Chapter 30
thirty
Remy
Someone is cleaning house.
The thought has been circling for forty minutes and the pattern won't let me set it down.
Shell entities dissolving overnight. Offshore accounts freezing themselves before law enforcement can ask.
A PAC scrubbed out of existence like it never funneled six figures into anything.
Whoever is doing this isn't panicking. They're pruning.
Cutting dead branches before the rot spreads to anything they actually want to keep.
I can't attribute it. Not yet. If Vanessa hadn't built custom monitoring after the last briefing, we wouldn't have caught any of it.
"Okay, so Meridian Capital Partners just terminated its operating agreement, and the custodial bank in the Caymans froze the associated accounts before anyone asked them to.
" Vanessa's fingers haven't stopped moving since I walked in, her eyes tracking between Obi-Wan and Leia while Han runs a parallel query she set up an hour ago.
"That's the third voluntary dissolution this week, and I'm not even counting the PAC that just evaporated like it never existed, because honestly that one is making me question my own databases and I don't appreciate it. "
I reach past her to pull up a second screen, and my hand crosses the space where her mug sits on the console edge.
The ceramic is the same shade of cream as the one Evie left on my counter last night, and my fingers hesitate for a half-second over the rim before I redirect to the keyboard.
The warmth isn't there. Wrong mug. Wrong woman.
Wrong room. My pulse settles back into operational rhythm, but the hitch happened, and I file it away as evidence that the compartmentalization is getting worse, not better.
"Pull the dissolution timelines against Blanchard's exposed donor list." I bring up the adjacency map on the second monitor. "If they're severing in sequence, there's a priority structure. Someone decided what to cut first."
Kade leans forward in his chair, eyes on the same map.
Cole hasn't moved from the far console, but his attention shifted to our screen two queries ago.
"They're not just cutting Blanchard connections.
They're cutting anything adjacent to Blanchard connections.
" He traces a line on the screen with one finger.
"Whoever's cleaning this is protecting the next layer. "
"Which means there IS a next layer," I say, and Kade nods once without looking at me because we both already knew that.
Vanessa's query finishes populating. New names scroll down Han's screen. Corporate boards, advisory positions, shared registered agents. Routine connective tissue.
A name catches in the scroll and my hands stop on the keyboard.
LeBlanc Holdings. One overlapping advisory member.
"LeBlanc Holdings." Vanessa reads it off the screen and her cursor stops on the keys. She doesn't look at me. The stop is the look.
Kade is already looking. He's known the name longer than anyone in this room.
My stomach drops before my brain processes why, a physical response that belongs to an eighteen-year-old standing in a hallway in the Garden District, not a thirty-two-year-old operative in a basement command center.
My fingers hover over the keys, very still, the stillness of someone who stepped on something sharp in the dark and hasn't looked down yet.
What they don't know is the brother attached to it.
I push back from the console. Cole is already watching me.
"I need to go to Louisiana." The drawl is gone. "LeBlanc Holdings is on the dissolution list. My brother sits on adjacent boards."
Cole's eyes narrow by a fraction. "How recent is your last contact?"
"I don't have a hard number. I'll pull it in transit."
Cole doesn't blink. "Your call. What's your read?"
"Wrong against the dissolution sequence."
Cole straightens, already building the operational framework I can see assembling behind his expression. "Who are you taking?"
"Jax." The choice is intentional and Cole knows it.
Fast extraction, fast driving, someone who won't overthink the family dynamics and will cover my blind spots with instinct instead of strategy.
"Wheels up in two hours." I turn before Cole can ask the next question.
"Damian on physical proximity to the townhouse.
Vanessa runs digital monitoring if Evie leaves the perimeter. Kade has command here."
A man choosing to leave the woman he was lying to in order to save the brother who doesn't know him anymore.
"Blanchard doesn't know she's at our table. He still thinks his daughter does what she's told."
Every number is wrong. The probability matrix has gaps I'm choosing not to calculate because if I calculate them I won't get on the plane.
