive back to San Diego is a blur of red taillights and rain. I drop the dog—I’ll call him Buster, for now—at the shelter run by my sister-in-law. She promises to keep him off the books. I promise to pay the vet bills.
My phone rings again. It’s Miller.
“Merritt, where are you? The Federales arrived, place is an inferno. Did you engage?”
“Negative,” I say, my voice flat. “House was torched when I got there. No visuals on the perps.”
I lie effortlessly. I’m not giving Dario Ferri to the locals. He’s mine.
“Get back to the office,” Miller says. “Something’s happened. It’s bad.”
The ominous tone in his voice makes the hair on my arms stand up. “What is it?”
“Just get here. The Director is in the war room.”
I hang up. The wipers slash across the windshield, fighting a losing battle against the storm. The city lights of San Diego blur into streaks of neon.
I park in the underground structure, the concrete cold and damp. The elevator ride up to the 14th floor feels like an ascent to the gallows. The bullpen is usually buzzing with low-level noise—phones ringing, keyboards clacking, agents trading war stories.
Tonight, it is silent.
Heads turn as I walk in. People I’ve worked with for ten years look away. They study their shoes. They study their screens. No one meets my eyes.
A cold stone forms in my stomach.
I walk straight to Miller’s desk. He’s sitting with his head in his hands. He looks up, his face grey.
“What?” I demand. “Did we lose the warrant for the port seizure?”
Miller stands up slowly. He looks like he’s aged ten years since this morning.
“Merritt,” he says, and his voice cracks. He reaches for a file on his desk. It’s a crime scene photo, face down.
“Tell me,” I say, the command sharp.
“It’s Jack,” he whispers.
My partner. Jack Reynolds. The man who taught me how to clear a room. The man who bought me a beer every time my cases hit a wall. He was supposed to be on leave. He was supposed to be at his kid’s soccer game.
“Jack?” I stare at him. “What about him?”
Miller slides the photo across the desk. He flips it over.
The world stops. The fluorescent lights hum, a buzzing insect sound that drills into my skull.
It’s Jack. He’s tied to a chair in what looks like a warehouse. His badge is shoved into his mouth. His chest…
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the image is burned into my retina. The brutality is medieval. It’s a message.
“Where?” I choke out.
“Found him an hour ago. warehouse district. Gang unit thinks it was MS-13 initiation,” Miller says, but the words sound hollow. “Standard hit.”
“Standard?” I slam my hand on the desk, the sound cracking like a whip. “Look at the knots, Miller! Look at the precision! That isn’t a gang initiation. That’s an execution.”
I grab the file, flipping through the preliminary report. My hands are shaking. Not from fear this time. From a rage so pure it feels like holy fire.
“I want the drive,” I say.
“Merritt, you’re too close…”
“I want his hard drive, Miller! He was working something off the books. He told me last week he found a thread.”
“Evidence locked it down,” Miller says, stepping between me and the hallway. “Director explicitly ordered you to stand down. You’re compromised.”
“Compromised?” I laugh, a harsh, jagged sound. “I’m the only one who isn’t blind.”
I shove past him. I don’t go to the evidence locker. I go to my desk. I log into the remote server Jack and I set up two years ago—a mirrored backup for when the red tape got too thick. A dead man’s switch.
I type the password. Buster. The name of the dog he always wanted but his wife wouldn’t let him get.
The screen flashes green. Access granted.
One folder. Uploaded three hours ago.
I open it. It’s a map. A blurry satellite image of an island off the coast of Baja. Isla de la Sangre. Blood Island.
And a jagged list of IP addresses. Trafficking routes. Money laundering fronts.
I run the first IP address through the database. It bounces through three proxies in Singapore before hitting a server in San Diego.
A shell company. Ferri Imports.
The world tilts on its axis.
Dario Ferri.
He was at the stash house. He cleaned up the bodies. He told me I was chasing ghosts.
Did he kill Jack?
I think of the dog. I think of the gentle way he cut the collar. I think of the cold, dead eyes when he looked at me. I am the consequence.
