Power Play (Edge of Control #1)

Chapter 1

KINCAID

Chicago, Illinois

Seven words that cost me five years of discipline, and I spent them without hesitating: 'longer than you've been working for him.'

She'd asked how long I'd been watching Arthur.

That was my answer, blunt and unplanned, the kind of thing a man doesn't get to take back once it's left his mouth.

I held her gaze a beat longer than the answer required, long enough that the look stopped being about Arthur or the job or any category she'd have a name for.

Then I turned and walked out before she could hand me back a reaction I wasn't ready to read.

The cold found me on the sidewalk before I'd gone ten feet. I didn't look back through the glass. I didn't need to. Whatever her face was doing behind me, I'd already spent everything I had walking away clean, and a man doesn't get to watch the receipt.

I'm in the truck before the door of La Ventana has finished swinging shut behind me, still running the calculation on exactly how much damage seven words can do to a man who's spent that long making sure nobody ever had enough of them to do any damage at all.

I don't drive home. Home can wait.

The storage facility sits off Cermak, a flat gray building with a keypad and a guy at the desk who's paid enough to remember nothing. A little extra cash on top of what the company pays him buys a specific brand of blindness in this city, if you know who to offer it to.

The corridor smells like concrete and cold metal, fluorescent tubes humming overhead in a pitch just low enough to feel in the teeth.

I walk it the way any space that matters gets walked, counting exits without meaning to.

Unit 214. I work the combination on a lock I change on a schedule only I keep track of.

The door rolls up on a folding table, a lamp, and a fireproof case bolted to the floor.

I sit. I open the case. Years of paper live in here: statements, shell registries, a timeline that Arthur Harrow doesn't know exists.

This unit is the one place in Chicago where the two versions of me stop performing for each other.

If Arthur ever finds this room, there's no version of my life that survives the discovery intact.

I've never let myself run those numbers all the way to the end.

Some risks a man carries precisely because he refuses to price them.

I add today. Three lines, handwritten: Renaud connects to Beaumont through Meridian. Beaumont shares a Geneva address with Veridian's private bank. She found it in four days without my help.

I start to write her name on the third line and catch myself a full word in.

Meagan. Not Keating. I've never once, in all my years of keeping records on everyone who's ever mattered to Arthur's operation, written a first name into this ledger.

I cross it out hard enough that the pen nearly tears the page, and write it the way it should be written.

The way I write everyone else. Last name only.

My hand isn't quite steady doing it, which is its own kind of information I don't have a category for yet.

Four days. I've had people on my payroll for longer than that who never found half of what she put together sitting alone with a laptop and a bad theory about Renaud's fund.

That's fact, not flattery, and a man in my position doesn't survive long if he starts lying to himself about which threats are real.

My phone buzzes against the table. Priest—one of my oldest friends and the intelligence contact who has a talent for finding truths powerful men think they've buried. He’s been feeding me pieces of Arthur's world for years.

I answer on the second ring. "Go ahead."

"You sitting down?" Priest's voice comes through flat, the same register he uses whether he's telling me a shipment cleared customs or telling me somebody's dead. The flatness never wore off. It's the only thing about him I trust completely.

"I'm always sitting down when you call. Saves time."

"Cute." A pause, the particular kind he uses when he's deciding how much of something to give me at once. "I've got a friend inside Harrow's IT contractor. Says security around the client archive got quietly locked down recently. New restrictions, nobody announced them. They just showed up."

My hand goes still on the table. "Locked down how bad?"

"Bad enough that it wasn't routine maintenance.

Somebody upstairs decided that cluster needed more eyes on it, and they didn't ask permission from anybody who'd normally sign off on a change like that.

" Priest lets that sit. "You know why anybody'd want more eyes on that specific corner of the archive, Kincaid? "

I don't, not for certain, and that's the part that sits wrong.

I know what's in that corner of the archive.

