Chapter 7
seven
Remy
Three doors, and Evangeline Blanchard is behind the last one, sleeping under the sheets in a guest room nobody was supposed to use.
The dinner replays in fragments. Not the food, not the laughter, not Darcy's magnolia story that had Jax crying into his napkin. The operative math. Darcy said "Remington Arthur LeBlanc the Third" to a table of people who run background checks for a living.
Cole didn't react. Asher tracked the table in a sweep that had nothing to do with dinner and everything to do with filing responses. Kade already knew, but Kade knowing and the team knowing are different threat levels entirely.
How fast can Cole pull LeBlanc records?
I sit on the edge of my bed and press my thumb into the scar on my left ribs. Old habit. The pressure helps me think, or it used to, before Louisiana crawled back into my bloodstream and brought her with it.
Asher's probably already running—
Evie in my kitchen. Barefoot, stirring a roux with the concentration of a surgeon, cayenne on her fingers. Evie at the rooftop, reading the crowd. Evie settling into a chair at a table full of killers and con artists and making it look like she'd been sitting there for years.
The operative math falls apart every time she walks through it.
CPG has quarters on B3. Good mattresses.
Soundproofed walls. Biometric locks. I can be there in twenty minutes, work early shifts for the rest of the week, cite operational necessity.
Kade won't question it. Nobody questions a guy who volunteers for extra hours, and I've been that guy for four years running.
You know what you're actually running from.
I pull the bag from beside my bedroom door. The one always packed. It hasn't been unpacked since I moved in, so I can leave any room, any city, any version of myself in under ninety seconds. The zipper sounds louder than it should in a quiet house.
Three doors. One summer. Darcy's staying until August, which means Evie is staying until August, which means three months of her in my kitchen, on my rooftop, behind the third door wearing those cotton shorts that barely qualify as clothing.
Her shampoo on my towels. Her laugh through walls that suddenly feel too thin.
Three months of pretending I don't know exactly what she sounds like when she stops pretending.
I shoulder the bag and open my bedroom door.
Darcy is in the hallway.
She's in pajama pants with tiny crawfish on them and an LSU shirt that's three sizes too big, phone in one hand and the other hand already gesturing at nothing because she starts talking before her audience is confirmed.
"OK so I know it's late but I can't sleep because I'm already planning tomorrow and Jax said there's this place in North Beach that does beignets and I know they won't be as good as Café Du Monde but he was SO confident about it, Tripp, like weirdly confident, and I feel like we have to go just to prove him wrong, and ALSO. "
She holds up her phone, screen bright with a list that's already color-coded.
"Farmers market on the Embarcadero opens at eight, and Evie wants to find someplace that sells good andouille because your fridge is honestly criminal, like I opened it yesterday and there was oat milk and mustard and that's not a fridge, that's a cry for—"
She sees the bag.
Her phone drops and it hits the hardwood face-up, the color-coded list still glowing.
The face changes.
I know this face. I've seen it once before, eight years ago, standing in the foyer of the LeBlanc house with a bag on my shoulder and my grandfather's voice still ringing in my ears.
She was sixteen. She stood on the stairs and her chin did exactly what it's doing right now, this tiny tremor that starts at the bottom lip and moves upward, and her eyes went wide and wet and she didn't say a word.
She didn't say a word for three days after I left.
Darcy, who has never been silent a day in her life, went quiet for three days. Corbin told me in a text that just said Darcy's not talking. Fix it.
"Darce, don't do that." I hear it scrape on the way out. "Don't do the chin thing."
"I'm not doing a chin thing." Her chin trembles harder.
She tries. God, she tries. The hurricane attempts to restart, her mouth opening, her chest filling with air to fuel whatever bright, deflecting thing she's about to say, and then it just doesn't come. The air leaves without words. Her eyes stay on the bag.
"I just got you back." So quiet I wouldn't have believed it if I wasn't standing right in front of her.
The bag hits the floor. I don't set it down.
I don't decide to. The strap slides off my shoulder and then I'm pulling her into me because I don't have the right words and she doesn't need them.
