I turn to leave, ready to change shoes and braid my hair and build the kind of day where the waiting doesn’t rot, when Atticus steps into my path and catches me with a look. “You good?” he asks, quiet.
“Good enough,” I say. “I’m going to be bored on purpose for an hour. Then I want to help you sort the tips so we don’t duplicate effort. And then I want to watch a man with clean shoes run out of places to stand.”
His mouth curves, fierce. “Yes, ma’am.”
I’m halfway to the hall when my tablet pings. It’s the secure channel Atticus built—the one that only rings when someone inside the family calls it. The ID tag is a number I don’t recognize, attached to a name I wish I didn’t.
Rafe Collier.
A single line slides across the screen:Nice drawing. Tell Conrad I’ll see him before he sees me.
I look up. The room has already felt my change in temperature.
“Atticus,” I say, voice steady even as the floor tilts a degree. “He knows.”
“How?” Conrad demands, already reaching for his keys. “How does he know already?”
Storm is at my shoulder, eyes on the message. Maverick swears softly, affection gone from the sound.
Atticus takes the tablet, reads, and hands it back like it’s a hot stone he won’t let burn me. “Because someone just told him.”
“Then let’s make him right,” I answer, the old fear flaring and then folding into something cleaner. I look at Conrad, at the men, at the safe, at the door we’re about to open.
“Call your father,” I tell him, stepping toward him, toward the fight I’m not going to run from. “Tell him we’re on our way.”
25
Storm
There’sa map on Atticus’s table that doesn’t look like a map to anyone but us. Names instead of streets. Lines instead of roads. My mother’s name sits on the top right like she thinks gravity comes from wherever she’s standing. Masterson on the left, his circle fat with old favors. Maverick’s father in the corner with a smile that buys silence. Atticus’s parents boxed beneath, perfect posture and perfect portfolios, never a fingerprint when there’s cleanup to be done.
Spencer’s name is not on the board. He’s here in the doorway, coffee in one hand, eyes on all of it like he’s counting exits. His presence is the only part of the morning that doesn’t make my teeth grind.
“Of course they’re involved,” I say. It comes out flat. Not surprise, just accounting. “All but Spencer.”
Spencer’s mouth twitches like he wants to apologize for being the exception and at the same time refuse to feel guilty about it.
Atticus draws a line from Masterson to a new card:Rafe Collier. “Money. Access. Cover,” Atticus says. “Rafe doesn’t move without at least two of those three. He had all three.”
Maverick flips his phone screen and taps a name I recognize as Blackvine. “And he won’t move without them again if we cage the sources.”
Conrad hasn’t said a word. He’s too still. That’s when he’s loudest—the part of him he learned not to show anyone because it scared teachers and girlfriends and his father. Phoenix stands near his shoulder, not touching, but close enough that he can feel her. If he leans an inch, he’ll brush her arm. He doesn’t lean. He breathes through his nose and holds the distance because that is the only way he knows to love someone when anger’s present.
I’m knives and forward motion. Plans that need a spreadsheet make me itch. Atticus is busy planning our takedown. Maverick will be the people-end of things, Conrad the hammer.
Me? I’m like a hinge and a lock pick all in one. The part of the night that makes cowards rethink their hiding spots.
“We can’t just take them out,” I say, because I need to hear the line before I find ways to cross it. “Not in a way that lands clean. You stab a king in daylight and you spend the rest of your life paying for it, unfortunately.”
“We’re not stabbing,” Atticus says. “We’re starving them out. Then make them choose between sunlight and jail.”
“I want to stab them.” I twirl my knife.
“We’re not letting the mess land at our feet,” Phoenix adds. Her voice is steady now when we say their names. She earned thatsteadiness. “If we go loud, it’s with evidence. If we go quiet, it’s into rooms that can actually shut doors.”
Spencer moves to the table, sets his cup down, and taps the lower corner of Atticus’s grid. “You’ll need three plays,” he says. “Financial, legal, and moral. You cut the cash. You bring in a real DA with a spine. You force a board session and make them answer to their own bylaws. Meanwhile, you protect the people who got hurt. If any part of that triangle fails, the others hold.”
Atticus’s pen is already moving. “Okay, financial is forensics, shell audits, vendor scrubs. Legal is district attorney and federal—your two phone calls,” he says to Spencer without looking. “Moral is board and press. We exert selective pressure. We leak what hurts, and we hold what convicts.”
