CHAPTER 18
Her Move
°°°
Rhys found her at the kitchen table twenty minutes later, papers spread out in front of her, a half-drunk cup of coffee going cold at her elbow despite the hour, and something in his expression when he saw her working suggested he already knew this conversation was going to look nothing like the ones the club usually had.
He'd changed out of the clothes he'd worn to the motel, she noticed, though he still moved with the coiled alertness of a man who hadn't actually let himself rest, some readiness still humming under the surface even in his own kitchen at this hour.
He pulled out the chair across from her carefully, like he didn't want to disturb whatever process was visibly working itself out across the papers she'd spread over the table.
"Talk to me," he said.
"The signing session. The one Salazar's apparently not waiting for anymore.
" Emery slid one of the papers toward him — a printed copy of the title company's scheduling confirmation, the kind of document she'd spent weeks staring at without ever once considering its actual leverage.
"It's on their books. Denise runs that office like clockwork, and title companies live and die by their scheduling integrity.
If I call first thing tomorrow and tell her I need to push the session — not cancel, just move it, quietly, with a plausible business reason — she can do that without anyone outside the office ever knowing it happened until it's already done. "
"You want to move the signing."
"I want to move it somewhere Salazar doesn't expect, at a time they haven't planned around, using a completely legitimate business reason that has nothing to do with the club at all.
If they've built their whole timeline around a session that no longer exists where they think it does, that buys us real time.
Not forever. But enough to actually get ahead of them instead of just reacting.
" She watched him process it, watched the specific way his attention sharpened as he followed the logic through to its end.
"Ghost's methods are good for a lot of things.
But nobody in Salazar's crew is watching a title company's internal scheduling software. That's not their world. It's mine."
Rhys was quiet for a long moment, studying the papers, and Emery watched him do something she recognized now as increasingly rare and increasingly precious — actually consider a plan on its own merits instead of filtering it first through how much it might expose her to risk.
"This is good," he said finally. "This is actually really good, Em. I wouldn't have thought of this in a hundred years. Legitimate paperwork moving through legitimate channels — nothing about it looks like club maneuvering, because it isn't club maneuvering. It's just business."
"That's the idea."
He sat back slightly, studying her with an expression that had shifted from simple approval into something more thoughtful. "Can I ask you something? Not to second-guess it. I genuinely want to understand how your mind works when you're solving something like this."
"Go ahead."
"How did you even think of this? Most people, hearing they've got a deadline moved up on them by dangerous people, don't think about scheduling software."
Emery considered the question seriously, tracing back through her own thought process.
"I think it's because I've spent three years learning that the boring, unglamorous parts of running a business are usually where the real leverage actually lives.
Everyone focuses on the dramatic stuff — the big client, the big sale, the confrontation.
But the schedule, the paperwork, the quiet administrative machinery underneath everything — that's where things actually get decided, most of the time.
Nobody watches the boring parts closely enough. That makes them useful."
"What do you need from me?"
The question landed with unexpected weight — not what should you do, not here's how I'll handle it from here, but a straightforward, respectful ask, the kind of question a partner asked another partner, and Emery felt something in her chest loosen at the simple fact of being asked instead of managed.
"Nothing yet. I need to make the call myself, first thing tomorrow, and it needs to come from me, professionally, not from you or the club.
If Denise senses anything unusual about the request, the whole thing falls apart.
" She met his eyes steadily. "I need you to trust that I know how to run this part of it. This is my world. Let me run it."
"Okay." No hesitation, no qualifying caveat, no offer to double-check her work or loop in someone else to be safe. Just okay, plain and immediate, and Emery felt the weight of that single word land harder than a longer speech would have.
She found herself studying him for a moment after he said it, some old habit of watching for the catch, the hidden condition, the eventual but that would undercut the simplicity of his agreement.
It didn't come. He just sat there, watching her gather her papers with the quiet, steady attention of a man genuinely willing to let her lead, and she felt, with a small internal jolt, that she'd been braced for a fight that had simply never arrived.
