Chapter 6
Imade the tail three blocks from Sterling someone had picked it rather than forced it. Professional. I pushed it open with my elbow, keeping my hands clear.
The living room looked like a tornado had passed through.
Cushions pulled from the sofa, books swept from shelves, her files, color-coded, organized with that obsessive precision I'd been making fun of for a week, scattered across the carpet.
But my eyes went straight to the bedroom doorway, to the spill of fabric visible from where I stood.
Personal items. Laid out on the dark comforter. Not dumped. Arranged. Deliberately, methodically, like a display.
The rage rattled the door in my chest. I didn't let it out. Not yet. It wasn’t useful yet.
"Don't." I heard her behind me and turned to block her view. "You don't need to see it again."
"I already saw it once." But she stopped, and she was anxious in a way that made her face tense up. "They touched my things. They were in my space."
"I know."
"They wanted me to feel..." She stopped, biting hard on her lip. "It worked. I feel it."
I cataloged the apartment in thirty seconds. Points of entry, items displaced, what had been searched versus what had been staged. Then I made three decisions in rapid succession, the way I always did when a situation required containment.
"You're staying at my penthouse," I said. "Tonight. I'll bring in a security team, discreet, professional. They'll rotate shifts and maintain a perimeter. I'll have someone sweep your car for devices in the morning and..."
"Excuse me?"
"...and we'll coordinate with Bates on whether this triggers a federal response. In the meantime, the penthouse has a monitored security system, reinforced entry points, and..."
"Will. Stop."
I stopped. Not because of the word. Because of her face.
She had crossed her arms, and her eyes, which had been wide and frightened two minutes ago, were now something else entirely. I recognized the expression from the first day she'd walked into my office. The one that said she was about to take me apart.
"I appreciate that you're concerned," she said, her voice low and controlled in a way that sounded like a fuse burning. "But you don't get to show up and start making decisions about my life."
"Someone broke into your apartment and went through your underwear drawer as a message. This isn't about decisions, it's about keeping you alive..."
"And you've decided the best way to do that is to move me into your home and hire people to watch me. Without asking. Without even pausing to ask. You just showed up and started issuing orders like I'm a... a..."
"Like you're in danger. Because you are."
"Like I'm a thing you're managing!" Her voice cracked on the word, and I saw her flinch at her own volume.
She took a breath. Tried again, quieter.
"Do you know what my father used to say?
'I'm doing this for the family.' Every lie, every crime, every decision he made without telling my mother or me.
Always 'for the family.' He decided what we needed to know.
He decided what risks were acceptable. He decided and decided and decided, and we just..
. lived inside his decisions until the FBI showed up. "
Something cold moved through my chest. Not the rage. Something else.
"I'm not your father."
"No? Because right now you're doing the same thing he did.
You walked in, you assessed the threat, you made a plan, and you announced it.
You didn't ask me what I wanted. You didn't ask me what I thought.
You just... decided." She pressed her palm against her forehead, like she was trying to hold something in.
"I spent ten years trying not to be someone else's managed problem. I won't start again with you."
The silence that followed was the kind that changes things. The kind where you can hear the building settle and the refrigerator hum and the sound of your own assumptions cracking.
I heard what she was saying. I understood, on some level, that she was right.
But the other part of my brain, the operational part, the part that ran threat assessments and calculated exposure and had kept me alive for seven years, that part was screaming that right and safe were not the same thing, and safe was what mattered, and if she'd just let me. ..
Let me what? Decide for her? Control the outcome?
I didn't like the question. I moved past it.
"You're right," I said carefully. "I should have asked."
She blinked, the anger in her expression flickering with surprise. "What?"
"I walked in here and took over. That wasn't... I shouldn't have done that." The words felt strange in my mouth. Clumsy. Like speaking a language I'd learned from a textbook but never used in conversation. "That's not who I want to be. Not with you."