Chapter 24 Phoenix
Phoenix
Something thwacks against the glass of the shower enclosure hard enough to rattle the door on its track. A rectangle of paper blooms against the fog on the other side, the face I dragged out of my head staring at me through steam.
Atticus is a silhouette on the other side—broad shoulders, jaw clenched. “Is this the man who killed Danner? The man on the container ship?”
I squint, soap burning my eyes. Water drums my scalp. I blink through the sting and nod, once, sharp. “Yes.”
He swears under his breath, a low string of words that tastes like metal even through the glass. Then he’s gone. No softening. No explanation. Just the click of the door and his footsteps, fast and hard.
I scrub soap from my lashes with my knuckles, yank the handle, and rinse until my eyes stop feeling flayed.
The house is not quiet. It has that gathering sound—boots on wood, voices tightened down to spare parts.
I kill the water, grab a towel, and wrap it around me in a tight twist that buys me thirty seconds of dignity and exactly zero patience.
“Atticus!” I shout, already moving. “What the—”
I don’t finish, because I hit the den doorway and walk straight into a firing squad of attention.
The security team is posted in a half-moon around the long table, comms in ears, their posture a single word—go.
Atticus stands at the head with the sketch in his hand like a warrant.
Storm is two paces off his shoulder, expression flat and lethal.
Maverick is pacing, phone to his ear, palm pressed to his chest like he’s trying to pretend his heart isn’t climbing into it.
Conrad is near the far corner—then he sees me.
Everything in him tightens, then snaps. He pulls his gun and levels it at the wall above the team with the kind of control that makes men rethink their lives.
“Close your eyes and turn around,” he says to them, even.
They move instantly to obey. Then to me, voice rough and struggling for control, “Phoenix. Clothes. Now.”
“Excuse me,” I say, because the towel is not the problem, and everybody knows it. “What the fuck is going on?”
Atticus flicks his gaze to me and away like he can’t afford the gravitational pull. “We have an ID.”
“You had an ID last night. You have my sketch. That’s not what’s happening.”
“Phoenix,” Conrad grits out, eyes still on the team. “Put on some fucking clothes, and we’ll talk.”
I fold my arms over the towel and dig in. “You can either tell me right now, or you can stand here in solemn silence until I get back. Your call.”
His jaw knots. He looks like he wants to argue and also like he knows he will lose. “Nobody says a word until she gets back,” he snaps.
Storm’s mouth almost tilts. Atticus’s throat works, once. The room holds its breath because I asked it to. I hesitate, then turn and leave, my bare feet slapping the hall in quick, wet steps.
Thirty seconds. T-shirt. Leggings. Hair in a knot that will surrender the second I ask it to. I come back the same way I left, faster, heart in a higher gear from running and from the way the house feels like a drawn bow.
“Talk,” I say, planting myself at the table. I don’t sit. None of them do either.
Atticus lays the sketch down, palm on the edge to keep it flat. The face looks up at us like it’s bored. Clean hair, strict brow, small ears, that thin white line near the ear. A mouth that does not have to sneer to hurt you. I hate him more on paper than I did on the boat.
“His name is Rafe Collier,” Atticus says. “Former head of security at the Wynn. He ran access logs before I did. He engineered the last version of our camera coverage, and more importantly, he wrote the exceptions.”
I can feel my pulse in my temples. “He works for Conrad’s father,” I say. It’s not a question. It clicks into place with a sound I don’t like.
Atticus nods, once. “He did. Officially. After I replaced him, he left with a package and a recommendation,” the word sour, “to ‘pursue opportunities.’ Unofficially, he contracted for Masterson Holdings. Security audits. Quiet work.”
“So either he acted alone for money,” Maverick says, voice low, anger rinsed out until it gleams, “or he took a job for Masterson senior that wasn’t on a spreadsheet.”
“Or both.” Storm’s fingers drum once on the table, then still. “He knows our infrastructure. He knows where to put a knife.”
Conrad’s gun is down now, but he hasn’t holstered it.
