41. Holden
FORTY-ONE
HOLDEN
I’m the first one here, which isn’t uncommon. I’ve been up since five with the Hudson file open, cross-referencing what we clocked at Pinecrest against the digital footprint I started building Saturday. I like to be prepared. I don’t like surprises.
The back room is set up the way it always is: chairs in a loose semicircle, table cleared, laptop open to the surveillance folder. I drop into my usual seat, kick my feet up, and scroll while I wait.
Knox arrives next. He’s wearing his usual black ops outfit and just leans against the wall instead of sitting. He nods at me. I nod back. Then he starts doing that thing with the quarter, rolling it across his knuckles, over and back, a metronome of nervous energy that he’d never admit is nervous.
“You tell Eli about Sunday?” I ask.
“Sent him the photos. Layout, parking, the restaurant sight lines. He didn’t respond.”
“Shocking.”
Micah comes through the bar entrance. He’s not working today, but he’s still carrying a crate of glasses that he sets on the counter.
“Morning.” He smiles, starts whistling while he puts the glasses away. Knox and I exchange a look. The guy seems lighter. Not in any way I can pinpoint. But like something that’s been sitting on his chest has eased.
Interesting.
“How’d Sunday night go?” I ask him. “With Sage.”
The whistling stops. The lightness goes with it.
“She’s not worried about herself,” Micah says.
“She’s worried about Amy. Tyler’s escalating—controlling her, isolating her, pushing her into things in bed she doesn’t want.
Sage kept the details to herself, protecting Amy’s privacy, but I got the shape of it.
” His jaw sets. “I told her we’d keep eyes on Amy. I meant it.”
“We’re already watching Tyler,” Knox says from the wall.
“Now there’s a second reason.”
I file it next to everything else: Davis’s best friend, the man who took a private meeting with a name on our kill list, is leaning on Sage’s roommate. We’ll need more before we move on him, but my hatred is already settled.
Milo blows in, a giant coffee in one hand, a bakery box in the other.
He’s talking before he’s fully through the door.
“Morning, gentlemen. I brought pastries. Don’t say I never contribute to society.
” He dumps the box on the table and drops into the chair next to mine, immediately putting his feet on the table.
Eli is last. He walks in with the kind of deliberate calm that makes me think he’s been rehearsing this version of himself in the car. He sits, opens the folder, and gets straight to it.
“Hudson. Here’s what we’ve got.”
Professional. Controlled. Whatever’s been eating at him, he’s locked it in a box and shoved it under the bed. Fine. I can work with the mask. We all can.
He runs through it. Hudson treats Pinecrest like a second home—golf on Sundays, the club gym Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings after the office.
Married, two kids in school, wife on a charity board Tuesdays and Thursdays.
The house sits in a gated community with residential security, which Eli flags and dismisses in the same breath. Too many eyes. Too many variables.
“The gym’s our window,” I say. “It’s the one place he’s predictable and alone.”
“Agreed.” Eli looks to Milo. “Tell me the locker room’s clean.”
Milo’s already got it pulled up. “Locker forty-seven. End of the second row, two from the showers, one from the sauna, three from the back exit. No cameras inside—the club won’t put them where members undress.
The floor feed runs through a closet I can get into, so I loop it, we move, nothing lands on a drive.
” He spreads his hands. “I cased it Sunday. We’re good. ”
Knox shifts against the wall. “What are the roles?”
“You can be on kitten duty.” Milo sits forward and grabs a pastry. “Kitten duty is the most important post,” he says. “Bad things happen to kittens when you leave them alone too long.”
“Yeah,” Micah says, voice warm. “And we all know Knox is her favorite.”
Knox doesn’t answer, but the quarter moves a little faster.
The door opens. Odin enters. Dark hair cut precise, gray suit, those odd pale eyes—one of them a half-second slow—moving over each of us.
“Gentlemen.” He takes a seat and plucks a pastry from the box. “Show me what you have.”
Eli presents the plan. Clean, efficient, no wasted words. I fill in the recon details. Knox adds the physical layout. Milo covers the digital angle and what he thinks the suicide note should cover. Micah suggests hanging the rope in the shower cubicle—it’ll take longer to find him that way.
Odin listens. Asks two questions about contingencies we’ve already addressed. When Eli finishes, Odin is quiet for a moment.
“Wednesday,” he says. “Next week.” He looks at his watch. “That’ll make it the seventeenth. I want logistics confirmed by the fourteenth.” He finishes the last of his pastry and somehow doesn’t have any crumbs. “And the girl? I assume you have the undertaker watching her again?”