I don't know if Arthur's clamping down because he suspects someone's already inside it, or because he runs security like this on a schedule I've never been able to map.

Either read costs me something. I just don't know how much yet.

"I need to know if this is routine or if it's a reaction," I say. "Not from IT. From him."

"I'll have something by tomorrow night." A pause.

"There's a narrower window than I said. Whoever tripped this walked in during a stretch of a few hours, and I can narrow it further by morning if the logs cooperate.

" Priest's voice drops the flatness for half a second, just long enough to matter.

"You should think about what you want to do if the answer's the one you're afraid of. "

"Keep digging. Call me the second you have a name on the flag."

"When have I ever called you before I was sure?"

"Once. Nashville."

"Nashville doesn't count. Nashville was a different kind of sure." A pause, shorter than the others. "You good, Kincaid?"

The question catches me flat enough that I don't answer right away. "Go to sleep," he says, when I don't. "I'll call when I have something." He hangs up without saying goodbye, which is the only kind of goodbye Priest has ever given anyone.

I sit with it a while, the lamp making a small yellow circle on the table and the rest of the room in shadow.

Could be nothing. Firms like Arthur's run security reviews on a cycle, quiet ones that never make a memo because the point is nobody notices.

I've seen it before, twice, and both times that's exactly what it was.

I don't buy it tonight. Meagan's been in that corner of the archive, and she's the only person I've met in a long time who moves fast enough to make a man like Arthur nervous without meaning to.

That's instinct, not evidence, and instinct isn't proof.

I won't know which one I'm dealing with until Priest calls back, and waiting on someone else's timeline is not a position I enjoy.

I don't call her. Not because I've decided to protect her from worry.

Because I have nothing yet worth the cost of explaining how I'd know to worry in the first place, and that explanation runs straight through Priest, straight through this unit, straight through five years I'm not ready to hand her on the strength of a guess.

I lock the unit. I check the lock twice, which is once more than I usually do.

The drive to Bridgeport doesn't take long at this hour, streets empty enough that the truck's headlights are the only light moving on some blocks. I let the city go by without really seeing it, which isn't like me at all.

My mind stays on what Priest just told me, running it against every version of Meagan I've built in one morning of watching her, and none of the versions add up to careless. That's the problem with a woman that good. Careless would almost be a relief.

My loft takes up the top floor of a converted button factory, wide-plank white oak floors and a stone kitchen island long enough to seat six people I never invite, floor to ceiling windows on the south wall that I paid to have custom-cut because the standard sizes didn't let in enough light.

Every piece of it was chosen because nobody else chose it for me first, a fact worth something to a kid who grew up eating dinner off a card table because the real one got repossessed with everything else.

I built this with my own hands, and I keep it exactly as clean as the life I tell myself I'm still building.

It's quiet when I let myself in, and the quiet doesn't bother me most nights.

Tonight it does. The reason has nothing to do with silence.

It has everything to do with the specific size of the space where a woman's voice would sit if she were here, still working the Beaumont thread out loud, thinking better with her mouth moving than most people do in silence.

I noticed that about her before I noticed almost anything else. She narrates her own thinking, half under her breath, like the ideas need to hit the air before she trusts them.

I pour two fingers of whiskey I don't usually touch on a Tuesday and stand at the window instead of sitting, because sitting feels like giving up on the night doing anything else useful.

The city spreads out flat and lit beneath me.

Somewhere in it a door just got harder to open for reasons I won't understand until Priest calls back.

I couldn't say yet whether that costs me, costs her, or costs nothing at all.

My phone lights up on the counter.

The Beaumont filing you mentioned. The one with the Geneva reference. Can you confirm the date range? Want to make sure I'm not misreading the sequence.

I read it twice. It's a case question, clean, professional, the kind of message any two people working the same problem might send each other on a Tuesday night.

I text back.

Late March through June. You're not misreading it. You're reading it better than the last three people who had that file, and one of them had a law degree.