His stillness is louder than shouting. “My father knew about Danner,” he says, voice flat enough to cut.
“He called me the night she disappeared and told me to find her before someone used her against me. He might as well have confessed with that. I just didn’t… put it together.”
“Or he might have been testing how much you already knew,” Atticus says. “Either way, Collier doesn’t move without money and cover. He’s a mercenary with a tie clip.”
I’re aware of the team around the perimeter without looking straight at them. They’re good enough not to react when the room gets uglier.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“Savannah for sure. The docks, likely,” Storm answers. “We’re pulling port access rosters and tug captain logs.”
“His last personal residence on record is an address on East Jones,” Atticus adds, already sliding me a print-out, “but the utilities went dark six months ago. I’ve got a storage unit under a shell company that still autopays. We’re looking.”
I stare at Rafe’s paper eyes and say the thing I don’t want to say. “If he works for your father and he took me, then your father wanted me taken.”
Conrad doesn’t flinch. He already lived with that weapon in his ribs. “Yes,” he says. Then jaw, tighter. “Or he wants us to think he did.”
“And you want to go to him,” I say. Every part of me recognizes the shape of the urge that’s holding Conrad tense. “Kick his door in. Demand an answer. Break a knuckle and call it closure.”
Conrad’s silence is an admission. Storm looks at him, then at me. Atticus looks at the wall like there’s a line of code there he hates and is willing to rewrite anyway.
Maverick taps the sketch and smiles the kind of smile that isn’t friendly. “We don’t need to guess. We have a face. We have a city he’s comfortable in. We have friends who hate human traffickers more than they like their own mothers.”
“Blackvine again?” I ask.
“They offered,” he says. “This morning. They like us in their debt. I like us alive. The Venn diagram is a circle this week.”
Atticus finally looks straight at me. He’s moved past the edge we left him on last night. There’s color in his face that isn’t just rage now. “We don’t make a move without you knowing about it,” he says. “But we are going to move.”
“Good,” I say. “Because I didn’t go through a container and an ocean to live in a house that only makes toast.”
Maverick snorts. Storm’s mouth flickers, almost a smile, gone.
“I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. The man’s as crooked as a Lowcountry politician in election season. Security procedures?” Spencer asks from the doorway.
I didn’t hear him come in, which means he chose not to be heard. He looks from the sketch to me to his son, expression stormy.
“Two cars anytime she leaves the house,” Storm says. “Staggered routes. Atticus’s trackers on phones and the new keys. No deliveries cleared without visual confirmation. Operators on outer perimeter, our team inside. Nobody assumes a uniform means friendly.”
Spencer nods and shifts his gaze to me. “You okay?”
No one else asks it quite like that. He isn’t questioning whether I can handle knowing; he’s asking if the knowing is sitting right.
“Yes,” I say. “Because I want a plan and I want this to be over more than I want to be sheltered.”
Atticus’s mouth does that small thing again. He hears rules; he likes me following them when I write them.
I go to the table and flatten the sketch with one palm.
Rafe Collier looks back at me—neat, practiced, patient.
The small scar near his ear is the only pout on a face that prefers not to be read.
I want to put a thumb over that white line and push until I find the nerve under it.
I want to be in the room when the first handcuff clicks.
I want to watch him pretend to be tired of this conversation.
“What’s the play?” I ask.
“We keep you out of sight, first,” Atticus says, practical. “No lobby walks, no back corridors, no I just need to anything. If Collier worked this close to us once, he can do it again.”
“We take his money,” Storm says. “Not literally. We take the flow. Shell companies. Pay lines. If we pinch his wallet, he’ll have to move.”
“We flush him,” Maverick adds, leaning on his elbows, eyes bright. “You give the city the face without giving them you. Anonymous tips. A reward that’s not tied to us. We flood the places he thinks are safe. Dock bars. Yard crews. Men who think they’re invisible until they’re suddenly not.”
