Chapter 24
twenty-four
Remy
The guest room door is closed when I come out of my room.
I stand in the hallway for longer than a man with my training should stand there, reading a door the way I'd read a room. The gap under the frame is dark, no lamplight, no movement, and I can't tell if she's sleeping or lying in the dark deciding how much of me she can tolerate in the morning.
I'm not going to find out by knocking, because knocking is a question, and every question I ask her right now sits next to the one I already answered on the rooftop.
The kitchen is worse. Cold coffee maker, no mug in the sink, the counter wiped clean of evidence that anyone lives here who isn't me.
Darcy left yesterday. Evie's still in the house, and the kitchen is still empty.
I make coffee I don't want and drink half of it standing at the window where the fog hasn't burned off yet, watching the street below where nothing is happening because nothing happens on this block at six in the morning.
The stillness outside matches the stillness upstairs, and I cannot stand this quiet for one more minute.
I leave without telling her. The lock clicks behind me, and I think about a different door clicking last night, a softer sound in a darker hallway, and what it meant that she chose the guest room and not the street.
She stayed. Just not with me.
The pharmaceutical distribution map on my tablet doesn't match the shipping manifests Cole pulled from the facility's server.
Three warehouses in the East Bay are receiving twice the volume their square footage justifies, and the overage lines up with the intake logs I photographed before the security system locked me out.
"The dosing protocols are wrong." I swipe to the next screen, expanding the medication list. "Midazolam in these quantities isn't outpatient. It's procedural sedation, the kind you use when someone needs to be compliant for transport, not treatment."
Cole looks up from his own screen across the conference table, pen paused over the legal pad where he's been mapping shell company structures in handwriting so clean it could pass for typeset.
"That matches the financial pattern. The shell companies purchasing those pharmaceuticals share a registration agent with two of Blanchard's PACs. "
"So someone's buying enough sedatives to knock out a small army and routing the invoices through political fundraising." Jax spins a pen between his fingers from the far end of the table, his chair tilted back at an angle that would make an insurance adjuster nervous. "Cool. Normal Tuesday."
"It's Thursday," Asher says without looking up from his laptop.
"It's always Tuesday somewhere, Frost."
"That's not how time zones work."
Jax opens his mouth, reconsiders, and points the pen at Asher. "You know what, I'm not taking the bait. That's growth."
"Debatable." Kade's voice carries from where he stands near the window, arms crossed, watching the room.
My phone sits in my left pocket. I haven't checked it since I walked in ninety minutes ago, and pressure of it against my thigh is a like a low, constant hum that has nothing to do with vibration and everything to do with the fact that no one has texted.
Focus.
I set the tablet down and reach for my coffee. It's lukewarm now, the surface flat and still, and I drink it anyway because the motion gives my hands something to do that isn't reaching for my phone.
Miguel catches my eye from two seats down, where he's reviewing the victim medical files I compiled. He tips his chin toward the tablet. "The midazolam dosing, is that weight-adjusted or flat across the intake log?"
"Flat. Same dose regardless of body mass, which tells you whoever's administering isn't medically trained." I lean back, half-smile in place because Saint always has one. "They're following a recipe, not practicing medicine."
"That's actually more dangerous," Miguel says, already pulling up a dosing calculator on his own screen. "Flat dosing on a low-weight patient could cause respiratory depression. On a high-weight patient, it might not sedate at all."
"Which means they're losing people on both ends and don't care enough to adjust." I let that land. The room absorbs it, quiet that isn't silence so much as the sound of people deciding not to flinch.
Across the table, Vanessa's right leg has been bouncing since the meeting started, a metronome set to whatever frequency her brain is currently running at.
Her fingers move across the laptop she calls Luke, and two auxiliary screens flank her workspace with scrolling data I can't read from this distance.
The bouncing stops.
Her fingers keep moving, but the rhythm changes, slower and more intentional. She tabs between two windows, then a third, then back to the first. Her head tilts three degrees to the left, and her lips press together in a line that isn't frustration, isn't confusion.
