That means…Conrad is not Masterson’s son.
He can’t know. It’ll crush him.
“Don’t thank me,” Spencer is saying. “Don’t thank a test. Use it to your advantage.”
I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and stand. The relief doesn’t solve all of it—there’s still a man with a clean pair of shoes who thinks he knows how to reach into our house and pull what he wants out—but the worst version is losing oxygen. I can breathe enough to be decisive.
“I’m going back to the Titan-Wynn,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “We leave at six a.m. Quietly book a room under another name and stay under the radar that way. We don’t want Collier sending anyone after you to the penthouse.”
“I want the guys with us,” I add. “And whoever built the rumor that the Queen has her own guard can keep it up.”
He salutes me with a grilling fork. “As you wish.”
I go inside and stand in the bedroom doorway and look at my bag like it might scold me for packing fast. Zeus watches me and thumps his tail. I kneel and put my forehead to his and whisper, “We’re going home,” and he wiggles like he understands the word even if he doesn’t care where home is as long as I’m there.
When I come back to the kitchen, Spencer is washing the two plates like he’ll be graded on the streaks. He glances at me and then at the little black phone on the counter.
“You could call them,” he says. “It would be kind.”
“I know,” I say, and my throat closes for one second. “I will, eventually. But I need time to figure out how to handle them, this, everything.”
He dries his hands and hands me the towel like it’s a baton. “Then we’ll set the stage.”
“What if they don’t like my approach?” I ask, only half joking.
“Then they’re not the men you love, and they don’t know you as well as they think they do,” he says, and somehow that unsticks something in my chest that has been lodged there since I slammed my palms against a steel door.
The house quiets. The night turns all the way dark. Ortiz takes the first watch while Jace sleeps on the couch with the television muttering over his shoulder. Zeus snores like a little outboard motor, happy in a place where the air tastes like trees. I lie down on the bed and put my phone face-down on the nightstand because I trust myself not to call and ruin the entrance I want or the time I’m going to need to get it straight.
I stare at the ceiling and rehearse what I’m going to say to my people without rehearsing.The door is open for anyone who wants to leave because this is going to be loud. If you stay, you do it with your eyes open. If you think you can scare me, you didn’t read the last chapter of my book.
I fall asleep with a list in my head and wake at five without an alarm because my body has learned to tell time by trouble. The water is hot and the coffee is strong, and Spencer is already in the driver’s seat when I climb in with Zeus and a backpack. Ortiz is in the lead car and Jace waves us out with a thermos in his hand like a flag. The feeder in the yard swings and a cardinal takes off and the little house is suddenly a past tense I’ll be grateful for someday.
We pull onto the road, the trees leaning over us like a tunnel. The river is to our left, going where it always goes. When the causeway rises, the city’s glow lifts over the horizon—gold and glass and southern sin.
“Ready?” Spencer asks, not looking away from the road.
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s go home.”
29
Maverick
“What doyou mean she’s gone?”
My voice hits the mirrored ceiling of the Wynn’s side lounge and comes back meaner. The lighting glows honey-soft over velvet and brass; the air conditioner hums like it’s been paid not to snitch. Atticus doesn’t flinch. He swirls soda over ice like he’s rehearsing a lie detector.
Storm leans back in his chair, forearms ridged with veins, that same line in his jaw he gets when he’s trying not to put a knife into feelings.
“Where’s the fucking tracker?” I demand, too loud for a Monday and not sorry. “Didn’t Conrad have her injected? Why the fuck can’t we just ping her like an iPhone?”
Atticus doesn’t look up. “Because your best friend is a paranoid control freak who kept the keys in his pocket,” he says, too calm. “The implant reports to a private endpoint I don’t have. He hardcoded the cipher offline. I can’t brute-force a frequency I don’t know exists.”
“English.”
“Only Conrad can pull her dot up on a map,” he says. “And Conrad isn’t answering our calls.”
