4. CJ
CJ
My fifth cup of coffee was cooling on my desk when the office door slammed open hard enough to rattle the frame.
I tense at the noise, a reflex I hate. I force my fingers that are tight around my pen to relax as I watch Deck walk in, as if the building belonged to him and I was just borrowing space.
I mean, technically it did belong to him, seeing as he co-owned the place with me, but tomatoe, tomato.
“Good news,” he says.
I don’t look up. “Do you realize every time you say that, it’s never good news?”
Deck dropped into the chair opposite me, all six-foot-five of muscle, tattoos, and questionable life choices. The chair groaned under him, and I made a mental note to apologize to Facilities later.
He looked like trouble wrapped in denim and a leather jacket, but beneath all that noise he was the softest man I knew. We met in the army, before life split into before and after Charlie. Losing Charlie had carved both of us into different shapes, and neither of us had fully come back.
Deck and I had requested to leave, and we built PalMerc Security out of nothing.
One client. One truck. It used to be a dance hall years ago before becoming a laundromat.
We converted it, keeping the old feel, and now we operate everywhere, protecting CEO’s, celebrities, and people who can’t afford to be seen as vulnerable.
We don’t sell safety. We sell time. Enough time to survive.
Deck became the backbone of it, though I’d never say that out loud. He handles the jobs that never make reports unless something goes wrong. Officially, we exist. Unofficially, we’re ghosts.
A dull ache settles beneath my sternum, the same one that always surfaces when I think about Charlie. He could have been a part of this. That feeling hits me like a quiet bruise that’s never healed.
Somewhere along the line, Deck decided his life purpose was finding “the one,” and his current strategy sits somewhere between optimism, chaos, and complete delusion.
I take a slow sip of coffee.
“What do you want, Deck?”
He grins, “I might have found my future husband.”
I close my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. “For fuck’s sake.”
I didn’t bother hiding my reaction. Outside of work, he spent most of his time on what he called romantic reconnaissance, which mostly involved confusing strangers and calling it destiny.
Personally, I think his soulmate is already sitting on our conference table scrolling through his phone, but I’m not telling him that. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
“How many is that now?”
He holds up three fingers.
“Try four this month,” I say.
Deck corrects me immediately, “Three and a half.”
“That is not how numbers work.”
“It is when they’re little and cute.” He says, a grin wide across his face.
I stare at him. What the fuck. “You’re impossible.”
He just grins wider, bright blue eyes full of trouble. A walking contradiction, chaos wrapped in loyalty, but he is also the person I trust when things go bad.
Outside of work, he looks like a stereotype that escaped HR’s worst nightmares: Ripped jeans, black Henley, leather jacket, tattoos layered over old scars, and a red beard that somehow makes him look even more untrustworthy.
“Why are you really here?” I ask, rubbing my temple. “It’s too early for whatever this is.” Waving my hand at him.
“My cheerful personality?”
“Sure,” I say, rolling my eyes.
He ignores that entirely. “Your new brother-in-law works at the coffee shop down the street. He’s the barista, and his name is Toby.”
A laugh slips out before I can stop it, and Deck points at me like he’s caught me in something.
“There it is.” He says loudly.
“What?”
He motions at me with his head, “That smile.”
“Get out.”
But he sinks further into the chair instead.
“Nope. Business.”
The humor drains from his face so fast the room shifts with it when he drops the file on my desk.
“Mason Sterling.”
I open it and look at his photo. My stomach tightens as I study it. Something cold slides beneath my ribs, the kind of instinct that never lies. My jaw locks as I take Mason in.
“Twenty-two. Five foot eight. Dark blonde hair. Green eyes. Missing from Seattle.”
Three months.
I read faster.
“High-net-worth family,” I say.
Old money. Influence. Connections that don’t show up in public databases. The kind of people who could create noise overnight, yet they had chosen silence. Why had this been allowed to sit for three months?
That’s what bothers me. Not just the missing kid, but the delay, clearly the control, but also the silence. This doesn’t feel like a search; It feels managed. I flip another page.
“No interviews. No press. No public statements.” A faint pressure starts to build behind my eyes, the warning sign of a headache I had been ignoring for days.
Deck watched me closely as I read. The Sterlings weren’t acting like parents looking for a missing son. They were acting like people managing a situation. Power rarely hides what it loses. It hides what it fears losing control of.
When I look up, I already know.
“This feels wrong.”
He nods once. “I thought so too.”
Instead, there was nothing.
“What aren’t they telling us?” I ask. A faint prickle crawls along the back of my neck. This is a sensation I trust. It means danger. It means someone is lying.
Deck folds his arms. “They’re not acting like parents looking for a missing kid.”
“Exactly.”
I tap the file once.
