“Found you, pretty bird,” Danner murmurs.
8
Storm
The world is collapsingaround 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 setwater 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 inthe 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 weretold,” 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 saidleaving, 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.