Jax is arguing with Xander about whether thermite counts as a universal solvent. Mira watches them with the expression of a woman deciding whether intervention is worth the effort. Damian stands against the far wall, missing nothing.
The medic in me reads the shift, logs it alongside every room I walk into, every person I treat, the woman sleeping in my quest room whose breathing pattern I've memorized so thoroughly that I can hear it in this fluorescent-lit conference room forty minutes from my townhouse where her door is closed and her coffee maker is cold and the distance between us sits in my chest like a wound I keep pressing to make sure it still hurts.
Vanessa pulls her lower lip between her teeth. Tabs back to the second window. Her eyes narrow.
"Remy."
Vanessa's voice is quiet. Not her usual rapid-fire, not the breathless narration she gives her screens when a pattern emerges. Just my name, spoken at a volume that barely carries past the two seats between us, and it lands like a hand on the back of my neck.
There it is. The tone people use when they've found something you hid.
My stomach drops before my brain catches up. Cold slides down through my ribs and my fingers tighten around the coffee cup.
"The financial routing on the Blanchard PAC donations.
" She's looking at me, not at Luke, and that's wrong because Vanessa always looks at her screens when she's talking data.
Her hands rest flat on either side of the keyboard, perfectly still.
"They mirror the shell company structures we flagged three weeks ago.
Same registration agent, same dispersal pattern, same quarterly timing. "
I know. I know because I sat in my study at two in the morning and traced the same pattern through Sasha's files while Evie slept down the hall, and I fed Vanessa the initial data set myself, and I told her it was a routine financial audit connected to the trafficking pipeline, and she took that at face value because I'm her teammate and teammates don't lie about scope.
"You brought me in on this as a financial anomaly." She says it without decoration, without filler. "But the data pattern isn't anomalous. It's structural. Someone built this network on purpose, and Blanchard isn't a peripheral donor who got caught in bad routing."
She pauses. The conference room holds its breath.
"He's the hub."
My jaw locks. I set the coffee cup down with a control that costs me, placing it exactly in the center of the ring it's already left on the table, and my hands flatten against my thighs under the table where no one can see the tendons standing out across my forearms.
Cole's pen stops moving. His eyes lift from the legal pad to Vanessa, then to me, and the calculation happening behind them is visible, a strategist reclassifying variables in real time.
Jax's chair comes forward. All four legs hit the floor.
Kade doesn't move. Kade was already still, but the quality of his stillness changes.
Damian's eyes lock on me from the wall and hold.
The silence sits.
"You knew." Jax's voice is flat, stripped of every ounce of California ease, every racing metaphor, every deflection he's ever used to keep a room comfortable.
He's looking at me like three weeks ago when Darcy said "Remington Arthur LeBlanc the Third", except this time there's no hurt underneath it.
Just the clean edge of someone who's done the math.
"You knew Blanchard was the hub, and you brought Vanessa in on a partial scope. You had her running blind."
Vanessa swipes two fingers across Luke's trackpad and the main screen on the wall behind Kade fills with a web of interconnected nodes, shell entities branching outward from a central point like a nervous system designed by someone who understood exactly how to make money disappear.
She narrates as she builds it, her voice running quick but controlled, none of the usual breathless excitement, just a woman laying out evidence she wishes she hadn't found.
"Pacific Future Initiative feeds into Meridian Policy Alliance, which feeds into Coastal Heritage Partners, which cycles back through a 501(c)(4) called the American Civic Trust."
Her fingers move, and each node lights up as she names it.
"Every single one shares a registration agent out of Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Same attorney, same filing dates, same quarterly disbursement schedule.
And every disbursement lands in accounts controlled by entities we've already flagged in the trafficking pipeline. "
She pulls up a second layer. Board structures. Names.
"Senator James Blanchard isn't just donating through these shells.
" Her voice drops half a register, and her hands go still on the keyboard again.
"He's board chair of the American Civic Trust. His signature is on the incorporation documents for Coastal Heritage.
He's not routing money through someone else's infrastructure. He built it."