Chapter 8
Storm
The world is collapsing around me, and I have an idea for something that might help shore it up. But it might also bring everything crashing down a lot faster than we’re ready for. And I can’t go creating a second emergency while we’re working on fixing the first.
Patience.
I hold to that while the penthouse hums with motion. Maverick is building alliances by the minute while Atticus is surgically cutting the city into time-stamped slivers of data packets. Conrad is a coiled wire in the shape of a man trying to hold himself together.
Me? I feel completely fucking useless. I’m a blade made flesh, and I’m not needed until we find the monster that needs filetting.
I move through the rooms and find all the tiny things that need to be fixed.
Tighten screws. Replace broken things. I check locks, lines of sight, dead zones.
I distribute burner phones. I put a med kit by the elevator and another under the console table.
I set water on the coffee table and say nothing until someone drinks it.
Every few seconds, I look at the door that hides Atticus’s office. The last ping is still the last ping. There’s no more information than we had an hour ago.
But I can’t stop.
When I stop moving, silence presses behind my ribs. It’s an old, familiar pressure. I know what it wants. It wants me to pick up a phone I shouldn’t touch. It wants me to invite a different kind of trouble to the table.
I pick up the phone and stare at the number I haven’t dialed in so long. A simple string of digits. One I’ve known for years, and still haven’t found the strength to use.
Don’t create a second emergency.
Phoenix is the first emergency. She’s also the only thing that would make me cross lines I swore I never would.
And now I have no choice but to create what could be another problem…but for her? I’ll do anything.
I press CALL.
The ring tone drops me straight into a hallway I never left. Not really.
Seventeen years old. Junior year. A suit jacket that doesn’t fit right because I borrowed it from Conrad’s closet and pretended not to care when I needed something to cover my sweat-stained shirt before I went back home.
The smell of our house—my mother’s house—lemon and old money, the kind of polished wood that makes your footsteps behave.
It’s late. The big clock in the landing clicks like a small metronome marking the distance between the person I am and the one I’m supposed to be.
Earlier that night I was with the guys. We were stupid on adrenaline and quiet on the parts we didn’t say out loud.
Phoenix had ended it with Conrad. She’d walked out of his arms, and it felt like the room lost gravity for a second.
Everyone pretended they were fine. Conrad drank water and called it control.
Atticus reorganized the contents of his pocket into neat piles and didn’t say a word.
Maverick cooked eggs no one ate and made it sound like we were working on a plan to get her back or be better without her, whichever Con needed in the moment.
I won’t lie. Part of me was relieved. You can’t want what your brother has.
You don’t take from your best friend to make yourself happy.
But I wanted her, and I understood that wanting doesn’t stop just because you decide to be good.
I drove home with the windows down, cold air in my face and the music off, because noise would have dulled the pain.
I told myself I could hold all of it: Conrad’s hurt, my duty, my own ache.
I walked inside and heard voices and knew immediately that I should turn and leave. I didn’t.
I stopped halfway down the back hall where the carpet muffles everything and the air-conditioning vents make a low, steady hush.
I heard my father’s voice first—quiet, level, the way a man sounds when he’s already taken the blow and he’s steadying himself for the next.
My mother’s voice came second—sweet as a sugar rim and cold as a glass that has nothing in it.
“I warned you, Spencer” she said, and anyone else would have heard it as patience. I heard what was under it because I had learned her cadence too well. “You were told.”
“Told?” my father asked. “I was shot at.”
There was a pause. My mother let the word hang. She liked to set a word in a room and see who tripped over it.
“You were told,” she repeated. “If you insisted on embarrassing me, you were going to do it from a distance. If you insisted on leaving, on dating that ridiculous woman, you were going to do it far away. Savannah is a small town, dear. People talk, and there are…people who are bigger than I am. Bigger than any of us. I warned you, and you persisted. The next one won’t miss. ”
I didn’t breathe. Not because she said leaving, but because of the way she said next.
My father’s reply was soft enough that I almost didn’t catch it. “You put a man with a gun on me.”
“Please. I sent you a message,” she said. “You’ve never been a good listener.”
