Chapter 10
Liam
The footage shows nothing.
I've been scrubbing through every angle for an hour. Four exterior cameras. Two interior. Six feeds covering every approach to the Foxglove.
Nothing.
No shadow crossing the porch. No hand sliding a photograph under the door. Just the static glow of the porch light catching moths and the slow creep of darkness across the yard.
Whoever left that photo knew exactly where I put the cameras. Not approximately. Not a lucky guess. They knew the precise angles, the blind spots — the narrow sliver along the east side of the porch where the camera's field of view doesn't quite reach the door.
I installed those cameras yesterday.
My phone screen reflects in the dark kitchen window.
Behind me, the house settles — the radiator's metallic tick, old joists adjusting, Kari's breathing drifting down the stairs.
She fell asleep against the headboard with a book on her chest while I told her I needed to check the feeds one more time.
That was an hour ago.
There's nothing to find. That's the point. That's the message: I can reach her anytime I want.
My jaw locks. The photograph sits in a zip-lock bag on the counter next to the letter — both pieces of evidence that amount to the same thing: I'm not enough.
Vance answers on the second ring.
"The cameras got nothing. Whoever delivered the photo approached from the east side of the porch. Narrow gap in coverage — maybe eighteen inches. They'd have to know the exact placement."
"You installed those cameras yesterday," he says.
"Yes."
"And someone mapped the blind spots in under twenty-four hours."
"Or they watched me install them."
"Are you compromised?" No buildup. Just the blade.
"No."
"Cade."
"I said no."
"You refused rotation, you've been on-site for over a week, and someone walked through your security perimeter like it was a suggestion. So I'll ask once more."
My thumb presses hard enough against the phone to whiten the nail bed. "I'm doing my job."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the answer I've got."
Silence. Then: "I'm sending you what Evie pulled. Check your email. And Cade — if the answer changes, I need to hear it from you before I figure it out myself."
Evie's email arrives while I'm standing in the cold backyard staring at camera angles I've already verified. Subject line: Halcyon Ridge — Novak.
Gus Novak. Project manager, assigned to the Foxglove block acquisition a few years ago.
Before him, Halcyon Ridge used rotating attorneys through Prescott & Yates.
After Novak — after someone decided the block wasn't moving fast enough — the tactics changed.
More aggressive offers. Code violations materializing from nowhere. The notes to Kari started.
"Mid-level," Evie writes. "Not the principal. Someone told him to make it happen and he took the mandate literally. He's a problem-solver who doesn't know when the problem-solving becomes criminal. That makes him more dangerous than a professional — he's improvising."
Gus Novak. Not a mastermind. Not muscle. A mid-level project manager who decided that stalking a woman out of her home qualified as due diligence.
Morning light hits the kitchen in pale stripes. Kari is already up — cinnamon and butter, which means stress-baking. Snickerdoodles, her third batch this week.
She's at the counter with her back to me, rolling dough between her palms with the precision that means she's thinking hard.
"Morning," she says without turning.
"Morning."
"Coffee's on the counter. Nina brought over a bag of her single-origin whatever yesterday while you were having your daily staring contest with the backyard."
"I was checking the perimeter."
"You were brooding attractively near the fence line. Nina's words, not mine."
The coffee is strong enough to strip paint. I take the first sip by the window, eyes tracking the street by habit.
My phone buzzes. A text — an image file.
A scan of a handwritten note. Block capitals on cheap notebook paper.
SHE BAKES EVERY MORNING. BANANA brEAD. COOKIES. MUFFINS. STARTS BEFORE LIGHT. SHE TALKS TO THE WALLS LIKE THEY CAN HEAR HER.
My hand tightens around the phone.
She talks to the walls like they can hear her. Not something you'd know from watching through a window. That's a detail you only learn by being close enough to hear — by pressing your ear to a gap in the clapboard, by finding a way into the bones of this house I still haven't mapped.
"Liam?" Kari's voice, behind me. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where your jaw goes tight and you need to inspect something outside." She's turned from the counter, dough still in one flour-dusted hand. Her eyes read something in mine that makes her set it down. "What happened?"
"New threat. The person watching you knows your baking schedule. Knows when you start work. Knows you talk to the house."
Kari goes still. Not dramatic shock — the quiet, internal stillness of someone absorbing a blow they've been bracing for. Her thumb finds her teeth. Taps once.
"They've been inside," she says.
"Close enough to hear through the walls."
"Those walls are plaster and horsehair over original framing. Not exactly soundproof." She says it like a renovation problem. "How long do you think they’ve been listening?"
"A few weeks. There’s a project manager named Gus Novak — assigned to acquire this block for Halcyon Ridge. The harassment escalated when he took over."