Cole studies me for two seconds longer than necessary. "Understood. I'll brief Damian within the hour."
The go-bag sits on the foyer bench where it's sat for three years, packed and ready, and my hands move through the contents with the efficiency of a man who has spent three years ready to disappear.
Civilian layer on top, the one that says consultant, frequent flyer, nothing to see.
Long-sleeved pullover, jeans, charger, wallet with the Remy Black ID.
Underneath that, the medical kit, compact and organized by hands that learned triage in a combat zone and never unlearned the muscle memory.
And below the medical kit, in a nylon sleeve that looks like a laptop case, the thing that isn't a laptop.
I'm reaching for a second magazine when her footsteps land on the hardwood behind me. Bare feet, no hesitation in the stride, the particular rhythm I've memorized without meaning to.
"Jax is picking you up, or are you driving to the airport yourself?"
She didn't ask where I was going or what was wrong. She read the bag before she looked at my face.
I straighten and turn toward her. She's leaning against the kitchen doorframe with her arms crossed, wearing the soft gray shirt that isn't mine but smells like my detergent. Her hair is down, the natural waves she doesn't bother straightening when she's not performing for anyone.
"Jax. Two hours." My throat works around the next part, the words arranging and rearranging themselves because the With Evie register doesn't come with a script and I have never learned to be fluent in it.
"Landry had a meetin' in Baton Rouge yesterday.
He hasn't, he hasn't checked in. And there's a financial connection, his boards overlap with entities that are bein' dissolved, and the timin' is—"
I stop. One sentence. That's all this needs. I'm briefing the woman I'm sleeping with, not running an operational debrief.
"My brother might be in trouble and I need to go home."
Home. The word lands and I don't take it back.
Evie uncrosses her arms and walks toward me, and she's holding something, a phone charger, the spare one she keeps in the kitchen because her phone dies twice a day when she's running donor spreadsheets and cross-referencing financial records for a case that's dismantling her own father.
She extends it and her fingers brush the inside of my wrist on the handoff, a touch so brief it could be accidental if either of us believed in accidents anymore.
Her eyes drop to the bag. The medical kit has shifted where I was reaching, and the nylon sleeve underneath is visible, the shape unmistakable to anyone who has spent a lifetime around men who carry things they don't discuss.
The outline of the grip, the angular geometry that doesn't belong to any laptop ever manufactured.
Her face doesn't change.
My chest does something I don't have a clinical name for, a compression behind the sternum that has nothing to do with cardiac function and everything to do with the woman standing in front of me looking at a weapon in my bag with the same steady brown eyes she uses to look at everything else I am.
My hand closes around the charger and my fingers are shaking, barely, a fine tremor I haven't felt since the first night I came to her in this house.
"Go." She says it like it costs her, clean and quiet and without negotiation. "He's your brother, Remy."
I zip the bag. I pick it up. I walk past her toward the door, and the space between our bodies is six inches and neither of us closes it.
At the threshold I turn, one hand on the frame, and I look back.
She's standing where I left her, in the middle of my foyer, arms at her sides, and her face in the last second before the door swings shut is the steadiest thing I have ever seen and the saddest, and she doesn't follow me to the threshold because she would never hold a man in a doorway when his family needs him somewhere else.
The door closes. I stand on the wrong side of it and the silence is what she's giving me, steady and willed and what she thinks I need.
I take three steps toward the curb. My hand is on the handle of the SUV.
I cannot leave her in there being steady for me.
I turn around.
The door is unlocked. I push it open and she's where I left her, in the middle of the foyer, arms at her sides. She turns at the sound. The steadiness she'd been holding cracks across her face for one second before she catches it.
I cross the foyer in two strides. I drop the bag. I get my hand under her jaw and tilt her face up to mine and I kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth. Her hands fist in my shirt.
She rises onto the balls of her feet to meet me, and I bend, because she's a foot shorter and I have been bending to her for two months.
My body knows the angle without thinking.
The kiss is not careful. My thumb finds the line of her jaw.
My other hand splays at the small of her back and I pull her against me hard enough that her ribs press into mine.
