Chapter Eighteen #3
“The motorcycle team has not been identified.” Flat.
Economical. No padding. “The trail went cold in week two. Vehicles turned up stripped and abandoned in a warehouse outside Salem. Registered to a shell company that dissolved before the ownership chain could be pulled. The dissolution paperwork is clean, filed correctly, processed on schedule, no irregularities. The warehouse was leased through a separate shell that also no longer exists. The paper trail ends there.”
I looked at him. The early light had reached the desk now, pale gold across the security logs, turning the timestamps the color of old honey.
Beyond the windows, the Douglas fir stood motionless against a sky that had cleared to pale blue, and the first real warmth of the morning was beginning to press against the glass.
“You have a theory,” I said.
“I do.” Ashe’s voice carried the weight of a man who had been sitting on a hypothesis for weeks and had finally been given permission to voice it. “Not evidence. A theory.”
“Give it to me.”
“I don’t believe they had anything to do with the Dalys.
” His eyes held mine across the desk. Steady.
Certain. The kind of certainty that came from having turned the same information over enough times that the pattern had become clear even without all the pieces.
“The timing is wrong. The operational profile is wrong. Declan’s people were focused on Cormac and Lena.
That’s where the intelligence clusters. The motorcycle team was deployed to Jai’s building before Grace was even in that alley.
They were watching him specifically. When he picked up the box, they moved. Not toward the box. Toward him.”
The study went very still. The kind of stillness that happens when the air pressure changes and the room hasn’t caught up yet. I could hear the grandfather clock in the hallway ticking its steady, indifferent rhythm, and beneath it, the thread hummed quietly.
Jai’s voice carried from down the hall, low and dry, talking to Grace about something I couldn’t make out but could feel through the bond as a steady, warm current.
I looked at the logs on the desk. Time-stamped entries. Camera stills. The face of the lead motorcycle rider staring up from a high-angle frame, features obscured by a helmet, body language carrying the coordination of someone who had been trained and was following orders.
“Find them.”
Ashe’s pen moved. One line, block-capital.
“Shell company dissolution records. Warehouse ownership history. Every frame of Portland street camera footage from the night in question, pulled and re-analyzed from scratch. I want the footage team on it personally. No algorithms. Human eyes on every frame.” Each point landed between us with the weight of something that had been building since the first night.
“I want to know who wanted Jai badly enough to run a parallel operation and smart enough to stay invisible doing it. I want to know if they’re still watching.
I want to know if they saw what happened last night and what they’re doing with that information. ”
The pen kept moving. Ashe’s handwriting remained precise, each word allocated the exact space it required, nothing wasted.
“Preliminary report by end of week,” he said.
“Make it three days.”
“Understood.”
He closed the notebook. Slipped the pen back into his inside pocket.
The thread gave another small warm pulse—Jai had picked Grace up, I could feel it through the bond, the weight of a small body against his chest registering as a shift in the current that traveled from my sternum down through my arms.
I filed that under things I would examine thoroughly later, when the study was empty and the security question had been given the attention it required.
“We’re done,” I said.
Ashe stood. Gathered the logs with the same precision he brought to everything. Stacked them. Aligned the edges. Then he paused at the study door with his hand on the latch and his back still turned, and said, “I’ll have it by Wednesday.”
The door clicked shut behind him. The study went quiet in the way rooms do when they’ve been holding weight and are suddenly relieved of it — not empty, exactly, but settled, the timber walls releasing a tension they’d been carrying without anyone noticing.
Down the hall, Jai’s voice carried. Low and dry, talking to Grace the way he always did — like she had opinions he found inconvenient but respected, like she was a person rather than a project, like the fact that she weighed less than a bag of groceries was irrelevant to whether her perspective deserved a hearing.
Grace answered in small, contented sounds. The exchange of two creatures who had decided, independently and with absolute conviction, that the other was worth the trouble.
I sat alone for one more moment with the open security question. A second party. Unknown resources. Unknown intentions. Still out there, still watching, still making calculations I couldn’t see.
The weight of it settled across my shoulders alongside everything else the night had cost us, and I carried it with me into the hallway to find my mate and my ward and whatever the morning looked like on the other side of a thread that had not existed yesterday and now lived in my chest like it had always been there, humming steadily, specific and warm and absolutely certain of what it was for.