Each item was a wall. Each wall was necessary. I was building a fortress around her work and her safety and the thing between us that I didn’t have a name for yet. If the fortress looked a little like a cage from certain angles ... well, it wasn’t. Cages were built to keep things in. This was built to keep things out.
Jax pickedup on the first ring. He always did. There was a reason I paid him what I paid him, and responsiveness was only part of it—the larger part was that Jax Shaw understood threat assessment the way I understood structural engineering: as a system of forces, a calculation of load and tolerance and the precise point at which something gives.
“The Kessler email,” he said, before I could speak. “We flagged it. I was going to call you at noon.”
“I’m calling you now.”
“Yeah, I gathered.” A pause. Background noise—a dog, maybe. Life happening around a conversation about surveillance. “So here’s what I’ve got. The email originated from a personal account, not Sterling Corp. No VPN, which is either sloppy or deliberate. It was sent from a Denver IP address. He’s in state.”
My hand tightened on the phone.
“How long?”
“Can’t confirm yet. But the browsing pattern on the SEAS public portal—someone’s been pulling Charlie’s published work, her conference schedule, her co-author list. Systematic. Started about ten days ago.”
“One more thing. Someone queried the Pierce Construction fleet management system three days ago. The Range Rover you gave her—it’s a company vehicle, GPS standard. Whoever pulled the query had internal-level credentials, or paid someone who did. They would have had her location down to the block.”
Ten days. We’d been in Roatan ten days ago. I’d been standing on a veranda watching Charlie work in golden light and making calls to this same man about this same threat, and in the time since, Richard hadn’t slowed down. He’d gotten more focused.
“I want someone on the Aspen property,” I said.
“Already there. Pulled a guy from the Denver rotation this morning. He’s parked at the access road. Quiet. Nobody sees him.”
“Charlie doesn’t know.”
It wasn’t a question. Jax heard it anyway.
“She doesn’t know,” he confirmed. Then, carefully: “You planning to tell her?”
“When there’s something definitive. Right now it’s just emails and browsing history. I’m not going to scare her with a pattern that might not be anything.”
“It’s something,” Jax said. Quietly. Without emphasis. The way people deliver information they think you already know but need to hear out loud.
“I know it’s something. That’s why I’m calling you at nine in the morning instead of eating breakfast with—” I stopped. Recalibrated. “Expand the monitoring. I want to know if hebooks travel, rents a car, buys a goddamn sandwich in a hundred-mile radius. And I want daily reports, not weekly.”
“Copy. Standard protocol would also be to get her off her regular cards. Cash only, or a new account he can’t trace. You want me to set that up?” I looked toward the study door. She was out there with Mia and Shane, reading. Not worried. Not watchful. “I’ll handle it,” I said. I didn’t handle it.
“Copy.” A beat. “Asher. Sloane mentioned she met Charlie last night. Said she was great.”
I didn’t know what to do with that—the collision of the two conversations, the surveillance and the warmth, the threat assessment and the fact that his wife had liked my—that his wife had liked Charlie. So I said “She is,” and meant it in a way that went far past the sentence.
We hung up. I added three items to the legal pad. The list was getting longer. The fortress was getting taller. Everything was under control.
Shane foundme at two in the afternoon.
I was on my third call—this one with Mike Armitage, walking through the resource reallocation for the accelerated SEAS timeline—when Shane appeared in the study doorway with two beers and the expression he’d been wearing since he was fourteen, the one that meant he’d figured something out and was deciding whether to be kind about it.
I held up one finger. Mike was mid-sentence about lab scheduling.
Shane sat down in the leather chair across from my desk, set both beers on the side table, crossed an ankle over his knee, andwaited. Patiently. Shane was never patient. The patience was the first warning sign.
I finished with Mike. Hung up and picked up the beer Shane slid across the desk.
“You’ve been in here all day,” Shane said.
“I’ve been working.”
“You’ve been working since six a.m. It’s two. You skipped lunch. Mia made pasta and you weren’t there. Charlie ate with us. She asked where you were.”
