Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Warrick
Ibroke at least three traffic laws getting to Lucy’s.
Didn’t care. The tiger was so close to the surface that my hands had changed twice on the steering wheel, claws punching through, retracting, punching through again.
I’d burned every ounce of control I had on the single task of keeping my skin on straight while I drove.
Lucy’s building came into view, and I checked the perimeter on autopilot. Entrances, exits, sight lines, the alley between the building and the dry cleaner next door. Clear. The front door lock was a joke. A ten-year-old could pick it.
I took the stairs two at a time. Knocked twice. “Lucy. It’s me.”
A pause. The deadbolt turned. She opened the door with a cat pressed tight against her chest.
“Show me.”
She stepped back.
I walked through the apartment, reading it the way I’d read any scene.
Plants smashed on the hardwood, terracotta in angular pieces, soil tracked across the floor.
Not knocked over. Thrown. A textbook on the coffee table, spine broken, pages torn out in fistfuls.
A pink highlighter on top, tip snapped off.
I checked the door. No tool marks on the frame.
No scratches on the deadbolt. He’d had a key, or he’d picked it, and either way the lock was worthless.
I checked the windows. Latched from inside.
Bathroom, closet, the twelve square feet of kitchen. No one here now.
Nothing stolen. He hadn’t come here to take anything. He’d come here to leave a message.
I stopped in the middle of the room and let the PI side of my brain do what it did.
The destroyed plants weren’t random. They were alive.
Growing. Hers. The textbook was the same; something she was building toward, torn apart and left for her to find.
Coleman hadn’t trashed this apartment. He’d gone through it and surgically destroyed everything that represented Lucy moving forward without him.
And he’d done it clean. No forced entry, no tool marks, nothing knocked over by accident.
A jealous ex trashes a place in a rage. This wasn’t rage.
This was controlled entry, targeted destruction, zero trace.
I’d processed crime scenes messier than this from guys who did it for a living. Coleman hadn’t lost his temper.
Find him.
The tiger wasn’t asking.
Yes.
End him.
Yes.
I turned around. Lucy was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, the cat in her lap.
It was kneading her thigh with a rhythmic intensity that suggested it was trying to burrow through to the other side.
Lucy’s hand moved over its back in slow, steady strokes.
She looked dazed, as if she couldn’t quite believe this was happening.
I crossed the room and crouched in front of her.
Close enough that she could smell me, that my scent could cut through whatever cocktail of fear and adrenaline and anger was running through her right now.
My tiger wanted to Shift, wanted to curl around her and block out the whole apartment with his body.
“You’re not staying here tonight.”
“Dani—”
“If he knows where you live, there’s a good chance he knows where Dani lives. You can stay with me. You’ll be safe at my cabin.”
She looked at me. I could see the calculation going through her mind, of not wanting to put her friend in danger, but could she trust a guy she had just met?
“Let me repack my bag.” She stood up.
I blinked; I had been expecting her to argue with me.
The cat, displaced without consultation, landed on the floor, walked up to my boot, sat on it, and stared up at me.
I looked down.
What is that? My tiger sounded horrified. He usually dismissed cats as not prey, not a threat, therefore irrelevant. We had never had one sit on our foot before.
It’s a cat.
It is broken. Its ear is wrong. It is very small. Why is it not afraid of us?
That was a good question. Most animals instinctively knew we were an apex predator and went out of their way to avoid us.
“Why is your cat doing that?” I asked.
“Doing what?”
“Sitting on my foot.”
Lucy glanced over her shoulder: “She’s claiming you. Congratulations.”
Claiming us?
And just like that, the horror evaporated. He went from deeply offended to incandescent joy in the space of a single heartbeat.
Small pet of our mate. She is also ours.
She’s a cat.
She is brave. Fierce. Good judge of territory. A pause. We are keeping her.
Fucking fabulous.
“The cat have a carrier?”
“By the door. And she’ll scream the entire drive, just so you’re prepared.”
“Noted.”
I photographed the apartment while Lucy packed. She moved fast, efficient. Ten minutes and she was done.
The cat screamed for exactly twelve minutes after we got in the truck, then stopped so suddenly I checked the rearview mirror to make sure it was still alive. It was. Asleep with one paw pressed against the carrier door, like it had collapsed mid-protest.
