Chapter 8
ISLA
Jax's radio came alive at two in the afternoon.
Clark had it on the kitchen counter — a compact satellite unit, military-adjacent, the kind that worked when everything else didn't. I heard the static first and then Jax Mercer's voice, clipped and direct.
Clark crossed the room and picked it up. "Go ahead."
"Situation update. Someone's asking questions about Ms. Montgomery's location. Three contacts in the last eighteen hours, all from the same IP, all routed through a proxy that we've traced to the firm's opposition counsel." A pause. "They're not close. But they're methodical."
"Source?"
"Renata flagged it. She's monitoring. No physical movement yet." Another pause. "Your assessment?"
Clark's eyes moved to me. Brief, careful. "Holding. Enhanced watch from this end."
"Agreed. Check in at twenty-hundred."
The radio went silent.
I sat with my hands flat on the table and felt the cabin — which had been warm and present and real for the last twenty hours — shift slightly in my perception. Not unsafe. Just no longer separate from everything I'd come here to be separate from.
"They don't know where you are," Clark said. He'd turned to face me. "To be clear."
"I heard."
"I want to say it anyway."
I looked at him. He was standing with the radio in his hand and the operational control fully back in place — not cold, but professional in the way I now understood meant he was working, which meant he was doing what he was built for.
"Who is it?" I asked.
"I don't need to know that to do my job."
"I wasn't asking for operational purposes." I kept my voice even. "I was asking because I've been managing information about this for three years, and I would like to understand what's happening."
He looked at me for a moment. "Renata's assessment is that it's surveillance, not action. Someone wants to know if they can find you before you testify. If the answer is no, the inquiry stops."
"And if the answer is yes?"
"The answer is no." Simple. Final. Not a reassurance — a fact.
I breathed in. Breathed out.
"There are forty-seven people at that company," I said.
"Who attended board meetings. Who saw the same numbers I saw.
" I looked at the window. "Thirty-one of them did what I did, which is note the discrepancy and move on.
Fourteen of them understood what they were looking at and actively managed the information to protect the company's position.
" I looked back at Clark. "Three of us kept records. "
"And the other two?"
"Both settled. Both signed NDAs."
"Why didn't you?"
I looked at him. "Because I have the records.
And because what they did—" I stopped. Started again.
"There were people who lost their retirement accounts.
Regular people, not executives, not shareholders, who could absorb it.
People who put their savings into a fund that the people at that board meeting knew was being misrepresented.
" I set my hands flat on the table. "I kept the records because those people deserved someone who did. "
Clark looked at me for a long moment. He set the radio down on the counter.
"Forty-seven people saw what you saw," he said, "and you're the one who's here."
"Yes."
"Why does that not make you angry?"
"It makes me furious," I said. "I've just had three years to convert the fury into something useful."
He crossed the room and sat down across from me. He reached across the table and covered my hand with his.
"After you testify," he said, "what happens?"
"If the case holds — and it will hold — the fund gets restructured. The people with accounts get partial recovery. The executive team faces charges."
"And you?"
"I go back to my life."
"Which looks like what?"
I looked at him. "That's the part I haven't figured out yet."
He kept his hand on mine. The fire was steady in the woodstove, and the post-storm light was long and golden through the windows, and I sat in the cabin with Clark Baxter's hand covering mine and thought that three years of building armor had left me surprisingly unprepared for the question of what came after it.
"You'll figure it out," he said.
"You sound confident."
"I've watched you adapt in real time for days now," he said. "You'll figure it out."
I turned my hand over and held his.