Chapter Thirteen #2
The pause ran a quarter-second too long. I counted it. Ashe’s eyes stayed on the logs, his weight shifted fractionally to his left foot, and when he spoke, the word carried its own weight.
“Probably not.”
I heard the probably. Filed it. Did not comment. The gap between probably not and definitely not was wide enough to drive a truck through, and we both knew it, and the fact that Ashe had chosen probably meant the gap was real and he’d already started closing it.
“Two additional men into the service level by six a.m.,” I said. “Full rotation on the rooftop team. Quiet. I don’t want the change signaling awareness.”
Ashe nodded. Already pulling his phone, thumb moving across the screen, the orders transmitting before I’d finished the sentence.
“Full financial pull on Declan for the last sixty days. Every transaction, every shell, every account that touches his name or any alias we have on file. If he’s funding operatives at this level, the money came from somewhere we can trace.”
“Already running.” Ashe didn’t look up from his phone. “The preliminary hit came back twenty minutes ago. There’s a shell corporation registered in Vancouver that’s been moving six figures monthly through a Cayman intermediary. The pattern started eight weeks ago.”
Eight weeks. Grace had been here for three.
I poured a second cup. The coffee was fresh, hot, the smell cutting through the pre-dawn quiet like a blade. I stood at the head of the table with the mug between my palms and let the heat work into my hands while my eyes moved across the logs a second time.
Time-stamps. Angles.
The lead man’s face, caught in three-quarter profile by a camera he hadn’t accounted for—the high-angle feed, the one Ashe had installed after the Cedar Ridge consolidation specifically because Declan’s pack had a history of using elevation.
The face meant nothing to me. Generic. Dark hair, lean build, the kind of features that blended into a crowd.
But the movement—that was familiar. That of a wolf who’d been running territory long enough to develop habits, and those habits were what Ashe had spotted, what had triggered the alert forty minutes after the fact.
My next rut was two weeks out. The one piece of luck in this equation—a clean fortnight before the heat cycle would compromise my judgment, my reflexes, the cold precision I needed right now.
I’d need the suppressants. They’d leave me flat afterward, the hollow aftermath that came with chemical management, but flat was better than compromised, and compromised was what the rut turned me into when it ran hot.
The guest suite door opened down the hall.
I heard it before I registered the sound consciously—the soft click of the latch, the whisper of hinges that needed oil, the shift in the air pressure that happened when a door opened in a space this size.
The cherry-blossom scent carried, warm and specific, cutting through the coffee and the paper-and-ink smell of the logs spread across the table.
I didn’t turn. Not yet. I set the coffee down and looked at Ashe, and whatever he saw in my face made him gather the nearest stack of logs and step back from the table by two precise feet, creating space without being asked.
The day was beginning whether I was ready for it or not.
The wrongness had a name now, and the name was Declan Morrow, and he had resources I hadn’t credited him with, and he was looking at my east-facing windows with the focused attention of a man who had already decided what lived behind them was worth the risk.
I turned toward the hallway.
Jai was coming.
He came out in yesterday’s socks and a t-shirt I recognized from three days ago, the faded gray one with the stretched collar.
His hair was doing something his hair did when he’d slept on it wrong—short spikes at the crown, flattened at the temples, the particular disorder of someone who had not stopped to look in a mirror.
He was awake before he reached the kitchen. I watched it happen—the shift from sleep-walk to fully present in the space between the hallway and the dining table, eyes moving in sequence: Ashe first, assessing; the logs spread across the dark walnut second, cataloguing; my face last, holding.
He did not ask if something was wrong. He leaned one hip against the island, arms crossed, and said, “How bad?”
Clean. Direct.
“Declan’s men on the roof across the street last night,” I said. “Two of them. They were studying the camera that covers the east terrace, my suite, and yours. They had floor plans. Good ones. The approach vector they were mapping suggests they weren’t here for an adult extraction.”
