Chapter 28
GRANT
We went back to the main house because I was hungry again.
Louisa gave me the look—the one that was half amusement, half scientific curiosity, the expression of a woman who'd spent her career studying processes and had apparently decided my metabolism was worth observing.
"You just ate," she said.
"That was an hour ago."
"It was forty minutes."
"Forty minutes is a long time."
She shook her head but she was smiling, and the smile did the thing it always did, which was make me forget, briefly, that the world was complicated and full of things I hadn't figured out yet. In the presence of that smile, the only thing I needed to figure out was whether there was more bacon.
There was.
The kitchen at Dominion Hall in the mid-morning had the warm, settled energy of a place that expected to feed people in waves and had organized itself accordingly.
The younger chef—I'd learned her name was Petra, a quiet woman with fast hands and an instinct for anticipating what people wanted before they asked—had a second round of eggs going before I'd fully sat down.
Toast appeared. Coffee refilled itself. Bacon materialized as if summoned by the sheer force of want.
I ate with the efficiency that Louisa had stopped commenting on and started simply watching, the way you watched a natural phenomenon you'd accepted you couldn't change.
Then the brothers started arriving.
Ethan came first—freshly showered, smelling like soap and stable, which was apparently his permanent baseline.
He nodded at me, nodded at Louisa, sat down, and began eating with the same mechanical thoroughness I'd been demonstrating.
Two eggs became four. Toast became a stack.
The bacon plate, which Petra had filled with apparent optimism, began to diminish at a rate that suggested she'd underestimated the situation.
Marcus appeared next. Then Charlie. Ryker. Then Noah, who was quieter than the others but ate with the same intensity, the silent commitment of a man fueling a machine that ran on a higher octane than civilian life required.
Louisa watched all of it from her stool at the island, her coffee in both hands, her eyes moving between the men with an expression that started as amusement and built toward something closer to disbelief.
"Is this—normal?" she asked, looking at Petra.
Petra didn't look up from the eggs she was already cracking for the next wave. "Every morning. I budget for twelve dozen."
"Twelve dozen eggs."
"On a light day."
Louisa laughed. Not the polite kind—the real kind, the one that started in her chest and came out with her whole body in it, her head tipping back, her hand coming up to cover her mouth because she hadn't expected it and it had arrived too fast for manners to intercept.
The brothers looked up from their plates. Looked at her. Looked at each other.
Marcus grinned. "Something funny, bourbon girl?"
"All of you," she said. "You eat like you're preparing for a siege."
"We are," Charlie said, completely serious. Then he winked.
The laughter moved through the kitchen the way laughter moved through spaces where people were comfortable—easily, without resistance, filling the room like warm air.
I sat in it and felt something I was getting used to feeling at Dominion Hall but still didn't fully trust: the sensation of being somewhere I belonged.
Then the air changed.
A man appeared in the kitchen doorway. Mid-fifties, trim, wearing a dark suit that fit him with the precision of someone who considered his appearance a professional obligation.
His posture was formal—spine straight, hands clasped in front of him, the bearing of a man who'd spent decades in service and had internalized the discipline so thoroughly it was no longer effort but architecture. He moved to Ryker's side.
He leaned down. Whispered something in Ryker's ear.
Ryker's face didn't change. That was the tell. A man whose face should have changed and didn't was a man who was controlling what he showed, and Ryker's control was its own kind of information.
His eyes moved to me.
Fuck. Now what?
Every man in the kitchen was still eating.
Forks still moved. Coffee was still being sipped.
But the quality of the room had shifted—a collective recalibration, subtle enough that Louisa might not have caught it, obvious enough that every operator at the table had.
The laughter from thirty seconds ago was gone like it had never existed.
In its place, the stillness of men who'd felt a change in pressure and were waiting to see what it meant.
Ryker set down his fork. Wiped his mouth with a napkin. The gestures were controlled, deliberate—the movements of a man buying himself three seconds to choose his words.
"Grant," he said. "Come with me."
I looked at Louisa. She looked back at me with a steady, uncomplicated gaze.
