Chapter 6
Liam
She's talking to the pipe.
Not a passing comment — a full-scale negotiation, complete with pauses where she apparently waits for the pipe to respond.
I'm standing in the kitchen doorway with two mugs of coffee, and Kari Engstrom is on her back under the sink, knees bent, one sock sliding off her foot, conducting diplomacy with corroded plumbing.
"I understand you're old," she says, her voice muffled and entirely too patient. "I respect that. But you cannot just decide to stop working. We had an agreement."
A wrench clangs against something. She hisses.
"Okay. Okay, that was my fault. I came in too aggressive. Let me try again."
More clanging. A grunt. Her foot twitches, the sock sliding further.
"Listen. I inherited you. I didn't ask for this relationship either. But I need you to carry water from point A to point B. That's your one job. I'm not asking you to do calculus."
A pause. She blows a strand of hair away from her face, though I can't see her face — only hips, legs, that one rebellious sock.
"Fine. You want to be difficult? I have a guy at the hardware store. Walt will know what to replace you with. Someone younger. Someone who actually functions."
The laugh comes out before I can catch it.
Not a half-breath through my nose. An actual sound — short, rough, scraped out of somewhere behind my ribs that I thought I'd sealed off years ago. It fills the kitchen like a gunshot.
Kari goes still under the sink. I go still in the doorway.
She slides out slowly, hair stuck to her forehead, a smudge of rust on her jaw, wrench in one hand. Her eyes find mine — not startled, not amused. Searching. Like she heard something she wasn't supposed to hear and she's trying to figure out where it came from.
My jaw locks. The instinct is immediate — shut it down, rebuild the wall, say something clipped about the plumbing. My body knows the choreography. Flatten the expression. Drop the gaze. Retreat.
But she's looking at me with rust on her face and that damn sock halfway off and the wrench held like she might use it as a weapon or a scepter, and for one full breath I don't move.
"Did you just — "
"Coffee's ready." I set one mug on the counter. "You should call an actual plumber for that."
"I am an actual plumber. As of three online tutorials ago."
I don't look back. I take my coffee to the front porch, sit in the chair with sight lines to both ends of the street, and pull out my phone.
Vance picks up on the second ring.
"The development company — Halcyon Ridge. I need March to run financials."
I give him the harassment pattern, Oren's intel, the sense that someone is orchestrating a campaign. He listens the way Vance listens — extracting what matters, discarding what doesn't.
"I'll brief March. She'll want a full property history." A pause. "Liam. How's your objectivity?"
My thumb presses hard against the side of the mug. "Intact."
He doesn't sound like he believes me.
Before I go back inside, I scan the block. A silver Altima sits at the far end of the street, idling. Tinted windows. No one gets out. Nine-fourteen a.m. By the time I check again, it's pulling away from the curb and turning the corner.
The attic is Margit's filing cabinet and forty years of dust.
Kari leads the way up the narrow pull-down staircase, flashlight in one hand, and I follow into a low space that smells like old paper and cedar. The fireproof cabinet sits in the corner under a bare bulb that still works. She opens the top drawer and goes quiet.
Folders. Dozens of them, labeled in the same careful handwriting I've seen on her teacup shelf, her spice jars, her inventory lists. Property records. Tax documents. Correspondence.
In the back of the second drawer, a manila envelope labeled OFFERS AND THREATS.
Inside: three letters from Prescott & Yates on heavy stationery, each more insistent than the last. A typed offer from Halcyon Ridge Development LLC. And four handwritten notes — same blocky capitals, same cheap notebook paper as the ones left for Kari.
GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN.
THIS ISN'T YOUR HOUSE ANYMORE.
SELL OR REGRET IT.
LAST WARNING.
Kari's hands are steady as she reads them. Her jaw is not.
"She kept everything," she says. "Just like I told you she would."
I photograph every document. The law firm letterhead, the shell company correspondence, the notes. March will want all of it.
Evie March — HPG's intelligence analyst, ex-Interpol financial crimes — calls before noon, sounding like she's been working on this for six hours.
"Halcyon Ridge Development. Registered four years ago. Delaware incorporation — everyone's favorite opacity. The registered agent is a law office in Wilmington that services hundreds of similar shells."
"Can you trace the beneficial owners?"