If he killed Jack, I will burn his world down until there is nothing left but ash and bone.
But if he didn’t… if he was at that stash house hunting the same people Jack was hunting…
I pull the thumb drive from the computer. I shove it into my pocket.
“Gage!” The Director’s voice booms from his office doorway. “My office. Now.”
I look at the Director. I look at the sea of agents who are too scared to look back. The system. The shield that is supposed to protect us. It didn’t save Jack. It won’t save the next one.
I turn my back on the Director. I walk to the elevator.
“Gage! If you walk out that door, you’re done!”
I hit the button. The doors slide open. I step inside and press ‘G’.
“I’m done,” I say to the closing doors.
The metal slides shut, severing me from the only life I’ve known for fifteen years. I am free falling. I am terrified.
But for the first time in my life, I am not waiting for the silence. I am going to make some noise.
I will find Dario Ferri. And I will make him scream.
Ghosts in the Neon
The weight of the Sig Sauer P320 against my hip bone is the only honest thing left in the world.
Everything else is a lie. The “protect and serve” decal peeling off the side of the cruisers. The condolences from the Director, delivered with the plastic sincerity of a politician looking for a soundbite. Even the rain smearing the windshield of my personal SUV feels fake, like Hollywood tears sprayed from a hose to set a mood.
Jack is dead.
The thought doesn’t land like a blow. It settles like silt in my lungs, choking off the air slowly. I don’t see his face when I blink. I see the report. I see the glossy 8x10s Miller tried to hide. The wire. The burns. The badge shoved into a mouth that used to tell terrible dad jokes about his kid’s goalie skills.
They turned a good man into meat to send a message.
I downshift, the engine growling as I merge onto the 5 South, heading toward the Gaslamp Quarter. The city lights blur into streaks of radioactive color.
The agency wants to bury it. Gang violence. Random. Tragically unavoidable.
I touch the thumb drive in my pocket. The plastic is warm. Jack found the thread, and they killed him for it. That thread leads to an island that shouldn’t exist, and an IP address that routes straight to the heart of the city’s vice.
Ferri Imports.
Dario Ferri.
The name sits on my tongue like a curse. I should have put a bullet in him at the stash house. I had the angle. I had the justification. But I froze.
No. I didn’t freeze. I watched.
The memory hits me harder than the whiskey I wanted to drink an hour ago. I see his hands—large, scarred, violent hands—cradling the pit bull’s head. I see the way his thumb brushed the torn ear. For three seconds, the monster took the mask off, and there was something underneath that looked like pain.
That’s why I didn’t shoot. Because for a split second, in that blood-soaked laundry room, he felt more human than the badge I wear.
I grip the steering wheel until the leather groans. That hesitation got Jack killed. I let the wolf walk away, and now my partner is cold on a slab.
Never again.
The GPS pings. The Obsidian.
It’s not a warehouse. It’s a fortress of glass and black steel sitting on Prime real estate, masquerading as a nightclub. The line of hopefuls snakes around the block—girls in dresses that cost more than my car, guys with watches that could feed a village. They shiver in the rain, desperate to get close to the fire, unaware that the man tending it burns everything he touches.
I park in a loading zone three blocks away. I don’t care about the ticket. I don’t care about the badge in my pocket, either, except as a tool to breach the perimeter.
I check the Sig one last time. Chambered. Safety off.
I’m not here to arrest him. I’m here to look him in the eye and see if he flinches when I say Jack’s name. And if he does—if I see even a flicker of guilt in those dead, dark eyes—I’m going to burn his kingdom down with him inside it.
*
The bass hits me before I even clear the velvet rope. It vibrates in my sternum, a deep, rhythmic thud that mimics a heartbeat.
The bouncer is a slab of beef with an earpiece and an attitude. He steps in my path, a wall of muscle and cheap cologne.
“Private event, sweetheart. List only.”
I don’t slow down. I don’t speak. I flash the gold shield in my palm, holding it high enough for the strobes to catch the reflection, but low enough that he has to look down.
“Federal Agent,” I say. My voice is unrecognizable. It’s stripped of all the polite fiction I use at the office. It’s jagged metal. “Move.”
