Chapter 17
seventeen
Remy
The Oakland safe house smells like stale coffee and electronics.
I strip the medical kit down to components on the counter, sorting expired stock from viable, fingers working through the inventory on muscle memory while my brain runs a different calculation entirely.
My phone has been buzzing in my back pocket for the last forty minutes with messages I can't answer in this room.
Cole stands at the dining table they've converted into a mobile workspace, three monitors arranged in the formation Vanessa insists on, even when she's running remote. His fingers trace a repeating shape against the table's edge while he reads.
Kade occupies the chair at the head of the table, blue eyes tracking Cole's screen. Damian has the wall by the back door, arms crossed, positioned where he can see both entry points without turning his head.
Jax sits backward in a kitchen chair, bouncing one knee against the chair leg.
He's been turning a chip across his knuckles for the last ten minutes, the bronze one Mira handed him two months back, the one she still pretends not to notice him carrying.
The rhythm of it is a nervous habit he thinks nobody pays attention to and everybody does.
"Sasha's three minutes out," Mira says from the window. She hasn't moved from that position in twenty minutes, watching the street.
"Three minutes by whose clock?" Jax catches the chip flat in his palm.
"Because last time he said five minutes and showed up in twenty, and his driver showed up first and I had to make conversation, and the guy, by the way, does not appreciate racing jokes.
At all. I tried three different ones, and he looked at me like I'd insulted his mother. "
Mira doesn't turn from the window. "Sasha operates on his own schedule. That is not a flaw, it is a negotiation tactic, and you would know that if you stopped trying to befriend every contact we have."
"I don't try. It just happens." Jax flips the chip again. "It's a gift."
"It is a liability."
"You say that, but he texted me back last Thursday with a laughing emoji, so I think we're making progress."
Mira's reflection in the glass shows the faintest tightening at the corner of her mouth, the version of a smile she permits when Jax isn't looking directly at her. "He sent that emoji to me as well. It is his standard reply to all messages he does not intend to answer."
Kade's gaze shifts to them, then back to the screen. One look. The chip disappears into Jax's pocket and the knee stops bouncing for approximately five seconds before starting again at a lower frequency.
I slot the restocked kit back into the cabinet under the sink and wash my hands, drying them on the towel hanging from the oven handle. The phone buzzes again in my pocket. I pull it out long enough to read the preview without unlocking.
Darcy, forty minutes ago: ALCATRAZ TODAY!! evie says the audio tour is haunted and i told her thats literally the point. will send pics if we survive
My thumb hovers over the screen for one beat. Evie on a ferry to an island in the middle of the bay, audio tour piped into her ears, Darcy already buying gifts for everyone she's ever met in the gift shop. Both of them reachable in theory. Neither of them likely to look at a phone for hours.
My chest does something I don't give it permission to do, a tightening below the sternum that has nothing to do with the bruised ribs from last week and everything to do with not being able to get to her quickly if anything goes wrong, And the rational part of my brain knows Alcatraz is a tourist destination and not a strategic liability, but the rest of me is already calculating ferry schedules and response times from the Oakland Hills.
I lock the phone and put it back in my pocket. Drift toward the window by the front door because the room is small and standing at the sink cabinet stopped being useful thirty seconds ago, and if I happen to have a sightline to the street while I'm there, that's incidental.
Ferry schedule. Forty-five minutes each way. Gift shop adds twenty. Return dock by four at the earliest.
A silver Mercedes turns onto the street and takes its time reaching the driveway, a thirty-second approach turned into a statement.
The driver stays in the car. The rear passenger door opens and Sasha Kozlov steps out in a black suit, silver hair bright against the matte black of the sedan as he buttons his jacket and surveys the property.
Jax is up and moving toward the door before anyone else shifts. "I got it."
"You do not 'got it'," Mira says, already turning from the window. "I will make the introduction. You will not tell him about your lap time at Laguna Seca."
"That was ONE time, and it was relevant to the conversation."
"It was not."
Jax opens the front door anyway, leaning against the frame with the easy grin of a man greeting a friend at a barbecue instead of a former GRU intelligence broker at a covert safe house. "Sasha, my man. You look like a Bond villain, and I mean that as a compliment."