"Go," she said. Quiet. No drama. The word of a woman who understood that the man beside her existed in a world where people sometimes came to get you in the middle of breakfast and the correct response was to go.
I went.
The kitchen door closed behind us and Ryker's stride shifted immediately—longer, faster, the walk of a man moving with operational purpose through a building he knew by feel.
"The FBI is here," he said. Low. Clipped. The voice I recognized from briefing rooms—the one that compressed information into the fewest possible words because time was a resource and wasting it got people hurt. "For Wyatt."
"Why?"
"There was an incident. Before." Ryker's jaw tightened. "Wyatt and Sophie were on the Ravenel Bridge. A rogue FBI agent named Klein had been targeting the family—personal vendetta, off the books. He pulled a weapon. Sophie pushed him off the bridge to save Wyatt. Klein died."
I processed that in the time it took us to cross the hallway.
Sophie Clarke—the copper-haired girl from Valentine who'd outridden half the county boys when we were kids and, apparently, hadn't stopped surprising people since—had pushed a federal agent off a bridge to save my brother's life.
She just went from likable to legendary in my book.
Second thought: What the hell?
"I thought this was resolved," Ryker said, as if reading my mind.
He turned a corner, heading toward the residential wing.
"Our contacts in the Bureau confirmed Klein was running an unsanctioned operation.
Nobody in the FBI hierarchy wanted that rock turned over.
The investigation was quietly closed. Klein's death was ruled incidental to an unauthorized confrontation. "
"So, why are they here now?"
"I don't know." The words came out hard. Ryker didn't like not knowing—I could hear it in the way the syllables landed, clipped and controlled, the sound of a man whose operational picture had just developed a gap he hadn't anticipated. "But they're here. And they're not asking."
We found Wyatt in his room on the third floor. The door was ajar. Inside, my brother was standing by the bed in jeans and nothing else. From behind the bathroom door came the sound of the shower running. Sophie.
Wyatt looked at us. Read the situation off our faces in under a second. Ryker told him.
"How many?" Wyatt asked.
"One agent. Four tactical," Ryker said. "The family attorneys are being notified. We're about to dial the D.C. line."
Wyatt nodded. His jaw set—the Valentine jaw, the same one I saw in the mirror, the one our father had apparently given to all the men in this building. "Give me five minutes. I need to change and tell Sophie."
"Five minutes," Ryker confirmed. Then he turned, and we walked back the way we'd come.
The front entrance of Dominion Hall was a wide stone portico with iron-framed doors that looked like they'd been designed to withstand an industrial battering ram and had probably been tested at least once. The morning light came through at a sharp angle, casting long shadows across the steps.
The FBI was waiting.
One agent. He stood at the base of the steps with the patient, unhurried posture of a man who knew his authority.
Mid-forties. Tall—not Dane tall, but tall enough to look you in the eye without adjusting.
Dark hair cut short and going silver at the temples.
A face that had been handsome once and had been refined by time and purpose into something harder and more precise—high cheekbones, a jaw that could have been architectural, eyes the color of slate that moved with constant, quiet assessment.
His suit was federal—dark, fitted, the cut that said Bureau without needing the badge, though the badge was there, clipped to his belt beside a holstered weapon he wasn't touching and didn't need to.
He stood the way the best operators stood—still, grounded, radiating a competence that was more effective than any display of force.
His name, when he introduced himself, was Special Agent Dominic Craine.
The name landed in my ear and stayed there. Craine. It had weight to it. The kind of name that sounded like it had been doing damage for a long time and had gotten comfortable with the work.
Behind him, four men in black tactical gear stood in a loose semicircle.
Body armor. Weapons. Earpieces. The posture of men who'd been told to stand ready and were doing it with the bored professionalism of a team that had done this enough times that the adrenaline had worn off and been replaced by procedure.
I measured them. Automatically, the way I measured every potential threat—height, weight, stance, hand placement, eye movement.
Ryker approached with the composed authority of a man who owned the ground he was standing on—which he did, literally and otherwise.
His voice, when he spoke, was polite. Not deferential.
The politeness of a man who understood the law and respected it and would work within it right up until the moment working within it stopped being productive.
"What can we do for you?" Ryker said.