12. Wells
TWELVE
Wells
The Skull and Bone Gang: Before dawn on Mardi Gras, masked skeleton men walk the streets to wake the living and remind them death is near. They move through the dark looking for those who owe a reckoning, and they always know which door to knock on.
The screen goes live. She appears in her mask and platinum hair, her shoulders bare under the camera's frame.
"Hey, Midnight. I was starting to wonder if I lost you somewhere along the way."
My chest pulls tight. Heat moves through me without logic, without sex anywhere near the surface. It's her voice, the cadence, the way she tilts her head when she greets me.
"You couldn't shake me if you tried." There's more truth to that than I want to admit.
"You okay?"
Her tone is careful now, guarded without going cold. She's reading me, trying to figure out what changed between us. She'll never know that I fucked my employee and imagined it was her.
"I'm fine." My voice stays steady. "I've just got a lot going on."
She relaxes. I watch it happen in real time, her shoulders dropping, her hands coming to rest in her lap. Tonight she's wearing the black camisole again, not the oversized T-shirt she had on the other night. She looks good in it. She looks good in anything.
"What can I do for you tonight? Do you want me to run my hand up my thigh, like this?" Her finger slowly traces up the inside of her thigh. She licks her red lips.
Goddammit.
I lean back in my chair and let my eyes close for a second. I came here to cut the line. I am doing the opposite, pulling her closer. Whatever this is, it's supposed to stay on this screen. Lately it doesn't. It follows me into the office and settles next to a woman who has nothing to do with it.
"Let's wait," I say. "I want to apologize for Sunday first."
"You don't have to apologize to me, Midnight. I'm here for your pleasure."
"I do. I cut it short because of a work meeting I couldn't get out of, and some personal shit came up. I didn't handle it well."
None of it is a lie. All of it skips the truth.
She doesn't push. That's part of what hooks me. She doesn't demand explanations or reassurance. She just meets me where I am.
"I get it. But thank you for saying that."
We talk, not about sex or fantasies. She tells me about her week, a customer who tried to haggle her down to nothing, and how she talked him back up without him noticing.
I catch myself smiling at the screen like an idiot.
"You're good," I tell her.
"I have to be." She pauses, the kind of pause where she's deciding whether to hand me something real. "Nobody ever gave me anything I didn't fight for."
It lands somewhere I keep walled off. I want to ask who made her fight that hard. I don't, because things are getting too deep, too personal, as it is. And because I already know I'd remember the answer. Nothing good would come from me knowing who hurt her. I carry grudges.
"What about you? You ever fight for anything, or does it all fall in your lap?"
I huff a laugh. "Nothing falls in my lap. I work for all of it. I fight. But I fight quietly. You wouldn't know until it's already cost you."
"Ah. The silent assassin, huh?"
"Something like that."
''And now?"
I let the silence answer. She lets me.
I want this more than I wanted her body. That's the part I can't get past. I built a whole arrangement to keep a woman at arm's length, and here I am at one in the morning, not wanting to hang up.
And tonight I finally let myself name the thing I've been circling for weeks. It isn't the show, and it isn't even her. It's who I get to be with her.
With Peoria, the armor comes off, and I don't miss it.
I'm softer with her than I have let myself be with anyone in my entire adult life, and the soft version isn't the weak one I always assumed he'd be.
He's the one I would choose, if choosing were ever safe.
That's why I keep logging on, not for the orgasm I could buy from anyone, but for the one hour I get to set the whole thing down.
That scares me more than the wanting does. Wanting her body fits inside the frame I built. Wanting to be unguarded fits nowhere, because unguarded is the exact thing that has cost me every time I've allowed it.
My fingers go still on the edge of my desk.
My chest tightens, sharper this time, because I recognize the pull.
It's the same one I feel when Cera walks into a room and the air changes.
I've been calling that attraction. Sitting here in the dark, I'm not sure it was ever only that.
Something in me goes quiet around both of them, the way it goes quiet nowhere else, and I can't explain why my body keeps insisting they're the same kind of safe.
"You still there?" Peoria's voice cuts through.
"Yeah. I'm here. I like watching you talk."
"Good."
We talk until past midnight. When she finally says goodnight, her voice has gone soft, and I feel the loss of it the second the screen goes dark.
