Chapter 19
Kade
The office at Rourke Securities has become something it's never been before.
Every screen is lit. Every line of communication we trust is open.
Dana is at her station with three monitors running at once, pulling transaction histories, export logs, and shell-company records into the same map with the kind of focus that makes the rest of the room feel quieter around her.
Sloane moves between desks with a tablet in one hand and a phone in the other, keeping our cleared people tight, because the number of people allowed to know the full shape of this is still small enough that I can name every one of them without looking away from the main board.
Skylar’s by the long table near the center of the room with a mug of coffee in one hand and a printed ledger in the other, wearing yesterday's clothes, exhaustion under his eyes, and an expression that's sharpened into something I recognize too well.
He's lost official access to the station, which should've taken tools out of his hands. Instead, it's put him in the middle of mine, and there's a quiet, dangerous relief in watching him realize he can still work.
He belongs in this room. The thought comes with less surprise than it would've a week ago.
He belongs beside Emrys in the kitchen with a diner bag and too many excuses.
He belongs half-asleep in an Omega's nest with one hand tangled in a blanket and his scent finally settled.
He belongs here too, with evidence in front of him and the case taking shape under his hands.
Watching him move through my company like he's not quite ready to admit he trusts it yet makes something in my chest loosen and tighten at the same time.
Detective Caldwell arrives twenty minutes after Skylar.
Sloane lets him through the secure door himself, and Caldwell steps into the operations floor with his shoulders set and his eyes already moving.
He doesn't look impressed at first. He looks cautious.
An Alpha walking into another Alpha's territory with his former partner already inside it, surrounded by private security resources, money trails, and people who take my orders without question.
His apprehension isn't insulting. It's sensible.
I stay where I am near the long table and let him take the room in. Dana glances over from her station. "If you're here to say we're not allowed to touch the pretty federal task-force evidence, I've already decided to ignore you."
Caldwell's eyes move to her, then to the map on the screen behind her. "That depends on what you're doing with it."
"Mostly judging it for being badly organized."
"It's government work," Skylar says, setting his mug down. "Be kind. They're doing their best with beige software and institutional despair."
Caldwell looks at him then, something in his expression shifts. "You good?" Caldwell asks.
Skylar's mouth moves, into something that’s not quite a smile. "Working on it."
Caldwell's gaze flicks toward me again. The calculation returns, sharper this time, and I feel the room react around it.
Sloane's posture changes by a degree. Dana keeps typing, but she's listening.
Skylar notices all of it, lets out a breath through his nose, and crosses the space between us without hesitation.
"This is Kade," Skylar says, stopping beside me. Then, before Caldwell can decide what category to put me in, he adds, "My Alpha."
The room goes quiet for half a second.
Then Dana makes a sound into her coffee that she absolutely fails to hide.
Sloane turns his face toward one of the monitors like that'll save him.
Caldwell blinks once, then looks from Skylar to me and back again while the entire shape of what he thought he walked into rearranges itself in real time.
Skylar lifts an eyebrow. "You planning to say something?"
Caldwell rubs a hand over his jaw, and the laugh that comes out of him is short, surprised, and real. "Well. That explains the smell."
Skylar closes his eyes. "You were supposed to say hello."
"I was adapting."
Dana swivels halfway in her chair, grinning now. "For the record, some of us adapted days ago."
Caldwell's attention comes back to me, but the wariness is different now.
He's no longer looking at a large tattooed Alpha who runs a private security firm with an interest in his case.
He's looking at the person Skylar just claimed out loud.
The drifter who never stayed, standing in the middle of a pack and not making a joke fast enough to undo it.
The relief in my chest is quiet enough that I can keep it off my face. Mostly. I offer Caldwell my hand. "Rourke."
He takes it. "Caldwell."
"Thank you for coming."
"Thank Skylar. He said your people had something worth seeing."
"We do."