My phone buzzed on the console. Davan. I silenced it.
Lucy noticed. “You need to take that?”
“Not now.”
She didn’t push. She turned her head and looked out the window at the trees thickening as we moved away from town and into the state land. I thought about all the ways I was going to make Andrew Coleman answer. I had time. I was a patient hunter. And the list was getting longer.
I drove up the driveway to the cabin, parked the SUV, and grabbed her bag. Lucy grabbed the carrier. The cat woke up and started screaming again, but Lucy murmured something to it, and the screaming dropped to a low, offended grumble. Personality on that animal.
I unlocked the front door and stepped aside.
Lucy walked past me as I hit the light. She stood in the middle of my living room—the couch, the kitchen through the doorway, the bookshelves I’d built three years ago because I’d wanted to make something with my hands—and looked around at a space that hadn’t existed to her six hours ago.
She set the carrier down and opened it. The cat dashed out, paused, then moved: to the counter, then the windowsill to the bookshelf, checking every surface, every corner, every shadow. It was systematic, thorough, like a smaller version of what I’d just done in her apartment.
“This place is beautiful,” Lucy said. “It’s so peaceful here.”
“I like it. It’s remote. That’s the point.”
She nodded. I saw it hit her: the quiet, the distance from town, the fact that she could stop holding everything together. Her shoulders dropped a fraction. Not much, but enough.
“Bedroom’s through there.”
“I’m not kicking you out of your own bed.”
“You’re not. I sleep on the couch half the time anyway.”
That was a lie. She probably knew it. She looked at me for a beat too long but didn’t argue. She picked up her bag.
“Clean towels?”
“Cabinet above the sink.”
She walked toward the bedroom. The cat, having completed its inspection, trotted after her and disappeared through the door without looking back. Lucy stopped in the doorway.
“Warrick.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For all of it.”
She closed the door, and I stood in the kitchen listening to the water running, the creak of the mattress, then quiet.
The cabin had smelled the same way for five years.
Pine. Dust. Coffee left too long on the counter.
Cold stone from the fireplace and the faint trace of leather from the chair I read in every night.
Now there was jasmine. Not strong—she’d been here ten minutes, not ten hours—but it was here, underneath, threading through the rest of it.
The same scent that had been on my clothes for days.
Except now it was in my walls, my air, the space I came home to every night and sat alone in.
My tiger settled. All the way down, deep and quiet, the way he only ever got at the gate. No. Quieter than the gate. The gate was hope and grief braided together. This felt right. That the cabin with her in it was right and the way the world should be.
I stood in the dark kitchen with that thought and didn’t know what to do with it, so I did what I always did. I worked.
Lucy’s breathing had gone deep and even within twenty minutes. I gave it another ten, then opened my laptop at the kitchen table.
Coleman’s four layers of shell companies had been nagging me.
The Nevada LLC, Bluestone Consulting, was registered to a PO box in Henderson.
Dead end on paper. But Bluestone’s registered agent—a company called Barton Administrative Services—had also filed paperwork for eleven other LLCs in the past three years.
Eleven. I ran them. Most dissolved within six months of registration.
Two were still active. One of those, Lakeview Capital Partners, came back to a name I recognized.
Justin Reinoff.
Scott had flagged it two weeks ago when he was mapping Coleman’s financial network.
He’d put it in the file with a sticky note that read, “tangential—probably nothing.” Reinoff had been indicted two years ago in a federal money laundering case out of Indianapolis.
I pulled the court filings on PACER. Three of the shell companies in the prosecution’s case had been filed through Barton Administrative Services.
Same registered agent. Same filing patterns. Same nested structure.
The case had collapsed. The key witness had recanted their testimony.
I pulled the news coverage. The Indianapolis Star had run a follow-up.
The federal prosecutor said the witness had been “subjected to sustained pressure from individuals connected to the defendant” and flagged “grave concerns about witness safety.” The reporter dug further.
Five days before recanting, the witness had filed a police report: two men had come to his house and told him they knew where his daughter went to school.
He had written down their plate. I ran it.
Rental vehicle. The rental agreement traced through MidState Vehicle Leasing, registered in Henderson, Nevada.
Filed through Barton Administrative Services.