Sitting in the silence and realizing I didn't end it, I did the opposite. I pulled her closer, made it mean more, and let myself need something I have no right to take.
I reach for the pack of cigarettes beside the keyboard, light one, and let the smoke settle my nerves. It doesn't work. The conversation lingers.
I turn to the other screen, to work, the one lever I trust when everything else slips out of reach.
I pull up the file on Ronnie Louvre.
Two hours pass as I trace financial records, access hospital logs from the night Ronnie died, and cross-reference security footage from the neighborhood around his apartment. Most of it gives me nothing. Then I find the gap.
Ronnie's building has external cameras from four angles. Three of them recorded the night he died. One went dark for forty minutes, the window bracketing his time of death.
That's not an accident.
I flag the timestamp and move to Dane Carter. One of the two men who stood outside the door the night my father bled out on a warehouse floor, and the only one still breathing. I've wanted to get my hands on him for a long time. Now I know where he is.
He's easier to track down than I expected.
St. Petersburg, Florida. He works at a marina under his real name, which means he either doesn't know he's exposed or thinks he's far enough out to be safe.
He's wrong.
I write down the address and cross-check the marina's hours, then call to have the jet ready for Friday morning. No one questions where a Stone flies. The only thing I keep to myself is why. A long drive or a short flight, and I don't have the days to spare for the road.
If I traced him, whoever cleaned up Ronnie can too. I need what's in his head before someone closes his mouth for good. A dead guard tells me nothing. I couldn't care less if he's offed after I talk to him.
My phone vibrates. It's Ridge, and I answer without thinking.
"You still up?"
"Yeah. What the hell are you doing up this late?"
"Working on a few last-minute things. I need you to run some extra reports before the council meeting on Thursday. I'll email you everything I need. Maybe get that girl to make it look pretty for you."
"That girl? Her name is Cera."
"Right. Cera. Her name keeps escaping me."
I don't know why that annoys me. I take a drag of my cigarette.
"I'll take care of it."
Ridge rattles on about some bullshit with Vin while I mull over telling him what I've found since we last talked.
"Ridge."
"Yeah?"
I pause. The only question is how much of it I'm willing to hand him. He's already pushed back, so I'll test him, and if he's still not interested in following this thread, then what he doesn't know won't kill him.
"Ronnie Louvre's panel came back. Toxicology was clean."
He exhales slowly. I hear the shift in his tone before he speaks.
"Wells."
"Never mind. I know. Forget about it."
"I told you to leave it buried."
"I said forget about it."
"And you're still digging."
I don't answer.
Ridge's voice hardens. "Whatever you think you found, it's not worth pulling the whole thing back up. Dad's gone. The business is stable. Let it stay that way."
"Understood."
I end the call.
I don't tell him about Dane, or the charter, or the address in Florida, or the dead camera on Ronnie's street.
I close the file and stand. My apartment is too quiet. The case rattles in my chest, the call with Peoria still raw underneath it, and I need to move before the pressure cracks something I can't put back together.
I grab my keys and head for the door. I don't know where I'm going, but I need to get out of here.
Wednesday morning, I get to the office by six thirty and find Cera already there.
She sits at the table in my office with her laptop open, a notebook beside it, and two cups of coffee on coasters. She glances up when I walk in.
"You're early."
"So are you. What's your excuse?"
"I don't sleep. What's yours?"
"I teach a kids' class across town on Wednesday evenings, so I go by before work to get it set up. I'm already up and caffeinated by the time most people hit snooze. Except you, apparently, who doesn't sleep at all."
She slides the second coffee toward me without looking up.
"What kind of class?" I don't know why it stops me. I know almost nothing about what she does once she leaves this floor, and I've never let myself look, which for me is its own kind of restraint.
"Yoga. Little ones at a rec center." A real smile, quick and there and gone. "Best part of my week."
It lodges somewhere I don't examine, that she has a whole life she loves, one that has nothing to do with her job or the version of herself she wears to work. It's a little piece of her that makes me want more.
I take the coffee and sit across from her. The heat soaks through the cup and into my palm. I set it down and pull up the Rotterdam file on my screen, keeping her in my periphery.