Maverick points with the end of a spoon. “And staff. We don’t let rumor do what we can do better. You let Phoenix set that tone.”
Phoenix doesn’t step back from the table. She steps closer. “I’ll take care of the people. Not as a mascot, but as a manager. If you want me in the front office, then we do that now, not after you’re done playing chess. I want a room, a team, and authority. Otherwise don’t give me a ‘manager’ title just to make me feel useful.”
“You’re not a prop,” Conrad says. It’s the first thing he’s said. He looks at her when he says it, like that’s a vow.
“You’re all very good at taking a punch,” Spencer says mildly. “I’d like to see how good you are at filing an injunction.”
“I can file six,” Atticus replies. “And a temporary restraining order before lunch if you get me a judge who hates being lied to.”
“I can get you two,” Spencer says. “One who hates being lied to and one who hates being bored.”
The table hums with it—purpose. It tunes my anger into something that feels like work. I still want a blade. I want Rafe Collier under my hands long enough to learn which part breaks first. That’s not the plan that keeps us clean, though.
“So we starve them,” I say.
“We also pull you out of every room your mother owns,” Atticus adds. “No events. No charities. No photographs. She doesn’t get to use your face as insulation.”
I feel my jaw lock. “She hasn’t owned my face since the night she told a man to make sure the second bullet wouldn’t miss.”
Phoenix’s hand finds my forearm. Just fingers. Just weight. The pulse under my skin calms like it does when a blade sits right in my grip. I breathe. I nod.
“What do you need me to do that doesn’t involve a suit?” I ask.
Atticus slides a short list toward me without sarcasm. He knows what I am and what I can’t stand. “Operators, docks, bars. Quiet pressure. Tug captains. Yard foremen. Crew lists. I want shadow rosters and the holes in them. And I want two safe apartments in the city before dark that no one can tie to us.”
I take the list. It’s work I can dig into. “Happily.”
“Storm,” Spencer says, and I look at him because he rarely uses my name like a bell. “Two calls are yours if you want them. Good men. They’ll ask for proof before they stick their necks out. Get them what they need.”
“I’ll get it,” I tell him.
We break into motion. Atticus gets the financials humming. Maverick disappears into the puzzle of people. Spencer makes calls and tells the truth in a way that gets doors opened without shouting.
Conrad says he’s going to see his father and every molecule in the room shifts. Phoenix stands in front of him and repeats the plan back to him like he’s the only person who matters and like she will hold him to it. He answers her because he wants to, and because part of him is seventeen again and she was the first person who ever made him want to be better.
I text two names I haven’t used in years. One answers with a beer emoji and a time. The other with a boat and a frown. I book a car under a name that doesn’t exist and send a grocery list to a cleaner who owes me a favor: towels, bleach, coffee, four chairs, a dumb set of curtains. People laugh at curtains until you need to watch a door without being watched.
By noon the triangle is alive. Financial bleed is identified. Legal teeth are gathering. Moral rot has a spotlight warming it. It isn’t done. It’s a beginning I can trust.
I spend the afternoon with operators who don’t need their names on our walls. We stand on a dock and talk about tides and who drinks where. We stand in the back of a bar and say nothing for ten minutes, then everything in two. Men who live by the water hate traffickers the way farmers hate fires. You don’t have to buy their souls. You rent their attention with respect.
By four I’ve got two apartments under false tenants and a freezer full of ice in one of them because sometimes you need to put swelling down before anyone asks questions. One of those apartments is exactly what Storm needed to set up a clean room in case he needs to torture the truth out of someone.
By six I know which tug captain thinks he’s invisible and which one is too honest for his own good. I write it down without names, then burn the paper over a sink and flush the ash.
When I come back to the island house, the sun is dragging color across the marsh. It would be pretty if I was built for that kind of peace. I’m not. I’m built for evenings that sharpen.
Phoenix is on the deck, hair up, bare feet on the board I fixed last night because the squeak bothered her. She looks at me like she can tell the difference between a man who did violence and a man who measured it and set it aside.
“How bad?” she asks.
“Contained,” I say. “The docks will talk if Atticus’s money trail lines up with what their eyes saw. They’ll talk faster if we keep them out of it when we move.”
She nods. “Conrad?”
“Didn’t kill him. Didn’t let him in,” I say. “That’s the headline.”
She exhales. Her shoulders drop an inch. She stares out at the water like she’s telling it to keep doing the same thing, exactly, until we’re done.
