3
GRAYSON
Irun the number first.
Upstairs in the office with the door cracked so I can hear her breathing in the bedroom across the hall, I pull up the secure laptop and route the text through the tools I'm not technically supposed to still have. The number's a burner. Of course it is. But the metadata tells me it pinged off a tower outside Revelstoke four hours ago.
Four hours.
Someone followed her into the province. Not up the mountain. Not yet. But close enough that the walls of this cabin feel thinner than they did an hour ago.
I call Marcus.
"Tell me."
"She got a text."
A beat of silence that sounds like a man going still.
"What did it say."
"Pretty little cabin you picked. Used her name."
"Fuck."
"Yeah."
"I'll pull strings. Get a second body up there."
"No."
"Gray."
"Second body means second point of failure. I don't know them. I don't know how they move. Send me intel and stay out of my way."
He breathes out hard.
"Copy. What do you need."
"Everything the paper's got on the politician's son. Every name associated. Financials on the laundering operation. Vehicles registered to any of them. Photos."
"On it."
"And Marcus."
"Yeah."
"She's not going back to Toronto Sunday. Not until this is cold."
"I'll handle the paper."
He hangs up.
I sit there a second. Hand on the desk. Listening to the old bones of the cabin settle.
I can hear her in the bedroom. Pacing. Bare feet on the floorboards, a slow oval, the kind of walk a person does when they're trying to think through something without letting it sit on them.
She didn't cry. Didn't flinch when I took the phone. Didn't argue when I told her to get upstairs.