We move to the table, Dana throwing the transaction map onto the main screen, and the room's humor settles into work. That's one of the reasons I trust this company. They can laugh, but the second the evidence comes up, everyone's attention narrows.
Sloane lays out the printed records, each stack marked by source: Rourke approaches, Vesper overlap, offshore intermediary, task-force known shells, and the latest private consultation request. Skylar takes the place beside me.
Caldwell stands across from us, arms folded, eyes on the screen before he briefs on the current state of the Hex case, not that we hadn’t already pulled much of the information we could before he arrived.
A serial killer with an organization wasn’t what I was expecting to find behind the Cardinal Network. Even more so, I didn’t think it would drag Emrys into this either. But with the serial killer now on the loose, we have a much bigger problem.
How the fuck did he get out and who wanted him out?
Dana cuts in and starts walking Caldwell through what we have.
"The new request came through the other morning," Dana says.
"Different front company, same family of shells as the prior approaches.
Offer jumped from fifty thousand to two hundred and fifty for a private consultation dressed up as risk review and client-flow evaluation. "
Caldwell's expression tightens. "A quarter-million to get a meeting with a security company."
"Not even a good meeting," Dana says. "A suspicious meeting."
Sloane points to the next line on the screen. "The offer moves through three accounts before the number lands. Not unusual by itself, but the intermediary overlaps with a large donation processed through the Vesper Hotel two weeks ago."
Caldwell leans in slightly. "No direct Cardinal label."
"No," I say. "No clean tag, no convenient name. Just the same structure, same timing behavior, and enough overlap that coincidence starts looking lazy."
"That matches what Caldwell found," Skylar says, his finger resting near the Vesper line. "Hex took meetings at the Vesper before he was caught. Task force tracked him there three times. They never got a clean ID on who he met."
Caldwell's gaze stays on the map. "We had surveillance, but the hotel was a nightmare. Private entrances, donor events, staff movement, people paying a lot of money not to be seen. The first legal response gave us sanitized garbage."
Dana snorts. "I hate polished garbage."
"I remember." Sloane looks at her. "You called it spreadsheet perfume."
Dana's smile goes sharp. "I stand by that."
Skylar sets his ledger down and rubs two fingers against his temple, not tired exactly. Tracking. "There's still something I keep catching and can't place."
I look at him. "The scent."
He nods. "It’s got this chemical edge to it.
I caught it near the stairwell at the station once, then again in passing when Morrison moved the file.
Kade you described something similar from the first night.
I keep wondering if there's a person moving between the official side and the shell side, masking hard enough that they're leaving the mask instead of their scent. "
Caldwell's eyes sharpen. "You caught it at the station?"
"Once clearly. Twice maybe. I didn't have enough to name it, and Morrison was already making everything difficult by then."
Sloane looks up from his tablet. "Do we have internal station access logs?"
Skylar's mouth tightens. "Not anymore."
"We might," Dana says, already typing. "Not directly. But if someone accessed the Rourke file through a shared system or requested external footage under a station credential, there may be vendor-side timestamps. People forget outside systems remember what inside systems delete."
Caldwell looks at her like he's beginning to understand why Skylar trusted this room. "Can you pull that?"
Dana's hands keep moving. "Give me thirty minutes and one person who's willing to sign something later, saying they didn't know I was delightful."
Sloane sighs. "That'll be me."
"It usually is."
For a moment, the room moves around her, everyone preparing for information she can pull. Skylar steps closer to me, his arm brushing mine ever so slightly. I throw him a smile, just as Dana twists her screen to face us.
“Okay, I found something. Something that might explain a lot of shit. Between what Skylar and Caldwell have and what we know, the payments always happened before something happened.” She wiggles her fingers and Sloane shoves her a file that Caldwell had brought over.
“You see, all of the murders and everything, right? All the dates line up. Money was moved, someone died. And if the claim that Cardinal Network means more than just guiding your serial killer... then the payments that don’t match up are moving something else. ”
Caldwell looks at the screen for a long time, jaw tight. "It makes a whole lot of fucking sense for how long Hex was able to avoid getting caught."
