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.