She looks up. She's watching me carefully. The word is not spoken. It doesn't need to be. It's present in the room like a third person.
What moves through my chest before I can think is a pressure. A tightening. The word forming somewhere below language and not making it to my mouth. I'm not ready to name it. The part of me that still believes my desires are evidence of something monstrous hasn't dissolved in a morning. Those facts don't dissolve — they coexist with this.
But she trusted me with all of it. Her story, her lack of emotions, her mother, her father. I’m the first person she's given it to. I understand this without being told.
I reach for her hand.
Not gripping, not claiming — just present. Palm over hers. Her fingers are still beneath mine for one moment, and then they turn and lace through mine. A small adjustment that is also a choice.
We sit.
The morning light falls across the table. The sketchbook is there, open to a page I haven't been allowed to see before. Her story is between us. Her hand is in mine. The word stays in the room unnamed, patient and enormous.
This is real. The most real thing in my life, and I know it.
My phone sounds.
One buzz. I look at the screen.
Gunner: Shit's going down. Get to the club.
The warmth shatters. Instantly. I feel my own face change before I've decided anything — the soft thing receding, the fixer surfacing, because when Gunner texts like that, I know it cannot wait. The mole. The Zayas. The bait threads I've been running while half my attention has been here. Something has moved.
"Something is happening at La Sirena," I say.
She's already standing.
She sets down my hand and crosses to the bedroom without asking whether she's coming. She's coming. That's not a question she's putting to me. I watch her pull on fresh clothes — jeans and an oversized t-shirt that slips off one shoulder — and I don't argue.
We leave together.
19 - Wren
La Sirena at midafternoon looks like a theater between shows — all the bones visible, none of the magic. The chandeliers are up at half-light. The chairs are down but the floor hasn’t been prepped, and the bar gleams with restocked bottles that nobody’s drinking yet. During our short drive across the city, Logan has his hand on my knee, thumb moving in slow arcs.
The hand is gone before we're fully through the door.
His body reads the room ahead of his mind. He goes still for half a second on the threshold — something wrong, immediately wrong — and then he's moving.
The staff aren't clustered in obvious ways. It's subtler than that: a server near the bar who should be doing prep work but is instead talking low with someone from the door team. Two women near the host stand with their heads bent together, both tracking Logan as he crosses the floor. The cleaning crew is gone, or finished early. The room holds twenty-odd people and the noise is wrong — too quiet, too contained, conversations that stop and restart when he passes.
Everyone is waiting. The fixer has arrived.
I tuck my hands into my jacket pockets and follow a half-step behind. His territory, his crisis, his people turning toward him like plants toward a window.
I slipped from partner to ghost the moment we crossed the threshold.
Gunner materializes from the direction of the security room. He moves like he always does — people adjusting around him without knowing why — and stops in front of Logan. His face is its usual beastly wall.
But his hands are wrong. His arms hang slightly too still, the stillness of a man who has been managing something ugly and is choosing not to move until he knows what his hands might do.
"One of the financial analysts was killed," he says. "This morning. In his apartment."
Logan doesn't say anything.
"Throat cut." A pause. "Looked staged."
I watch Logan's face.