Micah’s mouth goes flat at the word girl.
Mine nearly does too.
Odin always says it like that. The girl. Never Sage. Like naming her would make her real in a way that’s inconvenient.
“Dean is watching her,” Eli confirms. Too fast.
“And have you read him in?”
Eli’s quiet a half-second too long. “Not all the way.”
It’s a small pause. On Eli, a pause is an alarm.
Odin’s gaze settles on him and narrows. “Explain.”
Nobody moves. Milo stops chewing. Knox’s quarter goes silent in his hand.
Eli folds his hands on the table. Calm as a grave. “Dean knows she’s under protection. He knows there’s potential collateral exposure from the Davis disappearance. He doesn’t know how or why he disappeared. Or what our involvement was.”
Odin leans back in his chair. “You were asked to test him.”
“I am testing him.” Eli holds steady. “I was told to bring him in slowly. One piece at a time.”
“And yet you seem no closer than you were seven days ago. We need more from him than simple surveillance duty.”
“Understood,” Eli says. “I’ll sit him down this week. Report back.”
Odin studies him for another beat too long.
“Do that,” he says finally. “If Dean is going to be useful, I want him in play before another op goes sideways. Not after.”
Useful. Like we’re discussing a new piece of equipment. Not a man.
He rises, smooth and unhurried. “Keep your timelines tight. I don’t like drift.”
None of us answer. We don’t need to. He leaves the same way he came in—quiet enough that the room feels louder after the door clicks shut behind him.
For a second, nobody says shit.
Then Milo exhales through his nose. “Well. Delightful as always. Love when Father drops by to call Sage ‘the girl’ like she’s some Dickensian orphan we found in a coal chute.”
Eli’s face is stone but there’s a tic in his jaw. Milo is already pawing at the box for a second croissant.
I get up, stretching. “Anyone else need a drink, or is it too early for whiskey?”
“It’s eight in the morning,” Knox says.
“So that’s a maybe.”
I don’t wait for an answer. I head for the bar, snag a clean glass from the rack Micah was stocking, and pour two fingers of whiskey.
Behind me, Milo says, “Actually, while Captain Emotional Constipation is still seated—should we address whatever’s been lodged up your ass lately?”
I take a sip and turn.
Eli doesn’t look at him. He closes the folder with slow, precise care. “No.”
Milo spreads his hands. “Cool. Good talk. Love a collaborative environment.”
“Drop it,” Eli says.
Micah leans a hip against the table, arms folded, expression mild in the way that means he’s about to put a knife in somewhere soft. “You know he won’t.”
“I know,” Eli says flatly.
“Good,” Milo says. “We’re on the same page.” He leans back with his hands behind his head. “Because we need to talk about the fact we’re all obsessed with the same woman. Or are we just gonna keep pretending this is a professional surveillance operation with a little kissy-kissy on the side?”
“Milo—” Eli starts.
“No, he’s right.” I cut Eli off because someone has to, and it might as well be me. “We need to have this conversation. A shared fixation is a shared vulnerability. So let’s figure out what this actually is before it becomes a problem we can’t solve.”
Knox pushes off the wall. Takes a seat for the first time. That alone tells me he knows this matters.
“Okay, I’ll go first,” Micah says. “How do we make this work?”
“Ground rules,” I say, sipping the whiskey and enjoying the burn. “Because right now, we’re all orbiting her in our own little silos, and it’s creating friction.” I gesture between Eli and Micah with my glass. “Case in point.”
“There’s no friction,” Eli says flatly.
“There’s enough friction to start a fire, and you know it.
” I set my glass on the counter and lean forward.
“So here’s what I think. We stop tiptoeing around it.
She likes us. Some of us, she already more than likes.
The question is whether we turn that into a pissing contest, or whether we build something that lets her choose without any of us making her pay for it. ”
“We’re not competing,” Knox says. Three words. Verdict delivered.
“Agreed,” Milo says. “Competition implies a loser, and I refuse to lose at anything, so sharing is the only logical option.”
“It’s not up to us,” Micah says. “It’s up to her. She decides who she wants, when she wants them, and how. Our job is to make sure she feels safe enough to choose honestly.”
“Beautifully put.” Milo slow claps. “Spoken like a man who’s already been chosen.”
Micah’s face does something complicated. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, nothing.” Milo examines his fingernails. “Just that the cameras I set up caught you.”
The room goes still.
“You fucking what?” I demand, rounding the bar.
Micah’s mouth drops all the way open. “What cameras, Milo?”