Chapter 5
Blade drilled his focus into the asphalt, but every shift in Tori’s posture registered in his periphery. She remained anchored in the passenger seat, head down, eyes on her computer.
Four hours of near silence. Four hours of tension cracking between them like humidity before a thunderstorm.
The only breaks came when his phone rang.
Sergeant Acker calling twice about the Florek case, then the lab tech with preliminary blood work results, then Acker again reminding him of the evidence chains that needed documenting.
Each call dragged him back into the machinery of the job.
Between calls, Tori’s fingers moved across her laptop keyboard in steady bursts. Click-click-click, pause, click-click-click. She’d claimed she needed to get Sullivan’s statements down before they blurred. Now she typed like the memory might vanish if she stopped.
The brief flashes he caught of her screen between glances at the road showed lines about Sullivan’s tangents, cross-links to fractals, pattern theory, and a bulleted list capped with one phrase that snagged him every time: a second murder book.
The GPS announced they had twelve minutes remaining to Millie Beach. Almost back where they’d started this morning. Back to the parking lot where some psychopath had pressed steel against Tori’s throat. The bandage on her neck caught his eye every time she turned her head.
His phone buzzed against the center console. Acker again. He let it go to voicemail.
Tori shifted, finally lifting her head from the screen. She closed her laptop and sat back. Dark circles rimmed her eyes. She looked like someone had twisted her emotions through a wringer and hung her up to dry.
“You good?” he asked.
She nodded without looking at him. “Yeah.”
The single word carried the weight of everything unsaid. No, she wasn’t good. None of this was good. But she was Tori, and Tori didn’t break down in passenger seats. She processed. She analyzed. She built walls around the damage and kept moving forward.
The familiar outline of Kingdom MMA appeared ahead. Home base. Neutral ground. A place where they could finally hash through what had happened back there without the road noise and phone calls creating distance between them.
The rush of the gym hit the second they stepped inside. Warm air thick with sweat and testosterone. Rubber mats giving underfoot. Runners drumming on treadmills, a steady grind of metal plates, the bag in the corner taking hits in a hard, steady rhythm. The place breathed work.
FDLE Special Agent Corbin King stood behind a bench station, one knee braced on the floor, steady hands spotting a younger kid pushing through his last rep.
Sweat darkened his navy FDLE T-shirt, clinging across the defined lines of his shoulders.
His eyes caught Blade’s from across the room in one glance.
Corbin tapped the kid’s shoulder, said something quietly, then lowered the bar.
“How’d it go?” Corbin’s tone stayed light, but the pinch in his brows told Blade he already suspected the answer.
Blade hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “Let’s take it upstairs.”
Corbin swiped a towel off a rack and wiped his hands as he turned to the kid. “I’m out. Hit your cooldown and log your weights.”
The younger man nodded, towel swinging as he waved them off.
Blade’s boots clanged on the metal stairs. Tori climbed ahead of him, one hand grazing the rail. Corbin came behind them, his heavier step setting the steel treads rattling with each rise.
At the top, Blade pushed open the thick door marked “Private.” Stryker’s office ran more like the nerve center of a surveillance unit than a gym.
Three desks, each lined with curved monitors glowing in soft blues and whites.
Screens streamed footage from the weight stations, the front lot, even the alley cameras Jett had installed for “situational awareness.”
“What’s that smell, chica? Did you burn the coffee again?” Tori hoisted herself up on the table beneath the wide one-way glass overlooking the gym floor and sat cross-legged.
“ATF motto, Crew. Burn it. Test it. File it. Coffee’s just field research.
” Harlee Bay leaned back just far enough to cut Tori a look, mouth tilting in that near-smile she rarely let out.
The black hoodie she wore had the Kingdom MMA crest printed in red along one sleeve.
Strands of blond had slipped free of a half-knot on her head.
Blade propped a shoulder against the doorframe, glancing at Harlee’s ultrawide monitor setup. Data crawled across one screen like ants after sugar. “You still even work for the ATF, Bay? Or they just pay you to haunt that keyboard?”
Harlee’s head turned half an inch, enough for the warning in her eyes to hit him straight on. “Keep talking. I’ll enter your social into the national forfeiture database. Let’s see how long your condo stays yours.”
Before he could fire back, Jett Nu rose from the desk beside her.
The tech billionaire was dressed in his usual.
Slacks, vest, French cuffs rolled to the forearms. His dark curls pushed past where a collar would’ve been, and Blade couldn’t tell if he needed a haircut or if he’d shelled out two hundred bucks for that look.
