Wells
SIXTEEN
The Flambeaux: Before electric light, masked torch-bearers carried open flame through the streets so the crowd could see the night parade pass. He lit the dark he swore he would leave alone, and once he could see her, he could not unsee who she was.
Monday morning, Cera sits at the desk outside my office with her hair pulled back and coffee steaming beside her keyboard. She looks up when I walk past, and the office does nothing to cool what followed us back from Florida.
Her eyes meet mine. We hold too long, and I keep walking because stopping would be worse.
I drop my bag in my office, pull up the Rotterdam file, and try to put the hotel where it belongs. It belongs behind me, beneath me, anywhere but in the office with her voice coming through the door, low and patient as she talks someone through a file request.
Nothing more than sex as punctuation between work sprints. Practical and contained.
Then she laughs at something I can't hear, and my attention splits anyway.
I pull up the revised interface map she sent last night, just before my call with Peoria. I didn't have time to review it until after my call. I sent her an email at two in the morning with three small data corrections, but other than that, it's flawless.
I wanted to find more wrong with it, but she's that good.
I open the door of my office and she looks up across the open space that separates my office from her cubicle.
"Did you see the corrections I sent last night?"
Her mouth twitches at one corner.
"Do you ever sleep?"
I don't answer.
"Yes, I did. This morning over coffee. I fixed them and just sent it back. Try to contain your joy."
"I will suffer privately."
Her smile breaks through, just for a second, and I turn back into my office before I forget which side of the door she works on.
The morning moves in pieces. Email, a call with Singapore and a gap analysis I should have finished last week. At ten thirty, I want her to walk through the partner handoff protocol, so I step out and find her at the printer with her back to me.
"Conference room two in five."
She turns, a stack of bound decks in her arms.
"Ridge or just us?"
"Just us."
Her expression doesn't change, but something in her posture does. She shifts her weight, and I clock it before I can stop myself. A small change. A bad habit. The kind of detail I am trained to notice and smart enough to leave alone.
I walk to the conference room and set up the prototype on the main screen. Cera arrives exactly five minutes later, sets her laptop on the table, and pulls out a chair across from me instead of next to me.
We work through the handoff sequence for forty minutes. She catches a data point I missed, flags a duplication in the metrics layer, and asks three questions that force me to rethink the entire third module. By the time we finish, the prototype is tighter than it was when I walked in.
"That work?"
She nods. "It works."
We pack up in silence. I reach the door first and hold it open. She walks through, and as she passes, my hand settles at the small of her back before I make the decision to put it there. It's there just long enough to guide her into the hallway, just long enough for her breath to catch.
She keeps walking, doesn't look back, and I follow her to the elevator bank where two analysts from logistics are waiting.
We ride down in silence, her standing to my left, close enough that the scent from the hotel finds me again.
It's lavender, maybe mint, clean enough that I have no business thinking about her skin.
The elevator opens on three, the analysts get off, and the doors close again. We're alone for six floors.
"You're staring. I think I'd be derelict if I didn't encourage you to blink. You've gotta protect your eyes."
I shift my gaze to the floor indicator.
"I'm thinking."
"About?"
"Work."
She makes a sound that is almost a laugh.
"Convincing."
The doors open on the ground floor, and we step into the lobby. I need nicotine, concrete, and ten minutes where I am not tracking the space between her body and mine.
"I'm grabbing lunch before the one o'clock with procurement," she says. "Care to join me?"
"Can't. I've got something I have to do."
Something, as if that something is not a cigarette, a locked car, and as much distance from her as I can get while still keeping her three feet down the hall.
We split at the main doors without saying anything else.
Back at my desk an hour later, my office door open, I hear her humming. The tune filters through the open door, a few bars of something I cannot name but recognize anyway. It catches on the edge of my brain, something heard before but not placed.
I pull up the Gulf-East terminal server to check for the tenth time since I shored everything back up, confirm the remote log, and drop into the encrypted partition. Looks like we are solid there.
Switching over to my current personal obsession, I open the original financial trace I ran after Dad's death.
The ten million that came through three shell companies, landed in an offshore account, and paid for the hit itself.
I followed it far enough to confirm what it bought, equipment and manpower staged weeks in advance, but never pushed past the structure hiding where it truly came from.
At the time, I didn't need to. Everyone already knew the Duvalls commissioned it.
I pull the shell companies back up now and start climbing.
The first two layers peel easily, routing through the Caymans and a Panamanian LLC that dissolved six months after Dad died.
The third layer hits a trust registered in Gibraltar, and the ownership structure fractures into four different entities that each own a percentage but none control.
I trace the entities. Two of them dissolve into more shells. One terminates at a law firm in London that handles institutional clients. The fourth loops back to a credit union in Louisiana that went under in 2019.
None of it resolves to a name.
I lean back and light a cigarette, the ember flaring in the dark.
Who backed that kind of capital? The Duvalls were Gulf logistics, mid-tier players with freight contracts and port access.
They were comfortable, maybe, but not the kind of family that keeps ten million offshore for contingencies.
Someone funded them. Someone with real money and a real reason to want my father gone, sitting a layer above a family too small to matter. That's who I'm hunting.
I pull the timeline from the night of the murder.
Ronnie and Dane were paid through a cash drop, according to Dane, so there's no way to trace that.
The call that brought Ridge in came from a burner, anonymized and routed through three towers.
The staging around the warehouse, tools left in specific places, the setup clean enough to read as premeditated from the first sweep.
I chart it against the money, the timing, the precision.
