Chapter Eighteen The Last Card Renata Cole Was Holding #2
He held my gaze a moment longer, something working behind his eyes that looked, for once, like genuine deference rather than concession.
“Then I’ll go get them,” he said, “and I’ll go get them fast, because I trust the plan you just described more than I’d trust one I built myself right now, and I don’t think that’s a small thing for me to say out loud.
” He was already moving toward the door, then stopped, turned back.
“For what it’s worth. I don’t think I could have said that sentence six months ago.
Trusting somebody else’s read over my own, without it costing me anything to admit it. ”
“I noticed,” I said, quiet, meaning it. “I notice every time, Dante. I just don’t always say so.”
“Say so more,” he said, something almost rough in it. “I think I need to hear it more than I let on.”
I looked back down at the numbers, already three moves into the trail Halloway’s file hadn’t even arrived to confirm yet.
“Go get them. The clock’s real, and I intend to win this one the same way I’ve won every other version of this fight — before anyone else in the room finishes deciding I’m the one who needs protecting. ”
Halloway’s file arrived nine minutes later, a dense export of account numbers and timestamps that would have looked, to anyone else, like an indecipherable wall of noise.
To me it looked like a story waiting to be read in the right order.
I spread it across the table the way I used to spread a client’s suspect ledgers, methodical, unhurried despite the clock running underneath every second of it, because rushing a financial trace had cost me accuracy before and I wasn’t willing to trade accuracy for speed on the one afternoon it would matter most.
The account structure told its own story before I’d even reached the transaction details — three shell layers, each one slightly more careless than the one beneath it, the specific fingerprint of someone confident enough in her own reputation to stop double-checking her own work.
I recognized the pattern because I’d built my entire career on recognizing it: competence that had curdled, somewhere along the way, into the particular arrogance of never having been caught.
“She’s good,” I said out loud, to no one, tracing the third layer back toward something that was almost, but not quite, untraceable. “She’s just not better than someone who’s spent six years catching people exactly this good.”
Cole and Matteo came back into the kitchen twenty minutes later, already dressed for whatever the afternoon required, and I felt the specific shift in the room’s energy that always arrived with them — not urgency exactly, just readiness, the particular calm of men who’d learned to move fast without ever looking rushed.
Cole crossed straight to the table and looked over my shoulder at the trail spread across it, quiet, absorbing the shape of it in the same unhurried way he absorbed everything.
“You’ve got her,” he said, not a question.
“I’ve got the venue. I don’t have her yet, not really — I have where she’s going to be, which is close enough to matter.” I kept working, not looking up, the specific focus of a trail finally close enough to touch. “Give me ten more minutes and I’ll have the exact room.”
“Take the ten minutes,” Matteo said, already checking something in the bag he’d set on the counter, methodical in a way that had nothing to do with his usual restless energy. “We’re not moving until you’re certain. I’d rather walk in ten minutes late and correct than five minutes early and wrong.”
“That’s exactly right,” I said, and meant it as more than agreement — the specific gratitude of being trusted to finish the work at my own pace instead of being rushed toward an answer that hadn’t finished forming yet.
Dante found me alone for exactly ninety seconds before we left, catching my hand in the hallway while Cole loaded the truck and Matteo double-checked the address one final time.
He didn’t say anything at first, just pressed his forehead briefly to mine, the specific quiet of a man storing up something before walking into a room he couldn’t fully control the outcome of.
“Say it,” I said, quiet, knowing him well enough now to know what the silence usually meant.
“I’m afraid,” he said, simply, no performance in it, the old reflex to armor every feeling in strategy finally, entirely absent.
“Not of the room. Of watching you walk into it and not being able to do the one thing I’ve spent my whole life being good at, which is standing between the people I love and whatever’s coming for them.
This time the only weapon that matters is yours.
I have to just stand there and trust it. ”
“You’ve been standing there trusting it for months,” I said, my free hand coming up to rest against his jaw. “You just haven’t had to do it somewhere with an audience before. That’s the only thing that’s actually different about today.”
“Maybe,” he said, something easing, fractionally, in the tight line of his shoulders. “I keep telling myself that. I’ll keep telling myself that the whole drive there, probably, until it starts being true instead of just being said.”
“It’ll be true by the time we walk through that door,” I said.
“I promise you that much.” I kissed him once, brief, certain, the kind of kiss that wasn’t asking for anything, only confirming something already settled between us.
“Now go help Cole load the truck before Matteo reorganizes it a third time out of nerves.”
Something almost like a laugh escaped him, real, the tension breaking just enough to let him move again. “I love you,” he said, plain, unguarded, the way he’d learned to say it now without treating the sentence like a liability. “Whatever happens in that room today.”
“I know,” I said. “Go. The clock’s the only enemy we haven’t already beaten once.”
◆ ◆ ◆