Jai’s face went very still. Not blank—tracking.
His eyes held mine, pupils adjusting to the kitchen light, and the expression that settled across his features was the one I’d seen twice before: the focused, calculating quiet of a man who had spent enough time in situations where panic was a liability that he’d surgically removed it from his options.
His jaw worked once, a small movement along the hinge, and then he was asking questions in the order that mattered.
“Can the east terrace be locked down from outside access?”
“Yes. Already done.”
“Who holds the building’s architectural records, and what’s the exposure there?”
“Developer’s office. NDAs, server security. Ashe is pulling the access logs now.”
Jai nodded. His eyes moved to the terrace windows—twelve feet of floor-to-ceiling glass, the gray pre-dawn city spread below, the Willamette a dark ribbon forty floors down.
Something moved across his face that wasn’t fear but lived in the same neighborhood—the tightness around the eyes that happened when someone who was used to calculating odds realized the math had changed.
He turned back. Looked at me directly. “Does Declan know Grace is here specifically, or is he still working from probability?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I said it without flinching. Without padding. Jai had made it clear, in ways both verbal and otherwise, that managed information was the fastest route to losing his cooperation, and I was not in the business of losing things that belonged to me.
He absorbed this. His thumb tapped once against his opposite forearm, a small, rhythmic press that I recognized as the tell he deployed when he was running scenarios. One tap. Two. Then he stopped, and his eyes found mine again, and the question he asked was the one I’d been waiting for.
“What do you need from me?”
I kept my face neutral. Gave him the three things, in order. “Stay inside the building today. All day. Keep Grace away from the east-facing windows. And if anything feels wrong—anything, Jai, any shift in the air, any sound that doesn’t belong—you call me first. Not Ashe. Me.”
His jaw shifted. A fraction of an inch, the particular movement that preceded an argument he’d already decided he was going to have. “I’m not going to just sit here.”
“I know.” I didn’t soften it. Didn’t need to. “I’m not asking you to sit. I’m asking you to stay inside the perimeter while I close the gap in it.”
The beat that followed ran long enough to count.
Jai’s eyes held mine, and I watched the calculation happen behind them—weighing the argument against the energy it would cost, measuring the perimeter against whatever plan was already forming behind that sharp, restless intelligence.
His thumb tapped once more against his forearm. Stopped.
“Fine.” Flat. Final. “One day. If you haven’t closed the gap by tonight, we’re having a different conversation.”
“That’s fair.”
He nodded once. The kind of nod that settled something between us without requiring the words to do the work.
From down the hall, Grace’s pre-cry sounds carried—the soft, escalating fuss that started in the back of her throat and had about ninety seconds before it committed to volume.
Wet. Indignant. The noise of a creature who had been asleep and was now awake and found this state of affairs personally offensive.
Jai was already moving. No hesitation, no pause, yesterday’s socks nearly silent on the dark walnut floor as he turned and walked back toward the guest suite with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything that mattered.
His shoulders carried the tension I’d come to recognize—not fear, not quite, but the alert readiness of a man who had decided, against his better judgment, that something was worth protecting.
I watched him go. The cherry-blossom scent trailed behind him, warm and specific, cutting through the coffee and the paper smell of the logs.
He disappeared around the corner into the hallway, and a moment later I heard the guest suite door open, then the soft, immediate drop in volume as Grace registered his presence and decided, temporarily, that the universe might be worth tolerating after all.
I turned back to Ashe. The logs were still spread across the table, time-stamped and annotated, the face of the lead man staring up from the high-angle still with the blank focus of someone doing a job he’d been trained for.
I pulled out my phone and called the head of my security division. The line picked up on the second ring, a voice I’d hired for competence rather than warmth, and I gave the orders in the sequence they needed to happen, no wasted breath, no repetition.
The day began. The wrongness had a name, and the name had resources, and I had exactly until tonight to make sure those resources became irrelevant.
I picked up the cold coffee and drank it anyway.