My phone sat on the table in front of me, screen dark. Silas's message was still there, unanswered.Someone I'd like you to meet.
I'd deal with it later.
Right now, my attention was somewhere else entirely.
On a flower shop I couldn't see from here but could feel in my gut like a compass pointing north.
It didn't make sense.
I'd spent years honing my instincts—learning to read a room, track a target, sense danger before it arrived. Those instincts had kept me alive in places where hesitation meant death.
And right now, every one of those instincts was screaming at me to stay close to Joy.
Not because I'd seen a threat.
Not because logic dictated it.
Just because.
The same way you knew to go left instead of right in the middle of an op. The same way you felt a sniper's scope on you before you heard the shot. The same way your body moved before your brain caught up, pure survival reflex taking over.
That's what this was.
I told myself I was being paranoid. Overprotective. That Joy was fine, that Charleston was safe, that nothing about this situation warranted sitting in a shitty diner drinking bad coffee just to be within sprinting distance of her.
But I stayed anyway.
And when my phone buzzed with her message—A woman came in asking questions. About you.—I was out of the booth before I'd even finished reading it.
Now, standing outside Dominion Hall's gates, the fury that had carried me here was sharpening into something colder.
More focused.
Because the timing was too perfect.
I show up in Charleston. Get recruited by Dominion Hall. Meet Joy. Sleep with her.
And suddenly someone's asking questions?
No.
This wasn't coincidence.
This was orchestrated.
And the only people with the resources, the reach, and the audacity to pull something like this were the same ones who'd flown me here on a private jet and handed me a folder with Benson's family in it.
Dominion Hall.
Everything else fell away.
Even Joy.
Not because she didn't matter—she mattered.
But because if I didn't deal with this now, if I didn't find out who the fuck had sent someone to intimidate her, then mattering wouldn't be enough.
The gates opened without me touching anything.