Careful,

she writes back.

Compliments make me suspicious. Suspicion is my whole personality lately.

Noted,

I type.

I'll switch to insulting your work instead. Less confusing for both of us.

Do it and find out what happens.

Careful,

I type.

I've been told my insults have a body count.

You're not bad at Tuesdays,

she writes back.

You're bad at goodbyes. There's a difference.

That one sits heavier than the ones before it.

I read it three times before I let myself answer, because there's a version of a reply that would tell her exactly how right she is, and I'm not ready to find out what happens if I send it.

Five years of watching men in Arthur's orbit disappear from rooms without a word, and I never once thought of it as a skill worth naming until a woman I've known for four days named it without even trying.

I almost tell her right there. Stay out of that corner of the archive for a while. Not tonight, not until I know what this actually cost, if it cost anything at all. The words sit ready behind my teeth.

I should probably let you go,

she writes, before I've sent anything at all.

I delete two different versions of my warning before I settle on something smaller, something that says less while meaning more, because that's the only kind of honesty I've ever been any good at.

I'd rather not,

I send instead.

The pause that follows is long enough that I picture her reading it twice, hunting for the same gap I hunt for in hers. When her reply comes, it's shorter than anything else she's sent tonight.

Yeah. Me neither.

I'm smiling before I know I'm doing it, an actual smile, alone in an empty loft at an hour when nobody's watching to make it worth performing. I catch myself in the dark window glass and stop, because a man doesn't get to keep a face like that once he notices he's wearing it.

I set the phone down on the counter face up. Turning it face down would be admitting the message did something to me, and I've spent most of my adult life not admitting things like that to an empty room. I drink the whiskey anyway, warm now, barely tasting it going down.

The screen lights again before I've finished the glass. A different name. The shift in my chest is instant, want dropping out from under me and something colder sliding into the space it left.

Need you for a new engagement. Time-sensitive. Details tomorrow, 8 AM, my office.

Content first. Then architecture. That's how I've learned to read everything that comes from Arthur, and tonight I can't tell if I'm reading him clearly or reading him the way I want to.

A time-sensitive engagement, requested the same night Priest tells me something's changed behind the archive walls and nobody's said why.

Arthur doesn't do casual asks. Every request is a shape that looks natural and a function that tests something specific, and I couldn't yet say whether tomorrow's is aimed at my loyalty in general or the exact window of time I've been spending near his protégée.

He's summoned me to that office more times than I like counting, and every time turned out to be a test I didn't recognize until I was already three moves into failing it or passing it.

I've beaten that game before. If he's connected any of it to her, tomorrow isn't a test. It's an execution with better lighting, and I'll be the one sitting across the desk from the man holding the trigger.

I've walked into that office believing I had the advantage of not being afraid.

Tonight I can't say that with a straight face, not even to myself.

Either way the answer's the same. I’ll show up. I’ll take the assignment. I’ll play the part I've played for years, the man who does what's asked and doesn't ask why, because the day I start asking why is the day Arthur starts wondering what changed.

I look at Meagan's last message one more time before I answer his. Yeah. Me neither. Three words that shouldn't weigh anything and weigh more than the glass in my hand. I type my reply to Arthur, three words, the kind of clean confirmation he expects from the men he built.

I'll be there.

I set the phone face down. The loft holds its quiet around me, the specific quiet of a space built for one man who's spent eight years believing that was enough.

Somewhere across the city, a woman is running a date range through her head and doesn't know yet whether any of it already cost her something she can't take back. I don't know it either. That's the part that keeps me standing at this window instead of in bed.

I didn't tell her. I made a calculation instead, the same kind I've made a hundred times for other people's problems and never once had to make about my own.

Arthur expects obedience. Tomorrow morning I'll give it to him, the way I've given it more times than I can count, to a man who's never once had to ask twice for it. The question isn't whether I can still fool the man who taught me how to lie. It’s whether he's already stopped believing me.