Skylar's voice softens, but not by much. "I know."
"No one wanted to say Hex wasn't working alone unless we could prove who was holding the leash. Every time we got close, the money split, a witness recanted, or some route went cold before we could get there." Caldwell taps one line on the table. "This is what we were missing."
I study the transfer chain, the way it moves too cleanly to be instinct and too repeatedly to be luck. "Someone's either funding Hex or controlling him. Maybe both. They've been moving money, access, and information through enough layers to keep him useful and deniable."
"And when he became too contained," Skylar says, "they got him out."
Caldwell nods once. "Or someone did it for them. The way the guy talks, he sounds like he’s running the show.
However, most suspects like that are usually the pawns of the operation.
" Caldwell exhales through his nose. "A federal apprehension team's coming to Ansdale.
They're not trusting local resources to bring Hex in.
They can't explain how he got out, and until they can, everyone who touched the containment chain is being treated like a possible breach. "
"Inside help," I say.
"Clean enough to mean it," Caldwell answers. "Access protocols bypassed in sequence. No panic, no improvising. Whoever helped him knew where the blind spots were or had someone telling them."
Skylar's scent sharpens beside me, amber edged with something cold. "Morrison."
Caldwell doesn't answer immediately.
That's answer enough to make my hand curl against the table.
"We don't have proof," Caldwell says.
"No," Skylar says. "We have a chief who kept trying to make Kade the threat, pushed the file away from the footage, and looked scared when I asked whom she was protecting."
The room stills again. I know the Morrison thread. I know enough of it to hear what Skylar isn't saying. He doesn't want it to be her. That matters less than the fact that he's no longer willing to look away.
Caldwell's expression goes grim. "Then we keep her away from anything that can bury this."
"My station won't make that easy."
"You're not working out of your station anymore," I say.
Skylar turns his head toward me. The words land harder than I intend, but not because they're wrong. He's spent too long trying to fight a compromised system from inside a room that wants him out. This room doesn't want him out. Neither do I.
Sloane picks up the thread without looking away from his tablet. "Rourke can host the work. Baxter can handle protected transfers. Caldwell can route task-force material through federal channels. Dana can keep doing whatever terrifying thing she's doing."
"I'm creating accountability," Dana says.
"You're smiling."
She throws up a middle finger at him but returns her attention to the screens.
Caldwell looks around the table, the last of his earlier apprehension gone now, replaced by something that looks like reluctant relief.
He's spent years chasing a ghost with official resources and closed doors and now he’s standing in a private security firm with better tools, an Alpha whose territory has become a war room, and Skylar planted in the middle of it like a man who's finally stopped pretending he's passing through.
"We keep digging," Caldwell says. "The money doesn't lie. If we prove the network's still moving assets in and out of the city, we can force their hand before the federal team locks everything down."
Dana's fingers start moving again. "Then nobody distract me with feelings for the next hour."
Sloane glances at Skylar, then me. "That may be difficult for some people."
Skylar doesn't look up from the ledger. "I can still hear you."
"I was counting on it."
The tension breaks enough for breath to move through the room again. Work resumes, but it's different now, more focused than it was before.
Caldwell stays another hour before taking a secure copy of what Baxter has cleared for transfer. When he stands, the room doesn't pause the way it did when he arrived. He belongs to the work now, at least enough for this. Sloane walks him to the secure door, but Caldwell stops near me first.
"Rourke."
"Kade," I say.
His mouth twitches. "Kade, then. I misread the room when I walked in."
"You were careful."
"I was territorial."
"So was I."
That gets a low laugh from him. His eyes move to Skylar, who's arguing with Dana over a timestamp, then back to me. "He never stayed anywhere long."
"I know."
"He looks like he might this time."
The relief that moves through me is quiet enough to keep. "I sure hope so.”
Caldwell holds my gaze, then nods. "Good."