There was the smallest rustle of silk. If you didn’t know my mother, you wouldn’t know that was her version of a smile. “Don’t be dramatic. It was a warning. I told him not to hit anything vital.” Then, like she remembered I existed only insofar as I complicated things, “And do stop coming home so late with the boy. It sets a tone.”
“The boy,” my father said, and the break in his voice then was the kind I only ever heard when he talked about me. “You mean our son.”
Another small click from the landing clock. Another second gone.
“I’ll give you that divorce you want so badly, but you’ll leave Savannah. If you don’t, immediately…” my mother said, reasonable again, “the next one won’t miss. If he happens to be with you, that is an acceptable loss to me.”
It was the only time my mother ever said out loud what she measured me against. I learned two things in that one sentence: how expendable I was, and why my father always seemed like a man walking toward a door.
He didn’t argue. Not because he agreed; because he understood her. He had stayed too long, and she wanted an end he couldn’t negotiate.
He left that night. He had a bag in the car already, because of course he did. She watched him from the doorway and set the alarm and turned off the light behind his heels. I stood in the dark at the bend in the hall and memorized the shape of his back as a man who had decided to live.
I also learned exactly who my mother was.
I didn’t tell her I heard. I didn’t tell him I knew. I learned a long time ago the rule that has kept me alive: say less, see more, act when it counts.
When he called later—from a number he said not to save—he told me to make myself a different house. A different family, one not created by blood but by different bonds. So I did. With Conrad. With Atticus. With Maverick. We made a safe place out of each other. We made new rules. We made our own future.
And apparently our own kind of hell, now that one of ours is gone.
The ring tone stops.
“Storm?” he says.
I don’t say Dad. We don’t do that. He didn’t say son. We’re too careful with each other now, after all this time.
“Yes,” I say. “I need help.”
A small pause—not wounded, but alert. He sits up, wherever he is. Papers slide. A door closes. His voice lowers.
“Tell me,” he says.
“Phoenix was taken,” I say. “From the hotel. We’ve got a GPS on her, and we have a last ping at the pier just after midnight. We think she’s on a container ship. They took her out on the ocean. We think it had to be organized. There’s a mole on our side. Atticus is working the feeds and data. Mav is pulling favors. Conrad’s on fire. I need…I need whatever you can give me without putting a new target on your back to take the place of the old one.”
The wood of his desk creaks—my mind supplies it, a memory I thought I’d forgotten. He bought it at an estate sale when I was twelve and told me men should have heavy desks so they remembered their words had weight.
“Do you have a name?” he asks. “For whoever took her?”
“Not that we can put on paper,” I say. “But I know the type, and his minion is a piece of shit.”
“The type,” he says, and I can hear him sorting boxes in his head. Old guard mafia. Boutique traffickers. Federal contractors with private boats. Men who don’t use their own phones.
“We’ve heard him called The Broker,” I say, testing the shape of it in my mouth. “That’s the story under the surface story. But we think there’s probably more to it.”
He breathes out. “I’ve heard rumors. If it’s him, you’re already playing a different game.”
“I don’t care about the game,” I say. “I just care about her.”
“I know,” he says. The way he says it reminds me that he left so I wouldn’t die on a staircase behind him.
He doesn’t waste time on moral angles. He moves on to logistics, which is why I called him.
“Practical first,” he says. “I have two contacts in the Bureau who still answer my calls. One is in Crimes Against Persons. One is in Public Corruption. They’ll be careful. They won’t show up with badges unless I tell them to. They can pull cargo manifests faster than you can and without leaving fingerprints you don’t want on paper. They can ask questions at the pilot station with a badge in their pocket they don’t have to take out.”
“Names,” I say, and he gives them, spelling each letter, giving me the personal cell with the ‘don’t use this if you want to sleep easy’ warning built in. I write both on a yellow legal pad because I don’t want them living in a cloud.
“I’ll call them first,” he says. “When I hang up with you. I’ll ask for the quiet route. You’ll have numbers in twenty minutes and not in a text.”