She's small against my chest. Her hands fist in the back of my shirt and hold on just like she did in the driveway eight years ago, tight and wordless, her face pressed hard into my sternum like she can keep me here by sheer grip.
I rest my chin on the top of her head and I don't say anything because there's nothing to say that isn't a promise I've already broken once.
She sniffs once against my shirt. Pulls back. Wipes her nose on the LSU sleeve with zero self-consciousness, and the hurricane flickers behind her eyes like a pilot light catching.
"Beignets at eight?" I ask.
The hurricane restarts. Not all the way, not at full power, but enough. "Beignets at eight." She picks up her phone, wipes the screen on her pajama pants, and holds it up so I can see the list. "And the farmers market. And Evie wants andouille."
"Then Evie gets andouille."
Darcy nods once, hard, like we've just signed a contract. She turns back toward her room and makes it three steps before she spins around. "Tripp?"
"Yeah."
"Your fridge is still a cry for help."
"Noted."
She disappears into her room and the door closes softly, and I stand in the hallway with the bag at my feet and three doors between me and the woman I was trying to run from.
I go back into my room and leave the bag in the hall.
"Remington Arthur LeBlanc the Third."
Cole says it like he's reading coordinates off a map. No inflection. No judgment. Just data, placed on the conference table the same way he places mission parameters.
Three days. That's how long it sat between the rooftop dinner and this room.
Three days of normal operations, normal briefings, normal banter in the kitchen on B3.
I poured coffee and made jokes and waited for the floor to open up beneath me.
Darcy said the name on a Saturday night.
It's Tuesday afternoon, and the shutters on the executive conference room are sealed, and twelve people are seated around a table built for eight.
I stand at the far end of the table, fingers curled around the edge, because right now I need to look like a man who chose to be here instead of a man who got cornered.
The air-conditioning pushes recycled coffee and carpet cleaner through the vents, the flat institutional smell of a room built for bad news.
Kade is at the head, standing as always, arms folded, giving nothing.
Jax is in the chair closest to the door, one leg bouncing at a frequency that's faster than his usual restless baseline, and he's looking at me with an expression I've never seen on him before.
Something flat and hard behind his eyes that makes him look like a different person.
Vanessa's laptop is open but her fingers aren't moving, which is how I know this is serious, because Vanessa's fingers are always moving.
"The question is straightforward." Cole glances up from his tablet, finding me with the calm of a man who's already built three contingency frameworks and is waiting for the data to choose between them.
"What does this change about our operational security posture, and how long has this identity been active? "
"Eight years." I keep my voice level. "Remy Black has been my legal name for eight years. Military records, medical licenses, everything operational runs through it. LeBlanc hasn't been attached to me in any system since I was twenty-four."
"So your whole thing," Jax says, and his voice is wrong, stripped of every racing metaphor and every self-deprecating joke, just flat California vowels with nothing underneath them, "your whole thing was fake.
Four years. Four years of missions and bar nights and me telling you about Tommy and you sitting there with a name that wasn't even yours, and you just, what, forgot to mention it? "
The leg bounces harder. His hands are gripping the armrests of his chair, fingers dug into the leather.
"Jax—"
"No, I want to hear this." He leans forward and the chair creaks.
"Because I told you things I've never told anyone.
I told you about the crash, and the bike, and the storage unit, and you looked me in the eye and you said 'I get it, brother,' and you were lying.
About your NAME. So what else was a lie?
The accent? The charm? The thing where you pretend to give a shit about people and then it turns out you've been performing the whole time? "
The word performing lands like a blade between my ribs, right next to the scar. My thumb finds it through my shirt before I can stop the reflex, pressing into the raised tissue, and I make myself let go.
He's not wrong.
"The name was a lie." The words come out steady. Underneath, something cracks along a fault line I didn't know existed. "What I said to you wasn't."
"That's real convenient, man. That's a real convenient thing to say when you've been caught."
"OK so wait, hold on." Vanessa's fingers finally move, not on her laptop but in the air, gesturing at nothing and everything, her brain visibly accelerating past the emotional temperature of the room into pure processing speed.