Jace checks the clock on his phone. “Shift change in ten,” he says. “Ortiz, you relieve Bear’s door. Herrera will take hall. I’ll run the perimeter with Cal and make sure Valet keeps the garage blind spot covered.”
Bear stands and stretches his arms until his joints pop. “And Her Majesty eats half a sandwich,” he says. “Minimum.”
“Quarter.”
“Half.”
“A third,” I bargain.
“Half,” three voices say in chorus.
“Fine,” I mutter, because even my stubbornness has limits and Spencer will appear out of thin air if I keep ignoring food.
They disperse with the quiet choreography that happens when men train to notice everything without making anyone else notice them. I stack the Operation pieces in their tray and snapthe lid shut. The board’s red nose looks smug. I flip it facedown and carry it to the bar.
My tablet chimes. Kendra again.
Kendra: “We have a Mrs. Carlisle insisting we lost her earrings ‘again.’ I checked the log—same woman tried this last month. How do you want to handle?”
Phoenix: Comp, but pair it with a “quality control sweep”—a staffer walks her to Lost & Found, then to a manager’s desk to file a report. Make her sign. We got cameras on the boutique?
Kendra: Yes, ma’am.
Phoenix: Pull her last visit and today. If she “finds” them later, add her to the “extra attention” ledger and flag her room for inventory before checkout. Quietly.
Kendra: Yes, ma’am.
I hate the “ma’am” and love it. I hate that the desk needed someone to say it out loud. I love that the second they had permission, they moved like they’d been waiting to be told they were right.
Another message.
Lionel in Valet:“We’ve got a sedan that keeps doing laps past the loading dock. Plates different each time. Same dent in the rear right. Want us to call it in?”
Phoenix: Yes. Loop Security. Don’t chase. If it parks, we log it and call SPD non-emergency. Make sure the runners know not to walk alone in the underground for any reason. Pair up. Radios on.”
Lionel: On it.
My stomach flips. I drink a glass of water and eat half the sandwich Bear left like I agreed. It tastes like cardboard and rosemary mayo. Better than nothing, worse than the impossible biscuits at The Maple Room down the street that I haven’t let myself think about in a year.
The television is on low in the bedroom, muted to a crawl of captions. I keep it there for weather and “in case of.” I don’t watch the true crime channels because I don’t need someone else’s scripted horror to drown out my own.
The local station is running a loop of river footage—police tape, boats, a long shot of the flats near Fort Pulaski where everything you throw away eventually comes to say hello again. I don’t look. I look.
The caption scrolls over the bottom, patient and mean:Body of local businessman recovered near shipping channel; identity confirmed. Cause of death undetermined due to “environmental degradation.”
Environmental degradation. That’s one way to say the river did what it does to everything that falls into it—softened, stripped, chewed. There are other words I could choose. I don’t. The one that lands is simple:gone.
I stand in the doorway and try to locate the feeling I’m supposed to have. Sorrow. Relief. Rage. Something. There’s a hollow where his name should be. There always has been. He knew I existed and chose a life where I was most useful as a secret or a lever.
He watched my mother carry towels and bleach past rooms where men tipped and women pretended not to be afraid of them.
He let me grow up on the edge of his empire and never reached a hand out—not for love, not for money, not even for a lie that could have made my mother’s rent easier.
And when the time came, he hired men who would have traded my body for cash.
My throat works. Nothing moves behind my eyes. I’m not numb. I’m done.
“Queen?” Jace calls, steps careful in the hall like he’s approaching an injured thing. “You want me to kill the news?”