“They’re acting like people managing a situation. Why?”
“And that,” Deck says quietly, “is the million-dollar question.”
He leans back, stretching out. Tattoos shift across his forearms, old ink over older scars. Some stories visible. Most not.
The room settles into that familiar kind of silence we only get when something doesn’t add up. Outside, fog rolls over the bay. A ferry moves through it like a ghost.
Deck picks up the file again.
“The job pays well.”
“Money isn’t the issue.”
“No,” he agrees. “It isn’t.”
Because it never is. It’s the delay that is the issue. The three months are not hesitation. This is pure intent.
“Ransom?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“Blackmail?”
“Nothing.”
“Family scandal?”
Deck’s mouth twitches.
“Now we’re getting warmer.”
I lean back. A missing man isn’t the question, not really.
The young man is real; That part of this is simple.
It’s the silence and the timing. The absence of desperation from parents who should be raising hell to get their son back.
But they aren’t. Instead, we get this file three months after he disappears.
Three months of no leads, no questions. No action.
“Ask the FBI for everything they’ll share,” I say. “Set up a meeting.”
Deck stands.
“You know most CEO’s have assistants, right?”
“And?”
“I’m not your assistant,” he grumbles, but I know he would do it.
“You’re making the meeting.”
“I’m not a PA.”
“You’re making the meeting.”
He points at me. “One day, I’m saying no.”
I huff out a laugh. “You won’t.”
He exhales. “Yeah. Probably not.”
At the door, I call out, “What happened with the barista?”
He doesn’t turn fully.
“Nothing.”
I glance up.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
Silence, and he shifts.
“Yoda, do you know how hard it is to find a man who appreciates all this…” He gestures vaguely at himself. “…and has unresolved abandonment issues?”
I stare at him. “Maybe share less of your internal monologue.”
“And that right there,” he says, finally looking at me, “is why you’re single.”
When the door shut behind him, I looked out the window. Deck joked about my love life, but he was the only one who knew what happened with Charlie. The fear of losing someone doesn’t fade. It just learns how to sit quietly in the background of everything.
I reach for the phone.
Something about Mason Sterling wouldn’t let go. Instinct is the thing that kept me alive, and it was telling me the Sterlings weren’t just hiding something. They were protecting it.
And I’m going to find out what.
* * *
The rest of the day doesn’t move the way it should. It never does when something lodges itself in my head the way Mason has done. By the time I leave the office, the fog over the bay has lifted slightly, but it doesn’t feel like clarity. Just exposure.
The gym downstairs was loud enough to drown out thought, or it should have been. Deck wasn’t there, which made the space feel off.
The space is familiar to me. Steel, rubber mats, the dull thud of weights being dropped too hard by people who don’t know better. It’s loud enough to drown out thought, or at least it’s supposed to.
I warmed up, then moved to the bench press. The bar settled into my grip, familiar and grounding. I lifted on instinct.
Up.
Down.
Up again.
My breathing steadied, but my thoughts didn’t. Mason Sterling stayed in my head like a bruise that refused to fade. Old money families don’t wait three months unless someone is controlling the timeline.
Up.
twenty-two.
Down.
Missing three months. Old money families don’t wait three months unless something or someone is controlling the timeline. And that something sits wrong in my chest.
The bar presses into my palms, grounding me. My muscles strain, burning in a way that feels honest. I feel sweat slide down my spine, cold against my overheated skin.
I racked the bar harder than I meant to. Heads turned. I ignored them. The silence around Mason was wrong. People don’t go missing without noise. Not in families like his.
Next set. Pull-downs.
My lats engage, muscles tightening under the strain, back and shoulders working in rhythm. The movement should empty my head, but it doesn’t.
Instead, every repetition drags his back into focus. Not his photo, not his file, but the gap around his disappearance. The silence where panic should be. People don’t go missing like that without noise. Not in families like the Sterlings.
I pause mid-rep. The weight hangs for a second longer than it should. My jaw tightens, and I finish the set.
By the time I finished, sweat clung to my skin and the weight in my chest felt heavier than the iron in my hands.
Mason sits there still, unresolved, and still wrong in a way I can’t name yet. I set the dumbbells down, rolling my shoulders out as I exhale. Across the gym someone laughs too loudly, and life continues exactly as it should.
But it feels off, because somewhere in Seattle, a twenty-two-year-old man has been missing long enough for people to stop reacting to it like an emergency.
And someone has decided that’s acceptable.
I grab my towel and wipe my face, staring at nothing in particular. The thought lands again, heavier this time.
This wasn’t a missing person case. It was a decision someone was maintaining.
A strange heaviness settles low in my stomach, the kind that is warning me of a storm coming. I don’t know why or who, but I feel it.
Something is about to shift.