Chapter 17 #2
Poor Briggs. Running Redhawk was stressful, and usually, we shared the load to balance it out. At the moment, he was handling almost all of it, but he’d agreed to this setup. He’d known what he was getting into, and we’d talked about what it’d mean.
I set the phone down and spent another hour working on the renegotiation memo.
It contained all the careful, precise language that cost nothing to write and prevented a great deal of expensive misunderstandings later.
All the contract mumbo jumbo had always seemed like a foreign language to me, but it was something I had to learn once Redhawk got going.
At some point, a handshake alone wasn’t enough when the stakes passed a certain point.
The second item in the priority queue was simpler—a personnel review for a new hire Briggs was recommending for the domestic protection division.
I got through most of it before my gaze drifted to the window and settled on the drive below, where East’s crew had moved their work closer to the house.
A truck was parked near the far row of bushes, its tailgate down, with two men unloading lumber in the easy rhythm of people who knew exactly what they were doing.
East had said the pergola framing would go up this week, and then they’d start on the carriage house renovation the week after.
He thought he’d have a few guys available to build the play structure (I might have texted him last night).
In fact, I had gone straight to my laptop after she fell asleep and spent forty-five minutes reading reviews with the focused intensity I usually reserved for threat assessments.
Watching the crew work, the way the lumber stacked up in ordered rows, the progress of it, I felt something ease in my chest that I hadn't known was tight.
This was the right choice.
I wasn't sure about much. There was Redhawk's future if I continued pulling back, and what Castleton would look like in six months.
Then there was the fact that I wasn't sure I knew how to live inside a life that didn't have an extraction point—but this, the lumber stacked in the yard of a house with actual grass, felt unambiguously correct.
I went back to the personnel review.
Around ten, I got up to pour a second coffee.
I stood at the kitchen window again, a different window this time, facing the back gardens and the greenhouses, looking at the glass catching the morning light.
I thought about what Sage had said last night at the pizza place, about working with what was already there instead of clearing it and starting over.
I thought about it more than was useful.
I’d already forwarded her plans to the grounds crew that was going to be helping around here.
They’d be able to get started on the basics.
Sage had wanted to work with some of the plants herself, but the foundational work could all be done by others.
I knew she wouldn’t have much time after working all day at her shop. She was a busy lady.
Last night, she tucked Opal’s coloring into her pocket with both hands, treating it like something precious.
I couldn’t stop watching her after that.
She had a confident, unselfconscious way of occupying space, and the way she talked about plants as if they were people she cared for…
well, I respected that. She was interesting to talk to, and even the two hours we spent over pizza wasn’t long enough.
She’d been awesome with Opal, too, talking about the names of her different plants like they were her best friends.
Hell, maybe they were. But that wasn’t right.
I saw how she was with her brothers and sisters.
They were all close. Sage was awesome with people.
That gave me pause. Could she be seeing someone?
She'd glanced toward the kitchen twice during dinner, where that creep-o had disappeared to.
I hadn't missed that, and I hadn't missed the micro-expression she'd corrected each time—the small, professional smoothing of her face when she caught herself. I’d filed the potential threat away in the same part of my mind where I kept things that required monitoring.
I'd run the name through the back of my mind on the drive home while Opal slept in her booster seat, her mouth slightly open, grease spread from one end to the other. There had been a way he’d said Sage's name, precise and careful, like a word he'd practiced, and the way he'd looked at her that worried me. I didn’t like it.
I set down the coffee cup.
Pulling up a secondary browser on the laptop, I ran Alan through the basic open-source search I could do without triggering anything through Redhawk’s systems. It was easy to find his last name in the restaurant’s employment records.
Boaz. I didn’t want anything to flag internally at Redhawk.
The last thing I needed was Briggs up my ass about running background checks on the residents of Wildwood Meadows based on a gut feeling and a bad vibe at a pizza place.
It wasn’t what Redhawk resources were for — but I looked anyway, because the feeling was there, and it was a particular frequency I had learned not to ignore.
The search didn't pull up much—social media absence, which could mean nothing or something, a single address history showing he'd moved here from Idaho in late February, no professional footprint I could locate. The man had grown up in Idaho in the foster system, which was interesting and a little Holt adjacent. It that didn’t necessarily mean much. Different states. Wade was closed-mouthed about his origin story, and I didn’t blame him.
It didn’t mean that I would poke into people’s business without their say-so.
I closed the browser and sat with it for a minute. There wasn’t any reason to mention anything to Sage.
Not yet—not without something concrete, not without a reason beyond I didn't like the way he looked at her.
She had six siblings and a solid family, and she didn't need a man she barely knew making assumptions about the people in her town based on a two-minute interaction and years of reading threat indicators for a living.
Still.
The rest of the morning moved in the ordered, satisfying rhythm that good work had—the Fernandez memo, two calls with the Redhawk legal team about a liability clause in the Central America contract, a video check-in with Parrish, who confirmed he'd start the financial sweep that afternoon.
By noon, I had cleared most of the overnight backlog and moved three items from urgent to resolved, which was the closest I came to satisfaction in administrative work.
My phone buzzed on my desk.
Wade
You’re expected at Sunday dinner. Maggie says so.
What if I don’t want to?
Wade
You owe me.
This the chip you want to call?
Wade
Every Sunday dinner for a year. Then we’ll be even.
Jesus.
Wade
Are you commitment-phobic? I did take a bullet for you …
I could have managed, and it was in the ass. The fleshy part. Not even the pucker part. Your butt is fine.
Wade
Hardly. There’s a scar. You know what? You’re a pucker.
You’re a dick face.
You don’t even get any action anymore. So it isn’t like chicks are even seeing it.
Wade
True. It’s kind of sad.
I tossed the phone onto my desk. A year. A smile broke out on my face—a year of family dinners. That feeling… it was happiness.