Sasha pauses on the front step, adjusting his cuffs. His eyes move past Jax to scan the interior, head still, the kind of look that notes every body and exit without giving anything away. Then his mouth curves, barely.
"Mr. Ryder. You are still talking, I see." His English is exact, lightly accented, the cadence of a man who switches registers the same way I do. "I had hoped that was a phase."
"Nah, it's a lifestyle." Jax steps back to let him through. "Come in. Don't mind the ambiance, we're going for 'academic research bunker' and I think we nailed it."
Sasha enters the house and the room reshuffles around him, every body recalibrating to a new variable. Cole straightens from his lean over the monitors, assessing. Kade doesn't move, but his attention shifts, finding its target. Damian stays against the wall, gray eyes watchful.
Mira crosses the room to meet Sasha with the controlled economy of a woman who has managed this relationship on her terms and intends to continue. "Sasha. Thank you for coming."
"Miroslava." He inclines his head with a formality that sits somewhere between professional respect and genuine caution. "Your team is larger than I expected."
"My team is the size it needs to be." Mira positions herself between Sasha and the rest of the room. "You have what we discussed?"
Sasha produces a slim portfolio from inside his jacket. "Everything your interested parties requested. Verified through three independent channels, as always."
Sasha's gaze drifts to Jax, who has circled back to his chair and is already bouncing the knee again.
"I've actually gotten more charming, but it's subtle." Jax tips his chin toward the portfolio. "That the good stuff?"
"There is no good stuff in my line of work, Mr. Ryder. Only accurate stuff and inaccurate stuff." Sasha sets the portfolio on the table beside Cole's monitors. "This is the former."
Cole opens the portfolio with a bomb tech's care, pulling three documents and a USB drive from the interior. His eyes move across the first page, and I watch his jaw set. The data is confirming something he'd already suspected but hoped he was wrong about.
Kade extends one hand. Cole passes the first document without looking up from the second.
The room goes still. Banter drops, and I move to the table because standing at the window stopped being a useful position about thirty seconds ago.
My phone sits heavy in my pocket. Silent now.
The USB drive loads on Cole's center monitor, and Vanessa's remote access protocol kicks in simultaneously, her software parsing the encrypted files into readable directories faster than Cole can click through them manually.
Financial records, shipping manifests, corporate registration documents from four different states and two offshore jurisdictions.
The donor lists populate first, names scrolling in alphabetical columns that Cole splits across two screens.
Hundreds of entries, corporate and individual, tied to a network of foundations and PACs that feed into each other like the structures I grew up watching my grandfather build.
Shell companies in Delaware and Wyoming.
Contributions routed through intermediaries that exist on paper and nowhere else.
My eyes move through the names the way a medic reads vitals, not stopping on any single data point but registering the pattern of the whole.
Board members of foundations that share addresses with shipping companies.
Donors whose contribution timing aligns with specific port activity dates Vanessa flagged last month.
A PAC registered six days before a Senate subcommittee vote on maritime inspection protocols.
Cole scrolls to the next page. More names, with my eyes snagging on one before my mind catches up.
Blanchard, James R. — Meridian Policy Alliance — $250,000
My pulse spikes. I feel it in my wrists, my throat, the back of my knees, and for one disgusting second I diagnose myself the way I'd diagnose a patient presenting with acute stress response.
Elevated heart rate. Peripheral vasoconstriction.
The body preparing for a threat that lives in a spreadsheet.
Fifteen months ago.
The amount isn't unusual for a man with Blanchard's money.t, but precisely calibrated to sit below the threshold might trigger additional scrutiny.
The file notes that Meridian Policy Alliance was incorporated in Wyoming seven weeks before this contribution.
Seven to ten weeks of corporate existence before the first significant transaction, just enough paper trail to look organic.
I grew up watching these type of structures get built.
Senators donate to things. This is what senators do.
"Blanchard." Damian speaks from the wall, the single word doing what Damian's words always do. Categorize, not judge. "That's the girlfriend's father."
My hand stops on the table. "She's not my girlfriend."
Too fast.