Conrad’s fingers flex around the butt of his gun, then finally—finally—he holsters it. His voice is low when he speaks, the way it gets when he’s past fury and into focus. “And I go see my father,” he says.
Atticus looks like he wants to object on principle. Storm looks like he wants to volunteer to carry the explosive. Maverick looks like he wants to go to keep it from turning into a murder charge. I look at Conrad and don’t look away.
“You go,” I say. “Because if you don’t, he’ll come. And I don’t want him in this house.”
Conrad’s jaw eases a fraction. He hates that I’m right and loves me for it. “I’m not giving him anything he can use.”
“Take a recorder,” Atticus says, already sliding one across the table. “He thinks in performative sentences. He wants witnesses even when he’s pretending he doesn’t.”
“We send him a copy of the sketch,” Storm suggests, deadpan. “With a note that says, ‘oops.’”
Maverick grins. “Tempting.”
“I think…we don’t give him anything,” I say. “If he’s dirty, we don’t give him a head start.”
Spencer exhales like he approves of the rhythm. “You have at least three good plays. Pick one to lead. Save the rest for when the board shifts.”
Atticus taps the corner of the sketch with one finger.
“We lead with the docks and the money,” he decides aloud.
“Maverick, you and I drive the tips without a trail back to us. Storm, you and the operators take the yards and the bars. Conrad—” He hesitates just long enough for me to watch him decide to trust the man he sometimes wants to kill.
“—go see him. Short. Controlled. You do not let him pull you into water he owns.”
Conrad glances at me again. “You stay here.”
I arch a brow.
“With me,” he amends, because he’s learning. “In my head. On the phone. Not anywhere near him.”
“Better,” I say.
“Phoenix.” Atticus’s voice pulls me back from staring down at the paper and imagining it on fire. “You don’t walk around with this in your hands. We need to lock up the hard copy until Junia makes additional ones.”
I pick up the sketch and look one more time, not because I need to—he’s already branded on the inside of my eyelids—but because I like the ritual of saying I saw him, I named him, I made him real to more people than me.
Atticus takes it in a sleeve and slides it into the safe behind a framed map that looks like generational wealth and is really just expensive paper. The door clanks shut. The click sounds like a promise.
The team breaks—clean, purposeful. Comms checks. Assignments. Storm starts a list and three grown men fall in behind it like it was their idea. Spencer steps aside and lets the younger men be the sharp edge. He’s the wall that makes the edge matter.
I stand a second longer, watching the room move around a plan we actually chose and not one we were forced into.
The man without a name finally has one, and it fits his face like a collar.
I turn to leave, ready to change shoes and braid my hair and build the kind of day where the waiting doesn’t rot, when Atticus steps into my path and catches me with a look. “You good?” he asks, quiet.
“Good enough,” I say. “I’m going to be bored on purpose for an hour. Then I want to help you sort the tips so we don’t duplicate effort. And then I want to watch a man with clean shoes run out of places to stand.”
His mouth curves, fierce. “Yes, ma’am.”
I’m halfway to the hall when my tablet pings. It’s the secure channel Atticus built—the one that only rings when someone inside the family calls it. The ID tag is a number I don’t recognize, attached to a name I wish I didn’t.
Rafe Collier.
A single line slides across the screen: Nice drawing. Tell Conrad I’ll see him before he sees me.
I look up. The room has already felt my change in temperature.
“Atticus,” I say, voice steady even as the floor tilts a degree. “He knows.”
“How?” Conrad demands, already reaching for his keys. “How does he know already?”
Storm is at my shoulder, eyes on the message. Maverick swears softly, affection gone from the sound.
Atticus takes the tablet, reads, and hands it back like it’s a hot stone he won’t let burn me. “Because someone just told him.”
“Then let’s make him right,” I answer, the old fear flaring and then folding into something cleaner. I look at Conrad, at the men, at the safe, at the door we’re about to open.
“Call your father,” I tell him, stepping toward him, toward the fight I’m not going to run from. “Tell him we’re on our way.”