Chapter Two | TORIN #2
Noa crossed her arms. “And if I decide I don’t like the plan?”
“Then you’ll tell me.”
“That’s it?”
“Irish diplomacy,” I said. “We argue loudly and proceed anyway.”
Another quick flicker of amusement crossed her face.
“Fine,” she said.
“Grand.”
She picked up the duffel again. “Let’s go before I change my mind.”
“For the record, I think you’ll threaten to change your mind at least six more times today.”
“You seem very confident about that.”
“I’m usually right.”
“That sounds unbearable.”
“You’ll survive.”
“I’m suddenly less convinced.”
Her eyes flicked over my face once more before she headed for the door, and for the first time since Landon handed me the assignment, the job stopped feeling routine.
Kent walked us to the door of the outer office. She put her hand briefly on Noa’s arm. Noa didn’t pull away from it, and Kent didn’t hold on.
We went down to the street together.
June air off the bay cut through the exhaust on Merchant Row, the waterfront smell carrying even this far inland.
The fog still clung to the glass towers off Commerce Row, softening their edges in the late-morning light.
Delivery trucks crowded the curb. Somewhere down the block, a bus exhaled hard at the stop.
I brought the vehicle around from the side lot.
Black, clean, and forgettable if you didn’t know what to look for.
Noa stopped beside the passenger door. “You drive something subtler when you’re trying not to attract attention?”
“This is subtle.”
“It looks like it bench-presses civilians recreationally.”
I barked out a laugh.
“Get in the vehicle, sweetheart.”
“See, that’s exactly the sort of thing that makes me consider violence.”
“You’d lose.”
“You sound very sure about that.”
“I’m Irish. Confidence comes factory-installed.”
That got another quick flash of amusement before she slid into the passenger seat.
***
The HPG safe house was a twenty-minute drive east, the city doing its mid-morning business past the windows, the bay haze still catching on the glass towers off Commerce Row. It sat off a side street in a residential block where nobody looked twice at a vehicle pulling into a private garage.
Ground-floor unit, furnished short-term rental from the outside and something else entirely from the inside — reinforced door, clean sightlines from every window, quiet that came from insulation built for a specific purpose.
I moved through it on instinct: windows, back exit, locks, street view. Noa put her duffel on the kitchen table and said nothing.
The kitchen had what HPG always left between activations — jerky, trail mix, protein bars on the shelf, a fridge running cold with nothing in it but condiments and a half-empty bottle of water. No one had provisioned for an arrival. This place was built to keep people alive, not comfortable.
I found two protein bars and put one on the table in front of her without asking.
She picked it up, looked at it, and unwrapped it. “Romantic.”
“Six hundred calories and enough preservatives to survive nuclear war.” I set up the laptop on the kitchen table. “Don’t knock the protein bar.”
“I’m not knocking it.” She bit into it and leaned against the counter, watching me. “You do this a lot?”
“Show up when things go wrong? Every time. My record is perfect, which is more than most can say.”
“Must be nice,” she said, “having a job description that covers everything.”
“It has its advantages.”
She held my gaze while she chewed, still tracking the room, the exits, and me.
The awareness went straight under my skin.
I opened the laptop. “Right. Now we look at the package.”
Noa pushed off the counter, unzipped the duffel, and pulled out the padded envelope — sealed at both ends with clear tape, unmarked, the size of a slim hardcover. She set it on the table.
The room seemed to get quieter once it was between us.
“You open it,” I said.
She peeled the tape back cleanly, reached inside, and drew out a small flat drive — matte black casing, unmarked, the kind of thing you could buy in an electronics shop and the kind of thing that turned up in situations like this one because it held more than it looked like it held.
“Comforting,” she said.
I slotted it into the laptop.
Financial records populated the screen. Hundreds of pages of them — transaction logs, wire transfers, account numbers running through shell company after shell company in a chain built to be difficult to follow and not quite difficult enough.
A charitable foundation sat at the center of it.
Donations moved through the foundation in identical amounts before reappearing offshore hours later under different corporate names.