"Gus Novak." She tests the weight of it. Gives the threat a name. "Is he dangerous?"
"He's desperate. That's worse."
She nods. Picks the dough back up. Rolls it. Sets it on the sheet.
"Kari."
"I'm fine. I'm processing. You brood near fence lines. I bake things."
The fury isn't professional. Professional fury is cold — narrows your focus, channels into response.
This is hot. The kind that pulses at the edges of your vision, that wants to find Gus Novak and explain in specific terms what happens when you stalk a woman who names her power tools and thinks a garden gnome is adequate security.
I set my phone face-down. Uncurl my fingers. Breathe.
"I'm going to get everything Evie has on Novak. Employment records, vehicle registration. If he's been watching this house, he's doing it from somewhere with a sightline."
"Okay." Kari slides the sheet into the oven. Turns to face me fully, leaning against the counter, flour on her collarbone. "But first — are you okay?"
The question stops me.
"Am I okay."
"Not about the case. Not about Novak or the cameras." She tips her head, studying me the way she studies load-bearing walls — looking for cracks, for stress points. "About you."
Nobody asks me that. Vance asks if I'm compromised. Evie asks if I need resources. Nobody asks if I'm okay — not like this, standing in a flour-dusted kitchen with concern that has nothing to do with the case.
"I'm fine," I say, because I'm a liar.
"Mm." She holds my gaze three beats longer than comfortable, then nods like she's filed my answer under things Liam says that aren't true. "There's cookie dough left if you want to stress-bake with me."
"I'll pass."
"Your loss. The apron really brings out your whole reluctant-protector aesthetic."
The corner of my mouth does something I don't authorize.
Evie sends Novak's employment history — commercial real estate, three firms in five years. Before Halcyon Ridge, he worked acquisitions for a group in Virginia that settled two harassment complaints from holdout property owners. Not charges. Settlements. NDAs.
Gus Novak isn't violent. He pushes a boundary, then another, each step small enough that he can tell himself he hasn't crossed a line. By the time he looks back, the line is a mile behind him.
Vance texts: March says Novak drives a silver Nissan Altima. Delaware plates. Check the block.
I check the block. Twice. No silver Altima right now. Whoever Novak is, he's not sitting in a parked car on Kari’s block. Smarter than that, or more patient.
The house goes quiet after dark. Kari comes downstairs in an oversized sweatshirt, hair damp, smelling like coconut. She sits on the other end of the couch and pulls her knees up.
"Tell me something," she says.
"What."
"Anything. Something that isn't about cameras or Novak or the fact that someone's been listening to me talk to my tools."
"My first week at HPG, Vance put me on a protective detail for a diplomat's cat."
Her eyebrows go up. "A cat."
"Seventeen-pound Maine Coon named Ambassador. The diplomat was convinced someone was trying to catnap him."
"Was someone?"
"No. Ambassador was escaping on his own. Figured out how to open the screen door. Took me three days to solve a case the cat solved in ten seconds."
The laugh is quiet and real. She drops her forehead against her knees, shoulders shaking.
Something cracks in my chest. A hairline fracture in the wall I've been maintaining since the first morning I woke up with her hair against my jaw. It doesn't shatter. It gives. The way old plaster gives when the house shifts underneath it.
"Come on," I say. "It's late."
No pillow wall. That fiction dissolved days ago. The bed is too small for two people to share without touching, which is a problem I've stopped pretending is a problem.
Kari falls asleep the way she does everything — all at once. One minute she's adjusting her pillow, the next her breathing evens out and her body curves toward the center. Toward me.
Her head settles against my shoulder. Her hair fans across my arm, carrying the coconut scent that's become the most dangerous thing in this house.
More dangerous than the gaps in my camera coverage.
More dangerous than a mid-level project manager who's crossed the line from harassment into something that could put him in a cell.
I’m staring up and I know this ceiling now — the water stain shaped like a boot, the crack from the light fixture to the corner. I've mapped this room the way I map every room. What I haven't mapped is the exact moment it stopped being a post.
Kari's hand rests on my chest, fingers loosely curled, like she reached for something in her sleep and found me.
Vance asked if I was compromised. I said no. I lied.
Her breath catches once — a small sound — and my arm tightens around her before I can run the calculation about professional distance, about what happens when the man tasked with keeping her safe is the same man who can't breathe right when she's this close.
Tomorrow I'll be the operative again. Tomorrow I'll track Novak's movements, find the place he watches from.
But right now, with her breathing against my shoulder and her hand on my chest like a question I don't know how to answer — right now I'm just a man holding the most important thing he's ever been asked to protect.
Knowing he'd burn the entire perimeter to keep her safe.
Knowing that's exactly the kind of thinking that gets people killed.