He hesitates. He sees the wet hair, the tactical boots, the eyes that haven’t slept in thirty hours. He does the math.
He steps aside.
I push through the heavy double doors into the sensory assault. The air is thick, humid with sweat and expensive perfume. Red lasers slice through clouds of artificial fog. Bodies grind against bodies on the dance floor, a writhing mass of hedonism desperate to forget the morning.
I hate them. I hate their laughter. I hate their ignorance. They dance while good men die in the dark.
I scan the room, ignoring the flashes of skin and the spilling drinks. I dissect the space like a tactical grid. Exits. Blind spots. Security details.
The floor is chaos, but the mezzanine is control.
A glass balcony overlooks the pit. Shadows move up there, watching the cattle below.
I head for the stairs. A security guard at the bottom steps forward, hand raising to stop me. I don’t break stride. I slam my shoulder into his chest, using my momentum to knock him off balance, and flash the badge directly in his face before he can recover.
“ICE,” I lie. “We have a creditable bomb threat. You want to be the one explaining to Mr. Ferri why his club is swarming with bomb squad in ten minutes, or do you want to let me clear the VIP section quietly?”
Fear flickers in his eyes. Not fear of the bomb. Fear of the name Ferri.
He backs off. “Upstairs. Don’t cause a scene.”
“I am the scene,” I mutter, taking the stairs two at a time.
The air gets colder as I ascend. The noise dampens, swallowed by soundproofing designed to keep the screams of the party separate from the business of the management.
The mezzanine is dimly lit, furnished with black leather booths and tables made of polished slate. It’s quieter here. Deadlier. The men sitting at the tables aren’t dancing. They’re drinking scotch and discussing profit margins on human misery.
And there he is.
He sits in the center booth, the axis around which this whole dark world spins.
Dario Ferri.
He’s discarded the ruined grey suit from the stash house. Now he wears black. A black dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, sleeves rolled up to reveal forearms corded with muscle and ink. A faint tattoo of a serpent winds around his left wrist, disappearing under the fabric.
He isn’t drinking. He isn’t talking. He’s watching the dance floor below with the detached boredom of a god watching ants drown.
My stomach drops. Not fear. Recognition.
It’s the stillness. Everyone else in this room is moving—gesturing, drinking, fidgeting. Dario is absolute zero. He occupies the space with a terrifying gravity.
I remember the heat of the fire at the stash house. I remember the smell of gasoline. And I remember the way he looked at me, dismissing me as soft.
Soft.
I reach into my jacket, fingers brushing the grip of my gun, but I pull my hand out empty. Not yet.
I walk toward him.
His security detail—two men who look like they chew glass for fun—start to rise.
Dario doesn’t turn his head. He simply lifts one finger.
The guards freeze. They sit back down.
He knew. He knew I was here the moment I stepped onto the stairs. Maybe even before.
I stop at the edge of his table. My shadow falls over his glass of sparkling water.
“You’re hard to kill, Agent Gage,” he says.
His voice is exactly as I remember it—low, scraped over gravel, vibrating with a dark resonance that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
He slowly turns his head.
The impact of his gaze is physical. Those eyes. Black, intelligent, and utterly void of warmth. But there’s something new there tonight. A spark. A curiosity. Like he’s looking at a puzzle box he hasn’t quite figured out how to open yet.
“I don’t die easy,” I say. My voice is steady, despite the adrenaline flooding my veins. “And I don’t go away.”
“Evidently.” He gestures to the empty seat opposite him. “Sit. You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“I’d rather stand.”
“Sit,” he commands. It’s not an offer. It’s an order wrapped in velvet.
My knees ache. My head throbs. I sit. Not because he told me to, I tell myself, but because if I fall over, I can’t shoot him.
“You cleaned the house,” I say. “But you missed a spot.”
I pull the thumb drive from my pocket. I slide it across the polished slate table. It stops inches from his hand.
He looks at it. He doesn’t touch it.
“IP addresses,” I say. “Routing back to this building. From a computer belonging to a dead federal agent.”