Noa moved closer as she read over my shoulder.
Close enough that I caught the clean scent of her shampoo under the cold city air still trapped in her jacket.
“Those transfers are cycling the same money through three different entities,” she said quietly. “That’s a laundering operation.”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“They’re running it through a foundation.” She straightened. “Someone built that to be invisible.”
“Someone did.” I scrolled through the records. Account traces without the full ownership chain. Transfers without names attached. Enough to see the shape of it. Not enough to name anyone.
Then a name surfaced.
Valenti Consortium.
One of the largest development and investment firms on the West Coast. Politically connected. Expensive enough to bury problems instead of solving them.
Noa exhaled slowly through her nose. “That’s not small-player money.”
“No.”
“So Price was building a case.”
“Looks that way.”
“And someone found out.”
I didn’t answer because she didn’t need me to. She’d already gotten there.
“So whoever killed him,” she said, “knows this didn’t get to Price. They may know Claudia’s courier was at that bench. And they may know I walked away with it.”
“That would be my guess.”
“And we can’t hand this to anyone official because we don’t know who’s clean.”
“Not until Landon’s team identifies who Price was building against and who had the reach to put a bullet in him before the handoff.”
She didn’t argue. She stared at the screen, jaw tight, eyes dark.
Then she said, “That’s incredibly bad for my plans this week.”
My mouth pulled sideways before I could stop it.
The woman could stand in the middle of a disaster and still sound unimpressed by it.
“Good news,” I told her. “You’ve got me.”
“That wasn’t remotely reassuring.”
“It should be. My survival rate’s excellent.”
“And humble besides.”
“One of my worst qualities.”
Her mouth twitched again.
I was about to call Landon when my phone lit up with his name.
I answered immediately. “Talk to me.”
“How’s the safe house?” His voice was even. It was always even.
“We’ve been through the device. Financial records, shell companies, a charitable foundation, Valenti Consortium traces. We can see the structure, not the people behind it.”
A pause. “My team’s on it. Stay where you are while we work the background.”
I moved to the window and checked the street below. A dark sedan had been parked at the far end of the block since we arrived.
It hadn’t moved.
Then the engine turned over.
“Dempsey,” Landon said.
“I see it.”
The sedan rolled forward slow, too deliberate for neighborhood traffic.
Then something hit the front of the building hard enough to rattle the glass in the kitchen cabinets.
Noa’s head snapped toward the sound.
The second impact came with a dull thump, followed by the bright, vicious bloom of fire licking up past the front window.
Accelerant.
Not a warning. A flush.
“We move now,” I said.
Noa had the duffel off the table before I finished the word.
Smoke pushed under the front door in a dark ribbon, carrying the sharp chemical stink of gasoline and burning insulation. The alarm screamed overhead. Heat rolled through the apartment fast, turning the air thick and metallic.
I yanked the drive free from the laptop, shoved it into my jacket, and slammed the lid shut.
“The back exit is clear,” I said.
“Already there.”
Christ.
That got under my skin.
No panic. No freeze. No useless questions.
She was already moving.
The front window cracked behind us as the fire took the room harder. Glass popped, heat punched down the hall, and the cheap curtains went up with a sound like paper tearing.
Noa reached the rear door ahead of me.
“Tell me the vehicle’s close,” she said.
“It’s practically kissing the alley.”
“Good.”
I got us through the back and down the steps into the alley. The air outside hit cold and damp after the heat inside, thick with the smell of smoke rolling over the roofline.
The vehicle was where I’d left it.
I had her in the passenger seat and the engine running before the garage door had finished closing behind us, and we were three blocks east before anything appeared in the mirror.
Behind us, smoke rose over the residential block in a dirty column.
The afternoon light hit the windshield hard off the bay, and I took the next turn clean — no signal — and pushed east into traffic. HPG was still working on a new location. Whoever had tracked us to the safe house was somewhere behind us, and the first safe house was gone.
The only thing between Noa and whatever came next was me, a head start, and a city with nowhere safe left to stand.