She opens her mouth under mine, and I taste her, coffee and the mint she chews when she's been working too long. Her hands move from my chest to the back of my neck and pull me down. Neither of us is breathing.
I break it. I have to. My forehead drops to hers. We are breathing against each other's mouths, still standing in the doorway air.
"I'll call," I tell her.
She nods, her forehead still against mine. Her hand is still on the back of my neck.
I straighten. I pick up the bag. I leave.
This time I don't look back.
The Gulfstream's engines settle into cruise altitude and the cabin pressure equalizes with a soft pop that registers in my jaw before my ears adjust. Jax sits across from me in one of the forward leather seats, legs stretched into the aisle, bouncing one heel against the carpet in a rhythm I recognize from a hundred parking-lot waits.
His posture is loose, studied, the sprawl of a man who wants you to think he's relaxed.
I check the phone. Damian texted at takeoff: Set. From him, that's a paragraph.
I pull up Corbin's number and hit call.
"Hey, Tripp." Corbin picks up on the second ring. "You okay? You don't usually call at this hour."
"Anything from Landry yet?"
A pause. Corbin's easy roll drops a quarter-step. "No. Why?"
"Has Grams heard from him?"
"She called the housekeeper this mornin'. Said the Range Rover wasn't in the garage. Figured he stayed over in Baton Rouge."
"What's the housekeeper sayin' now?"
"That his coffee mug's clean and his bed's made and his briefcase is on the kitchen counter where he left it Monday. Tripp, what's goin' on?"
Across from me, Jax has gone very still. The heel-tapping has stopped.
"I'm comin' home tonight. Don't tell Grams yet. I'll call when I land."
"Tripp—"
"Don't tell Grams."
I hang up. Jax is watching me with the unmoving attention of a man who has just had information added to his file.
"Corbin," Jax says.
"My youngest brother."
"Right." Jax leans back, the studied sprawl tightening at the edges. "So we've got Darcy, Landry, Corbin. Three siblings."
"And Grams."
"And Grams." Jax's mouth does something that isn't a smile. "Anything else you want to mention before we land in your ancestral hometown, Saint? Cousins? Wards of the court? Secret twin?"
"No twin."
"That's a real specific denial."
I look out the window. The cabin hum settles into the part of my chest that's been holding for an hour.
"I didn't think any of it was goin' to come back."
Jax doesn't answer for a long beat. When he does, his voice has dropped half a register. "Yeah. Well. Here we are."
"So just to be clear." Jax shifts his weight in the seat, the heel-tapping pausing for one beat before resuming.
"We're flying to Louisiana to rescue your secret rich brother from a financial conspiracy connected to your secret girlfriend's secret criminal father, and you brought me because I drive fast and won't ask questions you'd rather not answer. "
Jax's mouth twitches. He doesn't need me to say it.
The cabin hums around us at fifty-one thousand feet. Jax is watching me like he watches a road he hasn't driven yet, reading the curves before he commits to a line.
Damian has the townhouse. Vanessa has the digital perimeter. Cole is running coordination. She's covered. She's surrounded by professionals who would notice if something shifted, who would respond faster than I could from twenty-eight hundred miles away.
Except I'm the one who knows her tells. The way the silence stops being peace and becomes Layer Three, the one before—
I don't finish the thought. My hand finds the phone again and this time I don't pick it up, just press two fingers against the dark screen like I'm checking a pulse.
"Hey." Jax's voice drops half a register, humor on top, weight underneath. "You picked me, Saint. That means something and I'm choosing to be flattered about it, so don't ruin it by staring at the phone every thirty seconds."
Behind us, nineteen hundred miles west, San Francisco sits in its evening fog. The townhouse with its cold rooftop garden and its kitchen that smells like her cooking. And her in it, alone. Three people in that house became two, then two became one, and the one who's left is the one I'm leaving.
The phone stays dark on the armrest. I pull my hand back and fold both hands together in my lap, fingers laced tight, and turn to look out the window at nothing.