“You could have killed me,” he said, and there was something like surprise under the calm, like even after all the years he hadn’t put the weight in the right place.
There was the smallest rustle of silk. If you didn’t know my mother, you wouldn’t know that was her version of a smile.
“Don’t be dramatic. It was a warning. I told him not to hit anything vital.
” Then, like she remembered I existed only insofar as I complicated things, “And do stop coming home so late with the boy. It sets a tone.”
“The boy,” my father said, and the break in his voice then was the kind I only ever heard when he talked about me. “You mean our son.”
Another small click from the landing clock. Another second gone.
“I’ll give you that divorce you want so badly, but you’ll leave Savannah. If you don’t, immediately…” my mother said, reasonable again, “the next one won’t miss. If he happens to be with you, that is an acceptable loss to me.”
It was the only time my mother ever said out loud what she measured me against. I learned two things in that one sentence: how expendable I was, and why my father always seemed like a man walking toward a door.
He didn’t argue. Not because he agreed; because he understood her. He had stayed too long, and she wanted an end he couldn’t negotiate.
He left that night. He had a bag in the car already, because of course he did. She watched him from the doorway and set the alarm and turned off the light behind his heels. I stood in the dark at the bend in the hall and memorized the shape of his back as a man who had decided to live.
I also learned exactly who my mother was.
I didn’t tell her I heard. I didn’t tell him I knew. I learned a long time ago the rule that has kept me alive: say less, see more, act when it counts.
When he called later—from a number he said not to save—he told me to make myself a different house.
A different family, one not created by blood but by different bonds.
So I did. With Conrad. With Atticus. With Maverick.
We made a safe place out of each other. We made new rules. We made our own future.
And apparently our own kind of hell, now that one of ours is gone.
The ring tone stops.
“Storm?” he says.
I don’t say Dad. We don’t do that. He didn’t say son. We’re too careful with each other now, after all this time.
“Yes,” I say. “I need help.”
A small pause—not wounded, but alert. He sits up, wherever he is. Papers slide. A door closes. His voice lowers.
“Tell me,” he says.
“Phoenix was taken,” I say. “From the hotel. We’ve got a GPS on her, and we have a last ping at the pier just after midnight.
We think she’s on a container ship. They took her out on the ocean.
We think it had to be organized. There’s a mole on our side.
Atticus is working the feeds and data. Mav is pulling favors.
Conrad’s on fire. I need…I need whatever you can give me without putting a new target on your back to take the place of the old one. ”
The wood of his desk creaks—my mind supplies it, a memory I thought I’d forgotten. He bought it at an estate sale when I was twelve and told me men should have heavy desks so they remembered their words had weight.
“Do you have a name?” he asks. “For whoever took her?”
“Not that we can put on paper,” I say. “But I know the type, and his minion is a piece of shit.”
“The type,” he says, and I can hear him sorting boxes in his head. Old guard mafia. Boutique traffickers. Federal contractors with private boats. Men who don’t use their own phones.
“We’ve heard him called The Broker,” I say, testing the shape of it in my mouth. “That’s the story under the surface story. But we think there’s probably more to it.”
He breathes out. “I’ve heard rumors. If it’s him, you’re already playing a different game.”
“I don’t care about the game,” I say. “I just care about her.”
“I know,” he says. The way he says it reminds me that he left so I wouldn’t die on a staircase behind him.
He doesn’t waste time on moral angles. He moves on to logistics, which is why I called him.
“Practical first,” he says. “I have two contacts in the Bureau who still answer my calls. One is in Crimes Against Persons. One is in Public Corruption. They’ll be careful.
They won’t show up with badges unless I tell them to.
They can pull cargo manifests faster than you can and without leaving fingerprints you don’t want on paper.
They can ask questions at the pilot station with a badge in their pocket they don’t have to take out. ”
“Names,” I say, and he gives them, spelling each letter, giving me the personal cell with the ‘don’t use this if you want to sleep easy’ warning built in. I write both on a yellow legal pad because I don’t want them living in a cloud.
“I’ll call them first,” he says. “When I hang up with you. I’ll ask for the quiet route. You’ll have numbers in twenty minutes and not in a text.”
“Thank you.”