And if he leads me to the people who killed my father, I won’t hesitate.
But I won’t burn the wrong piece just to feel like I’m doing something.
That’s when I notice the weight in my breast pocket.
I reach in and pull out the photos. They’re bent now, the edges creased from being carried around longer than they should have been. I thumb through them again, slow and deliberate, like I’m studying evidence instead of something that keeps refusing to make sense.
Vin’s face stares back at me.
So does the man who slit my father’s throat.
There are others in the stack. There are men I recognize, but several I don’t. Faces that look ordinary enough in still frames. Nothing about them stands out, except for the fact that one of them ended my father’s life and somehow ended up photographed and hidden away in my father’s desk.
The images refuse to line up into anything coherent.
Coco took these. She hid them. Not sloppily. Not by accident.
I set the photos down on the desk and lean forward, elbows braced against my knees, hands pressing into my temples. The more I turn it over in my head, the more unstable everything becomes. Threads I thought were solid start to fray the second I pull on them.
Tripp never struck me as a mastermind. He neverstruck me as the kind of man who could build something this layered and keep it standing on his own.
Which means he either knows more than he’s said. Or someone else made damn sure he never understood what he was part of.
I scoop the photos back up and shove them into my pocket. The chair bangs into the wall when I stand, piercing the quiet room.
Beau is outside the door. I know that without checking. I also know I don’t want him with me for this. This needs to be handled without witnesses. Without an audience. Without anyone else deciding what comes next.
I head for my car with the photos back in my pocket, each one cutting away at the version of events I have been working from. Rhodes said Tripp is at the warehouse, so that’s where I’m going first.
I’m not looking for explanations. I want him to tell me his version from start to finish without four men staring at him. Just him and me.
The moment this stopped being a coincidence and started being something someone planned, that’s what I want to find. Tripp may not know what he was used for, but he is the first place where the story stops lining up.
The drive passes in a blur of sodium lights and empty intersections, my thoughts circling the same images without settling. Faces my father thought worth keeping. Faces I do not yet have context for. I will take these to Vin, too, once I know what questions I am actually asking.
Tripp comes first. He was closest to the noise when this started, and he is the only risk node I’ve isolated. By the time I turn onto Elysian Fields, I am already braced for the fact that whatever he knows will not clarify anything. It will only tell me where to look next.
The warehouse off Elysian Fields squats at the edge ofthe district, all corrugated metal and poured concrete, unfinished in a way that suggests no one ever intended to make it inviting. There is no signage, no attempt to disguise what it is.
It is the kind of place chosen because no one looks twice at it, and no one remembers it afterward.
Midnight presses down on the area, heavy and deliberate, the kind of quiet that settles only after the city has decided to sleep off its sins. A single car passes somewhere in the distance.
From the river, a ship’s horn sounds low and drawn out. For a moment, my mind jumps across the water to the penthouse I haven’t set foot in since this started, before I shut it down.
Streetlights throw weak yellow halos that don’t quite reach the lot. Shadows fill in the rest.
Gil Gerrard leans against the entrance, cigarette glowing between his fingers. He straightens the moment he spots me, stubbing it out against the metal door with unnecessary force. His posture snaps into place like he’s been waiting for this moment to arrive.
“Boss,” he says, dipping his head.
“Take a hike, Gerrard,” I say, not slowing.
He hesitates. Just enough to be noticed. “You sure? Vin said?—”
I stop walking and look at him. Not sharply. Not theatrically. Just enough to remind him that my patience is not a renewable resource.
“I’m sure,” I say. “Go find somewhere else to exist for an hour. I want Tripp alone.”
