Chapter 28- Phoenix
Torres never lets a call go to voicemail.
I answer the video call.
The screen flips to Dominic Webb's face.
He's standing in what looks like a warehouse, concrete walls behind him, harsh lighting casting everything in a flat white that makes the shadows underneath his cheekbones look carved.
He looks certain, like a man who has already run every version of this conversation and knows how each one ends.
Then he steps aside.
Jade is behind him, tied to a metal chair, her wrists bound behind her back.
There's a red mark along her jaw that wasn't there this morning.
Her hair is loose and tangled and she's looking directly at the camera with an expression I recognize, the one she wears when she's terrified and refusing to show it.
Her eyes find mine through the screen and stay there.
Something happens in my chest that I don't have a word for.
"Phoenix Crawford." Dominic’s tone is friendly. "Thank you for picking up."
I drag my eyes from Jade to him. Every muscle in my body has gone very still, the stillness of something under extreme pressure that has not yet decided which direction to move. "What did you do to her face."
"She fought. Your security man fought harder." A pause. "Torres, I believe his name was."
The word was lands like a stone into still water, and I feel the rings of it moving outward through my body. I knew when Torres stopped answering. I let myself pretend otherwise for twenty minutes because the alternative was this, another body added to a count that started with Marcus.
"Touch her again," I say quietly, "and there will be nothing left of you or anyone who matters to you.”
Something moves in Dominic's pale eyes. Not fear. Something more complicated. "Big words from a man whose woman is tied to a chair in my warehouse."
"Tell me what you want."
He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a phone, holds it up so I can see the screen. A recording app, already open, the red indicator waiting. "A confession. On video. Your voice, your face, your words. The full account of what happened at that cabin. Admissible in court."
The room I'm standing in is very quiet. My office, forty floors above Los Angeles, the city spread out below me in the late afternoon light, gold and smog-hazy and completely indifferent.
The contracts on my desk. The cold coffee on the credenza.
The family photo my mother insisted I keep, Jade laughing at something off-camera the day we took it, her head thrown back, her throat exposed.
"And if I give you that," I say.
"Then she walks out of here. Tonight." He glances back at Jade briefly, then returns his attention to the camera.
"And I release everything. The recording, the full account, every detail of what happened at that cabin. Not to the police. To everyone. Every journalist, every outlet, every person who has ever done business with the Crawford name. I want the world to know exactly what Phoenix Crawford is capable of. What his father helped cover up. I want you to watch it happen and be able to do nothing about it.”
"And I'm supposed to take your word that she walks out of there.”
"I don't need her once I have what I want. She's a means to an end, not the end itself." His voice is flat. "I'm not my brother, Mr. Crawford. I don't take things that don't belong to me.”
I look at Jade again. She's watching me and I can see her working to keep her breathing steady, can see the effort it takes, and I want to reach through the screen and pull her out of that chair and put myself between her and every bad thing that exists in the world.
"I need time," I say.
"You have six hours." Dominic checks his watch. "That takes us to eleven o'clock. If I haven't received your confession by then, the situation changes." He doesn't elaborate on what that means. He doesn't need to.
"I want to speak to her."
A pause. Then Dominic steps back and turns the phone toward Jade.
Her eyes are red at the corners but dry. The mark on her face is already darkening into a bruise. She looks at the screen with the focus of someone who is holding themselves together through sheer force of will and knows exactly how thin that margin is.
"I'm okay," she says. Her voice is steady. "Phoenix, I'm okay."
The words come out rougher than I intend. "I'm going to get you out of there."
"Don't." She says it quietly, urgently, leaning forward as far as the binding on her wrists allows. "Don't do anything stupid. Don't give him what he wants just because—"
Dominic pulls the phone back.
"Six hours," he says again. Then the screen goes dark.
I stand in my office and look at the phone for a long moment. The city hums forty floors below. A helicopter moves across the window's frame and disappears. Somewhere in this building a phone rings and goes to voicemail and rings again.
I set my phone down on the desk with great care and then I put both hands flat on the surface and breathe.
The calculation is not complicated. It is the simplest problem I have ever been asked to solve, stripped down to two variables with nothing in between.
If I give him what he wants, the recording goes public and everything the Crawford name has ever meant gets dismantled in full view of everyone who ever respected it.
Jade goes free and I spend the rest of my life watching the wreckage. If I don't, Jade doesn't go free.
I pick up my phone and call my father.
He answers on the first ring, which means he already knows. My father has a network of people whose entire function is to make sure he always already knows, and the measured careful quality of his voice when he picks up confirms it.
"I heard about Torres," he says. "My people had eyes on PCH. I'm sorry, Phoenix."
"He has Jade. He wants the recording released publicly. Every outlet, every journalist, everyone we've ever done business with. Six hours."
A pause on the other end. The quality of my father's silences is something I learned to read before I learned to read words, the difference between the silence of a man thinking and the silence of a man who has already thought and is deciding how much to share. This one is the second kind.
"He won't kill her," my father says finally. "Not yet. She's leverage, and Dominic Webb is not a man who discards leverage before he's extracted everything he can from it."
"You don't know that."
"I know men like him. He wants the public destruction because he wants us to watch it happen. That requires Jade alive and walking out of that warehouse. A dead hostage gives him nothing."
I move to the window. The sun is almost at the water now, the smog turning everything amber and the color of old blood. Somewhere in this city, in a warehouse whose location I don't yet have, Jade is sitting in a metal chair with her wrists bound and a bruise forming on her jaw.
"Torres had a tracker on her car. If they transferred vehicles in the lot—"
"Already running it." My father's voice shifts. "I have people pulling the PCH camera footage. We'll have a plate within the hour."
"And then?"
A pause. "And then we go get her."
The simplicity of it lands differently than it should. I've been standing here running calculations about public confessions and reputational destruction and the Crawford name reduced to a cautionary tale, and my father says and then we go get her like it's a logistics problem.
"Dominic has men with him. At least two. Possibly more now."
"I'm aware."
"Torres is dead."
"I'm aware of that too." Something shifts in his voice, something that sounds almost like grief before it gets managed and put away. "Torres knew the risks. We honor that by finishing what he started.”
I think about Torres. The way he moved through spaces, quiet and efficient, always exactly where he needed to be and never where he wasn't. He'd worked for my family for eleven years, longer than most of my father's people, long enough that he knew which coffee my mother took in the mornings and which entrance my father used when he didn't want to be seen.
He had a daughter in the seventh grade whose soccer games he never missed if he could help it, and a wife who sent him to work every morning with lunch packed in a black bag he kept in the car.
He talked about them the way men talk about the things they're most afraid of losing, briefly and carefully, like saying too much might jinx it.
The text he sent this morning said, I’m watching her. My response never came because I was on a call and thought there would be time later.
There is a kind of guilt that lives in the things you didn't do when you had the chance. It doesn't resolve.
"I need that plate," I say.
"You'll have it." My father pauses. "Whatever happens tonight, I need you controlled. Dominic wants you reactive. Don't give him that."
I think about Jade's face on the screen. The bruise darkening. The red at the corners of her eyes that she refused to let become anything more. The way she said don't do anything stupid with the same voice she uses when she's trying to take care of me from inside her own disaster.
"Call me when you have the plate," I say, and hang up.
The sun drops below the water. The city lights come on one by one and the office fills with the blue of early evening, and I stand at the window and think about six hours and what I am willing to do inside them.
The answer is everything.