I finish the cigarette and crush it in the ashtray beside the keyboard. My reflection stares back from the black screen to my left, pale in the monitor's glow.
I close the partition and open a fresh terminal, punching in the tracking protocol I set on Dane the morning I left Florida. His phone pings from the same apartment complex off I-275. There's been no movement logged since yesterday afternoon.
That's too still for his normal patterns I observed when I located him.
I pull his credit activity. One transaction at a gas station Saturday morning, nothing since. His work log shows him clocking out Friday night, on schedule, with no absences flagged. He'd be moving, buying food, using his phone. He'd be existing.
I run a deeper check, pulling his call history. Three outbound calls Thursday, two on Friday morning, and then silence. There are no texts, no data usage, even though his phone is on, pinging the tower.
I lean back, fingers drumming against the desk.
I trace the security feed from Dane's building. No cameras in the hallway, just the parking lot and front entrance. I scan backward through the weekend. Dane's truck sits in the same spot, untouched. No footage of him leaving or coming back.
He ran, or he is already dead.
Tuesday night, I light a cigarette and watch the black screen where her camera used to be. She turned it off five minutes ago after she agreed to fall asleep with me again. We did it a few calls ago because I didn't know what else to ask her with everything in my head getting harder to separate.
She thinks I'm drifting off with her, but I'm not. I smoke and listen to her breathe. I wait until her breaths go shallow and note when she turns over in bed. I listened like that for two hours the last time.
"You still there?"
Her voice comes through quieter than usual.
"I'm here, about to fade out," I lie, wanting her to feel comfortable enough to fade out with me.
I take a drag and let the smoke settle in my lungs before I exhale. The room is dark except for the glow from the monitor and the city lights bleeding through the glass behind me.
She shifts, and I hear fabric against skin, maybe her pulling a blanket around herself.
She hums, and the sound filters through the speaker, a handful of notes that catch on something at the edge of my brain. I heard this before. Recently. The melody is too specific to be a coincidence.
And then it hits me. It was yesterday at the office. Cera, standing at the printer, was humming this exact same tune, in the exact same tone and voice.
The connection slams into place, impossible to dismiss.
The same tune and the same bars.
My throat tightens, and I force my breathing to stay even.
Peoria keeps humming, unaware, the sound threading through the silence between us.
My heart slams against my ribs, my hands brace on the desk, and every instinct I have screams at me to trace her right now, pull her IP, run her voice through the filters I built to break anonymity.
I double-check the mute, then let out a wrecked sound I've never made in front of anyone, into the dark. I'm losing it. I'm seeing each of them in the other. My obsession is bleeding into reality.
My mind starts to catalog the things that have niggled at me over the last several weeks, things that mean nothing on their own but together can't only be in my head.
The silver belly ring in Florida, the twin of the one Peoria wears for the camera. The tilt of Cera's head when I catch her out, a tic I've watched a hundred times on a dark screen.
Then there's her voice when she forgets to perform, too close to a voice I talk to every day at the office.
None of it seems meaningless now.
"I'm fading, Midnight. Sleep tight."
Peoria's voice pulls me back. I unmute.
"Me, too. Good night."
I end the call and sit in the dark, not moving.
Despite every fiber of my being telling me not to, I open a new terminal and pull the call log.
I am not doing this.
The trace protocols load, automated tools I built years ago to unpack VPN layers and locate endpoints anywhere in the world. I use them on rivals, threats, loose ends the family needs mapped. I made a personal vow to never aim them at Peoria.
That was the rule. The one rule I swore I would never break.
The day I know who she is, she stops being the one part of my life no one gets to touch.
I stare at the blinking cursor in the command line and tell myself to close it and walk away. Let the coincidence stay a coincidence. The tune could be anything. People hum the same songs. The ring could belong to a thousand women in a thousand cities. None of it proves anything.
My fingers move anyway.
I run the first layer. The VPN peels back to a commercial server, routing traffic through Dallas. Standard setup, nothing unusual. I punch through to the next node and find another relay, this one in Miami. She bounced herself well, better than most amateurs would know to do.
I keep peeling. The third layer routes through Atlanta. The fourth drops into a private server hosted on a residential network. My pulse kicks up, not from excitement but from the gravity of what I am doing. This is a violation, and if I'm wrong, there's no going back.
And I can't stop.
The investigator in me does not care about the rule. The investigator sees the aggregate of it all and refuses to look away. Pattern recognition doesn't have a conscience. It only has logic, and the logic here screams loud enough for me to pay attention.
I tell myself the lie that makes the betrayal possible. I am only ruling it out, proving it means nothing.
The fifth layer cracks, and her real IP blooms on the screen.
I freeze.
The address does not resolve to Peoria, Arizona. It resolves to New Orleans, in Mid-City. It pings on a residential block not ten minutes from my penthouse.
I pull the geolocation tighter, narrowing the radius. The ping settles on a street I know well, a stretch of renovated doubles and shotgun apartments between North Broad and the Ponchatrain Expressway.
I pull up a map and drop the pin, and it lands a few doors from the address on Cera's onboarding file. The woman behind the mask lives three miles from my office, on the same street as Cera.
My hands stop moving. My breath stops moving. The room goes quiet except for the hum of the tower and the faint rush of blood in my ears.
She's here, not across the country in a city I will never visit. Not safely distant and unreachable. Here. In New Orleans. Close enough that I could drive to her building in under ten minutes if I wanted to.
I close my eyes and see Cera at her desk Monday, humming the same tune that filtered through my speakers an hour ago.
I already know. I've known for longer than I care to admit.
I just didn't want to accept it.