"I spent over a decade at Interpol tracking money through seventeen jurisdictions. Yes. I can trace them. It will simply take more than forty-five minutes."
"How long?"
"Give me the rest of the day. The interesting thing is the acquisition pattern. Four properties on that block in the last year. All below market. All from sellers who experienced some form of motivation to sell quickly."
"What kind of motivation?"
"Varied. One had a sudden code violation. Two received an aggressive audit from a city inspector who no longer works for the city. One simply became too frightened to stay." A pause. "Your client's great-aunt would have been the holdout."
"And now Kari is."
"Whoever is behind this has resources and patience. That's a more dangerous combination than either one alone."
Nina confirms the pattern when I cross for coffee. She got letters from Prescott & Yates — polite, then less polite. Zoning reassessment threats. The Hendersons at the end of the block sold months ago. The framing shop beside them — empty, sold to an unpronounceable LLC.
Oren, polishing shoes on his front steps: "Three offers in six months. Each one higher. They rotate the suits — young ones, old ones. Like they're trying to find the right flavor of pressure."
The block is being acquired systematically. The holdouts get pressure — legal where it works, something uglier where it doesn't.
That night, the pillow wall falls.
Late enough that even the house has settled into its vocabulary of creaks. The mattress has a dip in the center — decades of single occupancy carved a valley that pulls everything toward the middle. The pillows have been fighting it. Tonight, the pillows lose.
My body registers her before my mind does.
Hair against my jaw. Not just a strand — a whole cascade of it, smelling like coconut.
The back pressed against my chest through thin cotton.
The rise and fall of her breathing. My arm has committed treason — draped across her waist, palm flat against her stomach where the shirt has ridden up and there's a strip of bare skin under my fingers.
I don't move. Not because I'm still — because I'm choosing not to move.
There's a difference, and it matters, and I choose stillness anyway.
I choose the weight of her ribs expanding against mine, the warmth of coconut, the way her body fits against mine like something that was always supposed to be there.
My pulse beats against the back of her neck. She has to feel it.
She stirs. A small sound — not quite awake, not quite asleep. She shifts, and her hips press back, and every muscle in my body locks down so hard my teeth ache.
I close my eyes. Manufacture the rhythm of sleep with the precision I usually reserve for surveillance operations.
She goes still. A different stillness. Awake-still. The kind that means she knows exactly where my arm is, where my hand is, how much of her back is pressed against how much of my chest.
She doesn't move away.
A breath. Two. The ceiling fan clicks.
She settles deeper into me. Her hand finds my forearm, fingers resting against my wrist where my pulse is telling her everything my mouth never will.
She pretends to believe I'm sleeping. I let her.
Morning. Too bright, too soon, smelling like whatever she's already started baking. My arm is back on my side. She's downstairs. The bed is still warm where she was.
I press my hand flat against the warm spot before I pull it back.
I shower. Dress. Catalogue exits in the bathroom — the routine that's supposed to anchor me.
Reset parameters. Remind me what I am. The need to control everything — every lock, every route, every variable — is the only tool I've ever trusted.
I know this about myself. I know it's a wall, not a skill.
Control is the language I speak when I don't have words for what's actually happening.
It doesn't work this morning.
The kitchen smells like cinnamon. Kari is at the counter, flour on her collarbone, talking to the oven. She doesn't look at me. The back of her neck is flushed pink.
"Coffee's on the counter," she says, too brightly.
We don't talk about the pillow wall. We don't talk about the pause when she woke up and found my arm around her and chose to stay.
I take my coffee to the porch. The silver Altima is back. Same spot, three houses down. Different time of day. Same plates.
My phone buzzes. March: Ownership chain is interesting. Call when you can.
I should call. I should focus on the shell companies, the law firm, the acquisition pattern. That's the job. That's what Vance is paying me for.
But my hand is still warm where I pressed it to the sheets, and my pulse is doing something it hasn't done in years — something that feels less like a heartbeat and more like a countdown.
I'm not afraid of whoever is behind the threats.
I'm afraid of her. Of how right she felt. Of the fact that when the wall came down and my body had every reason to retreat, I didn't. I chose to stay. I chose warmth over distance, closeness over control, and I'd do it again.
The professional distance isn't eroding. It's gone.
And my hand remembers her skin. My ribs remember her breathing. I am not just in trouble anymore.
I am hers.