"Twelve dozen eggs."
"On a light day."
Louisa laughed. Not the polite kind—the real kind, the one that started in her chest and came out with her whole body in it, her head tipping back, her hand coming up to cover her mouthbecause she hadn't expected it and it had arrived too fast for manners to intercept.
The brothers looked up from their plates. Looked at her. Looked at each other.
Marcus grinned. "Something funny, bourbon girl?"
"All of you," she said. "You eat like you're preparing for a siege."
"We are," Charlie said, completely serious. Then he winked.
The laughter moved through the kitchen the way laughter moved through spaces where people were comfortable—easily, without resistance, filling the room like warm air. I sat in it and felt something I was getting used to feeling at Dominion Hall but still didn't fully trust: the sensation of being somewhere I belonged.
Then the air changed.
A man appeared in the kitchen doorway. Mid-fifties, trim, wearing a dark suit that fit him with the precision of someone who considered his appearance a professional obligation. His posture was formal—spine straight, hands clasped in front of him, the bearing of a man who'd spent decades in service and had internalized the discipline so thoroughly it was no longer effort but architecture. He moved to Ryker's side.
He leaned down. Whispered something in Ryker's ear.
Ryker's face didn't change. That was the tell. A man whose face should have changed and didn't was a man who was controlling what he showed, and Ryker's control was its own kind of information.
His eyes moved to me.
Fuck. Now what?
Every man in the kitchen was still eating. Forks still moved. Coffee was still being sipped. But the quality of the room had shifted—a collective recalibration, subtle enough that Louisa might not have caught it, obvious enough that every operator atthe table had. The laughter from thirty seconds ago was gone like it had never existed. In its place, the stillness of men who'd felt a change in pressure and were waiting to see what it meant.
Ryker set down his fork. Wiped his mouth with a napkin. The gestures were controlled, deliberate—the movements of a man buying himself three seconds to choose his words.
"Grant," he said. "Come with me."
I looked at Louisa. She looked back at me with a steady, uncomplicated gaze.
"Go," she said. Quiet. No drama. The word of a woman who understood that the man beside her existed in a world where people sometimes came to get you in the middle of breakfast and the correct response was to go.
I went.
The kitchen door closed behind us and Ryker's stride shifted immediately—longer, faster, the walk of a man moving with operational purpose through a building he knew by feel.
"The FBI is here," he said. Low. Clipped. The voice I recognized from briefing rooms—the one that compressed information into the fewest possible words because time was a resource and wasting it got people hurt. "For Wyatt."
"Why?"
"There was an incident. Before." Ryker's jaw tightened. "Wyatt and Sophie were on the Ravenel Bridge. A rogue FBI agent named Klein had been targeting the family—personal vendetta, off the books. He pulled a weapon. Sophie pushed him off the bridge to save Wyatt. Klein died."
I processed that in the time it took us to cross the hallway.
Sophie Clarke—the copper-haired girl from Valentine who'd outridden half the county boys when we were kids and, apparently, hadn't stopped surprising people since—had pushed a federal agent off a bridge to save my brother's life.
She just went from likable to legendary in my book.
Second thought:What the hell?
"I thought this was resolved," Ryker said, as if reading my mind. He turned a corner, heading toward the residential wing. "Our contacts in the Bureau confirmed Klein was running an unsanctioned operation. Nobody in the FBI hierarchy wanted that rock turned over. The investigation was quietly closed. Klein's death was ruled incidental to an unauthorized confrontation."
"So, why are they here now?"
