Jax pulled me into the study. Closed the door all the way this time.
“Sterling is at the Limelight. Checked in last night under his own name—not hiding. He wants you to know he’s here.” Jax spread a tablet on the desk, a satellite view of Aspen, markersblinking. “We’ve got eyes on his hotel, his rental car, the coffee shop from yesterday. Reid will stay on the property. Cortez runs the exterior rotation. I’m coordinating from here.”
“And Charlie?”
Jax looked at me. The kind of look that said he’d had this conversation before, with other clients, about other people they were trying to keep safe by keeping them contained.
“She’s a principal under protection. My team knows that. But she needs to know it too—the protocols, the check-ins, the movement restrictions. This doesn’t work if she doesn’t cooperate, and right now she looks like a woman who is not in a cooperating mood.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Asher.” Jax set the tablet down. “Sloane heard from Jax. The timeline thing, the not telling her. I’m not going to give you advice about your relationship because I’m not qualified and also because my wife would kill me. But I am going to tell you, professionally, that a principal who doesn’t trust their protector is a principal who goes around the protection. That’s when people get hurt.”
The words landed. I added them to the pile of things people had said to me in the last forty-eight hours that I was hearing and not acting on.
Mia tookher at three in the afternoon. I stood in the entryway and watched them go. Shane’s truck pulled out of the drive, and I didn’t move until it had rounded the curve and disappeared into the trees. Then I went back inside to the house that was, suddenly, the wrong size again.
I had done the right thing. I knew that. I’d called Reid off and honored it and she had chosen to go and I had let her go and every one of those sentences was correct and none of them helped.
Jax was still on the property. His team was still tracking Richard Sterling at the Limelight, his rental car parked, no movement since the coffee shop. I had eyes on Richard. I had no eyes on Charlie. The inversion was the most uncomfortable thing I’d felt in years, including the migraines.
I kept coming back to the way she’d said “I need to not be watched.” The trust in that. The ask underneath the order.
She’d trusted me with something that cost her. After everything. And I had honored it. I kept telling myself that like a man trying to convince himself the math adds up when the numbers are wrong.
Jax called at twelve forty-seven.
“Sterling checked out of the Limelight twenty minutes ago. No luggage, no car. He’s on foot.”
I was already sitting up. “Direction?”
“Downtown. Cortez has eyes on him. He’s moving like a man who knows where he’s going.” A pause. “Asher. Her credit card pinged two hours ago. The St. Regis. Two blocks from the Limelight.”
The card. The standard protocol he’d suggested and I’d said I’d handle. Two hotels, two blocks apart, one man walking at midnight in exactly the right direction.
“I’m going,” I said.
“I know. I’ll have Cortez converge. Asher?—”
I was already moving.
20
CHARLIE
The hotel room was fine. That was the problem with it. Fine mattress, fine blackout curtains, fine temperature. No smell of cedar or woodsmoke. No mountains visible from the window, just the parking structure across the street and the particular orange wash of town light that makes the sky look like something left on too long.
I lay there until one in the morning running SEAS numbers in my head, which was what I did when I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t think about anything else without the thinking becoming something I wasn’t ready for. Phase Two timelines. Acoustic calibration variables. The question of whether the sensor array could handle the thermal differential in the Gulf Stream application we’d been considering before Richard had become the kind of problem that required full attention.
The numbers weren’t working. Not the math—the math was fine, the math was always fine. But the numbers kept sliding off my brain and landing somewhere else, somewhere that was all mountain light and terrible eggs and the specific quiet of a man who had just made the hardest phone call of his life and sat withhis hand on the phone afterward like he was deciding whether to pick it back up.
I got up. Put on my swimsuit. Took the elevator down to the pool level.
Water had always been the place I could think. Not the lab, not the ocean, not the testing pools in San Diego with their controlled salinity and calibrated lighting. Any water. The simple physics of it—the pressure equalization, the way sound changes underwater, the way your body has to stop performing and just float. I’d done my best thinking in pools since I was twelve.
The pool was empty. The lights were on their overnight setting—blue-white, low, the kind that turns the water into something luminous and makes the world above the surface feel far away. I stood at the edge for a moment, then dove in.
I swam laps. Not thinking yet, just moving. The pull of the water, the rhythm of the stroke, the precise moment of the turn at each wall. My wrist and the tension in my shoulders loosened by degrees. Twelve laps. Fourteen. The thing I was avoiding started to surface anyway, the way things always do when you stop running from them.
