Rachel.
Stupid, fucking Rachel.
Rachel, who'd promised forever and delivered eighteen months. Rachel, who'd curled into me at night like I was the only safe place in the world and then quietly, methodically, built a wall between her body and mine until even touching her felt like trespassing. Rachel, who'd said she just wasn't wiredthat way anymore, said it wasn't about me, said the words that were supposed to let me down easy and instead rewired my understanding of what was real.
The ripper of hearts. The tease.
Fuck her.
I said it in my head the way I said it every time the memory surfaced—flat, hard, a nail driven into wood. Not because the anger was fresh. Because the anger was the only thing that kept the hurt from taking its place, and the hurt was worse.
The car the hotel had sent—I'd called from the lobby, because apparently that was another thing the name Dane got you—pulled through a set of iron gates and up a long drive lined with live oaks. I barely registered the approach. My jaw was tight. My hands were fists on my knees.
Then the building appeared and my operational brain engaged despite itself.
Dominion Hall.
I didn't care about the architecture. Didn't care about the stone or the dark glass or the columns or the manicured grounds or whatever the hell the landscaping was supposed to communicate about wealth and permanence. What I registered—what twelve years of training forced me to register even through the fog of Rachel and the bread and the brown eyes—was the structure.
This was a fortress.
Not metaphorically. Not in the soft, rich-people way of gated communities and security cameras. This place had been built to withstand assault.
The walls were load-bearing stone, thick enough to stop small arms. The windows were narrow on the ground floor—defensible, calculated. The sight lines from the main entrance covered two hundred and seventy degrees of approach. There were cameras, yes, but they were layered—visible ones fordeterrence, concealed ones I spotted only because I'd spent years installing the same systems in places where getting it wrong meant people died.
I'd been in embassies that were less fortified. I'd operated out of forward bases with softer perimeters.
Whatever Dominion Hall was, it wasn't just a mansion. It was a statement. And the statement was:come if you want, but understand what you're walking into.
My brain filed it. My mood didn't improve.
Ethan was waiting by the front entrance.
He stood with his arms at his sides, relaxed, unhurried, the same massive calm I'd encountered in the parking lot of a Texas bar however many hours ago that had been. He wore jeans and a plain gray shirt and work boots that had seen actual work, and he watched me step out of the car with the expression of a man who was either pleased with himself or simply at peace with the morning. In my current state, I couldn't tell the difference and didn't try.
"Grant." He said my name like a fact, not a greeting.
"Ethan."
We didn't shake hands. Not yet. Something in the geometry of two men sizing each other up in daylight that required a different protocol than a parking lot at two in the morning.
"How do you like Charleston?" he asked.
I looked past him at the fortress that apparently employed him. "It's fine."
He studied me for a beat. If my tone bothered him, it didn't show. Ethan struck me as a man who didn't waste energy on other people's weather, which was either infuriating or admirable depending on how much of your own weather you were carrying.
"Come on," he said. "I want to show you something."
I expected him to lead me inside. Through the heavy doors, down a hallway, into whatever briefing room or war room or mahogany-paneled office waited at the center of this operation. The pitch. The slideshow. The speech about mission and resources and why Grant Dane should sign on the dotted line.
Instead, he turned left and cut across the lawn.
I followed because I'd come this far and because my other option was standing in a driveway being angry at a woman in Minneapolis, and at least walking gave the anger somewhere to go.
The grounds were larger than they'd appeared from the drive. Beyond the main structure, the land opened up—wide, rolling, sloping toward water I could smell but not yet see. And everywhere, construction. Excavators parked in a row, their arms folded like sleeping insects. A crane rising against the sky near what looked like the skeleton of a new wing. Concrete foundations poured and curing. Steel rebar bristling from trenches like the bones of something being born.
Dominion Hall was growing. Whatever it was now, it was becoming something bigger.
