Cause and Origin (Point of Origin #1)

The fire tells him how. The money tells her who. This time the fire was set — and someone locked a man inside it.

Roan Holbrook reads burns for a living, and the wildfire above Cordell is lying to him.

His dog sits and stares at a cellar the flames haven’t reached — alerting on gasoline, and on the man locked in the dark below it.

Roan gets him out. Before the stranger remembers he isn’t supposed to talk, he says the six words that change everything: it wasn’t supposed to be tonight.

An accident doesn’t run on a schedule.

Mara Ellison reads money, and she flagged this exact address two weeks before it burned.

She drives up onto Roan’s crime scene with a fraud hold and a claim that paid too clean — and stops cold when she recognizes the man crouched in the ash.

They worked a fire like this one before.

She was ordered, in writing, to stop looking. She walked. He didn’t.

Now there’s a poured line, a fire-department key that shouldn’t exist, and a burn that proves what they both already knew: this wasn’t one man with a can of gas. It’s a method — and it reaches inside the very office they’re supposed to report it to.

One complete case. One long fuse. And the one person each of them swore they were done with.