She made the call the next morning from her own kitchen table, Rhys sitting quietly across from her, present but not hovering, and listened to her own voice go smooth and professional as she walked Denise through a plausible, boring business reason for moving the signing — a scheduling conflict with a supplier delivery, nothing that would raise a single question, exactly the kind of mundane request Denise processed a dozen times a week without a second thought.
"Done," Denise said, cheerful and oblivious. "New session's Thursday, two o'clock, same conference room. I'll update the file."
Emery hung up and looked at Rhys across the table, something fierce and unexpectedly proud rising in her chest. "It's moved. Thursday, not Friday, and nobody outside this kitchen knows that yet."
"You just outmaneuvered an entire crew with a phone call and a fake supplier delivery.
" Rhys was looking at her with an expression she hadn't seen from him in longer than she wanted to admit — open admiration, unguarded and plain, the specific look of a man genuinely impressed rather than protective.
"I mean that as the highest compliment I've got, Em.
I've watched grown men in this club try to solve problems like this with force for fifteen years. You solved it with a phone call."
"Force isn't the only kind of competence." She said it without heat, just simple fact, watching it land somewhere real in him.
"No. It's not. I think I forgot that for a while." He reached across the table, covering her hand with his. "I forgot a lot of things about you for a while. I'm working on remembering all of it."
They sat with that for a moment, something warm and unhurried passing between them despite the danger still circling the edges of everything.
She found herself thinking, unexpectedly, of the woman she'd been three years ago, first opening Winters & Wax with nothing but a workbench and a stubborn refusal to fail — the same stubbornness sitting at this table now, redirected toward an entirely different kind of survival.
It occurred to her that the two versions of herself weren't as far apart as she'd once believed.
Both had simply been trying to build something safe out of whatever materials were actually available.
Rhys's phone buzzed against the table then, breaking the moment with its now-familiar urgency.
He read the message, and Emery watched his expression shift toward something sharper.
"Ghost," he said. "Salazar's people showed up at the original signing time today. At the title company. Just — showed up, watching the building, clearly expecting something to happen." A grim satisfaction crossed his face. "Nothing did. Because the signing isn't there anymore."
"It's working."
"It's working." He looked at her with something like wonder. "They're going to know something's off. They're not stupid — they'll figure out fast that the schedule moved. But for right now, today, you just cost them a full day of certainty. That's not nothing, going into a fight like this."
Emery felt a complicated swell of emotions at that — pride, certainly, and something more grounded too, the specific satisfaction of watching a skill she'd built entirely on her own, entirely outside this world, prove itself useful inside it without being diminished or absorbed into someone else's methods.
For years she'd kept the shop deliberately separate from the club, protective of the one part of her life that had nothing to do with leather cuts and hierarchy and old loyalty.
She'd never once imagined that separation itself would become the exact advantage that mattered when it counted most.
Her own phone buzzed then, an unfamiliar number lighting up the screen, and she felt the now-automatic spike of dread that any unknown caller produced these days.
"Hello?"
Silence for a beat, then a woman's voice, low and careful. "Is this Emery Cade?"
"Who's asking?"
"My name's Sasha." A pause, weighted with something Emery couldn't immediately identify — not quite hostility, not quite fear, something more complicated than either. "I think we should talk. Just the two of us. I have information you're going to want, and not much time to give it to you."
Emery's whole body went very still, and she watched Rhys's expression sharpen with alarm as he read the change in her face, mouthing who is it with visible urgency.
She held up a hand, asking him without words to wait, and kept her own voice level and careful, some old instinct for handling difficult customers reasserting itself despite the very different stakes of this particular conversation.
"Why would you help me," Emery said carefully, buying herself a second to think.
"Because I'm not actually the villain everyone's decided I am, whatever your husband's told you." Something bitter and tired colored Sasha's voice. "And because I'm running out of good options myself. Meet me tomorrow. Alone. I'll explain everything when I see you."
The line went dead before Emery could respond, and she lowered the phone slowly, meeting Rhys's alarmed gaze across the table with a steadiness she didn't entirely feel.
"That was Sasha," she said. "She wants to meet. Tomorrow. Alone."