“She does work,” Jett said, voice calm as ever. “Intelligence Research Specialists operate anywhere they have a secure system. And she’s got the best one here. ATF headquarters can’t touch our encryption.”
Harlee arched an eyebrow, pleased but pretending not to be. “Translation, I’ve got better toys here.”
Blade grinned. “You’re too smart to be in the field anyway. Let the rest of us catch shrapnel.”
“Yeah,” Corbin added as he crossed the room. “Why waste a mind like hers dismantling bombs when she can save the world from here?”
Luna spread her arms, gesturing to the stack of color-coded binders containing the Warrior kids’ case notes. “What am I then, chopped liver?”
Corbin stopped in front of her. “Of course not,” he said quietly. “You’re saving the world too.” He bent and kissed her. Slow, certain, like a man who’d finally learned what love was.
Blade watched them and let his breath settle.
Same two kids who used to sneak outside after sparring, leaning into each other like nothing else existed.
Married now, but the same them. They’d come so close to losing everything.
Blade’s attention cut to Tori perched on the table before returning to Corbin’s hand tracing along Luna’s dark hair.
Maybe love like that belonged in real life after all.
Blade cleared his throat. “Hey, Jett. You get Tori’s text this morning? About checking the exterior cameras for the guy who jumped her?”
“Sure did.” Jett gestured toward Harlee with a flick of his pen. “We’ve got something.”
Harlee’s tattooed hands worked the mouse and keyboard simultaneously.
One monitor flashed through feeds of the front lot, side entrance, and a dark sliver of alley beyond the dumpsters.
“He parked two blocks east,” she said. “Walked in like he owned the place. Hoodie up. Kept his head tilted down every time he passed a camera.”
“He knew where the blind angles were,” Jett said. “Never let his face hit full frame.”
Blade stepped nearer and braced a palm against the desk to study the loop. “So, he did his homework. Never let us see his face.”
“Fact.” Harlee toggled to a magnified frame. The man crossed under a parking light. “But here’s his mistake.” She jabbed a finger at the image. “My baby doesn’t need a face.”
Tori watched Harlee’s screen from the table. “Your baby?”
Jett chuckled. “She’s talking about our motion-based biometric capture. Every frame pulls a signature. Stride rhythm, skeletal alignment, limb rotation. Within 87 percent confidence, we can ID a person walking through a fog bank at midnight.”
Blade buried a hand in his pocket and raked the loose change. “Translation?”
“It reads how you move,” Harlee said. “Like a fingerprint in motion. Might take a while to scour through local surveillance footage, but we’ll get him.”
“Still can’t get over the fact we’ve got CIA-level tech sitting in a gym office,” Luna said.
Jett’s grin widened. “Who do you think the government licensed it from?”
“You nerds and your tech toys,” Tori said. “Don’t waste too much time on it, okay? We’ve got bigger fish.”
Like Sullivan’s stunt at the prison.
Blade nodded, coins and keys clinking in his pocket. The motion helped him think, same as the rhythm of writing in his notebook. Little cadence loops kept his brain wired in usable lanes.
“Work it anyway,” he said, dropping into the worn leather armchair.
Harlee yanked a drawer open and tossed something across the room. “Here.”
Blade caught it one-handed. A green rubber ball, covered in soft spikes. He squeezed. The thing gave under pressure and expanded again like memory foam. Small, firm, almost satisfying. “What’s this?”
“Sanity,” Harlee said. “Yours and mine. You keep rattling change, tapping desks, and clicking pens like you’re sending some secret code. I’m one minute away from hurling your keys out the window.” She pointed at him with her pen.
“It’s a stim ball,” Luna said. “Use that instead of turning every room into your own drumline.”
He turned it in his palm. Felt weirdly good, holding something meant to channel the restless current always working through him, that too-fast hum in his head that never really found neutral. “Thanks,” he said. “Guess I owe you one.”
“Thank her for my sake too,” Tori said with a half smile. “The last hour in the car, you were clicking the cruise button like a percussion section.”
He smirked. “You really want me quiet? Not sure I’d recognize myself like that.”
“Try me,” she said.
The corner of his mouth hitched. He squeezed the ball and let the room settle. His mind kept circling back to that concrete visitation room. Sullivan spitting out Barclay’s name and accusations about a second murder book. If any of it was true, someone had kept those files buried for decades.
If Sullivan was telling the truth.