Jamie shrugged. “We got this.”
“We do?” Killian asked, his eyes wide.
Jamie patted his lover’s chest. “Yeah, counselor, we do.”
With my help, we got the dead guy into the well of Jamie’s truck, then Jamie made Killian leave separately, walking half a block and calling a rideshare. This was so fucked up, but we were taking no chances. Then Jamie left, and it was only Lyric and me. And his computers. And fuck knows what else.
I reached for Lyric’s hand, gripping it tight. “We need to go,” I said, my gaze locked on his.
He nodded and squeezed back, a silent agreementpassing between us. No more distractions. No more arguments. Just the two of us, focused on tearing down the monster before it reached anyone else we cared about.
Within ten minutes, Lyric was crouched in the footwell of my truck, his equipment packed around him with a precision that said he’d hidden like this before.
We sent a simple message to the three clients we had scheduled for tomorrow, followed by one to Logan, as manager of this place, so that he wouldn’t be involved. He had a whole new life in San Diego as a father, a partner, and the primary caregiver for Tudor. He didn’t need to know what was happening in detail, but he’d understand the message and know to stay away. The official story was an electrical fault—an excuse to shut operations for the rest of the day and the next day. His response was immediate.
Logan: Okay. You need me?
Rio: No. All good, boss.
But the truth? Redcars wasn’t closed.
Redcars was going to war.
TWENTY-THREE
Lyric
We endedup in a no-tell motel outside Thousand Oaks—one of those rundown, sun-bleached strips that hadn’t changed since the eighties. Faded pink paint peeled off the stucco walls. The neonVACANCYsign buzzed as if it had a nervous tic, and the office was protected by a thick glass window that made it clear this wasn’t the kind of place you stayed at because you wanted to.
But it was cash-only. No questions, no paper trail. That was what we needed.
Rio picked a room at the very end of the block, the one with a busted porch light and a rust-streaked ice machine around the corner. The truck was parked outside our door, close enough that Rio could get to it in two steps flat if shit went sideways.
Inside, it was small, dusty, and dim. The bedspread was a faded floral pattern that might once have been cheerful. Now it was tired. The air conditioner wheezed in the wall, blowing more noise than actual cold.
I didn’t care.
I dropped my pack by the table, booted the laptop, and set to work. Because while Rio was out locking down the perimeter, checking sight lines, and planning every exit, I had a different kind of fight to prepare for.
And it started with getting past the silence in my head and punching a hole through the fortress that was Kessler’s mind.
The contract on the dark web had updated to even more money now. LyricNight was getting worried about me. Whether that was Kessler losing his shit after seeing all his colleagues go down, or the AI calculating probabilities on its own to protect him, I couldn’t say.
That was the part that scared me the most. Not knowing where the decisions were coming from. Not knowing if Kessler was still the hand pulling the strings… or if the machine was doing it all. Kessler hadn’t been seen in public for seven weeks—no new appearances, no digital footprint that wasn’t already old and scrubbed. It was as if he’d vanished behind the firewall of his fortress and let the AI run wild. That silence? It was louder than any declaration. Either he was hiding, or something worse—he might be sending me encrypted messages, or the AI was doing it and he wasn’t the one calling the shots anymore.
Either way, the clock was ticking. And the price on my head said I wasn’tjusta loose thread anymore—I was a fucking threat.
Rio came back in, arms full of shitty snacks. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten them. Didn’t care. I took the first thing he handed me—a crushed pack of mini donuts tasting of chemicals and sugar and comfort. They were, somehow, still within the use-by date.
He passed me a bottle of water next. I held it for a second, blinking. Did it matter how old water was? Could it expire? I cracked the seal anyway and drank half of it without stopping.
Rio flopped into the room’s single chair as if he’d been shot, one leg stretched out, scanning every window and corner as if by instinct.
He didn’t ask what I’d found.
He kept me supplied with sugar and silence and the kind of presence that let me know I wasn’t doing this alone.
The silence lasted an hour, Rio was restless, and I sat back in my chair—there was nothing else I could do now but go over the plan I had in my head, which to be fair was get inside, fix shit, and get out alive. The Cave were working on their end, they’d tell me when it was okay to go in, but I hated that Rio was going in with me.
