She doesn't argue. A beat of silence, and then: "Have you slept?"
The question catches me. "Some."
"That's not an answer."
"I'll send the car."
A small sound that might be a suppressed laugh. "You're very bad at being taken care of."
"I'm not —" I stop.
"I know," she says. She isn’t being unkind, just…accurate. "I'll be there. Give me twenty minutes."
I set the phone down.
The gap in the room's frequency shifts — still there, but now it has an end point. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty with traffic. She's getting ready. She's coming here. I know exactly what she'll be doing in that penthouse right now: pulling on jeans, the jacket with the deep pockets, finding the pencil stub she keeps losing and always locates. Maybe looking out at the bay for a moment before she leaves it — not reluctantly, just taking a last reading of the space before she moves on.
Have you slept?
Nobody has asked me that since Jorge died, and Jorge asked it dryly — already knowing the answer, deploying it as evidence for a case he was building. Wren asked it like the answer actually matters to her.
I go back to the access logs.
The timestamps, when I look again, have not resolved. My eyes keep tracking across the numbers and finding her instead — the phone on the desk, the twenty minutes counting down, the knowledge that she's moving through the city toward me.
I set the pen down. Don't pick it up.
Sixteen minutes pass.
I'm working — actually working, the access log timestamps beginning to form a pattern I can use. Someone accessed theoffshore routing on three separate occasions, each time from an internal terminal. Three dates, three time windows. The structure mirrors my own thinking closely enough to survive casual audit. I find myself noting the craftsmanship despite myself.
My phone is face-down on the desk. I'm looking at the third timestamp when the boom hits.
The building moves — a low concussive pressure that registers in the floor and the glass and somewhere behind my sternum before my ears fully process the sound. The windows rattle. Car alarms trigger outside, then two more in quick succession.
One frozen second.
I sit in my chair and my body simply refuses. The timestamp is still on my screen. My hands are flat on the desk. The alarms are going outside and something in me already knows — knows before the reasoning catches up — where it was and who was arriving and what that means.
Outside. Near the entrance. Where she'd be arriving.
Then I'm running.
I don't remember standing. The hallway arrives and I'm already in it — past the mezzanine railing, staff turning toward me or away from me, someone shouting about the north side, someone else saying to stay inside. Smoke is already visible through the glass panels at the end of the corridor. The stairs are under my feet and then they're not and the service door hits the wall behind me when I throw it open.
Smoke — a smear of gray against the Miami afternoon that shouldn't be there. The smell hits immediately: burning rubber, something chemical underneath, the hot-metal aftermath of a blast.
She was on her way.
A Delgado vehicle is burning.
One of ours — I recognize the make, the plates before the flames have fully overtaken the rear end. The Zayas counter-strike, landed at my doorstep, precise and deliberate. Not random. Not warning. A response to the van:we reach you too.
Security is scrambling at the perimeter. Two of my people are down near the sidewalk — I see them, file them, keep moving. Sirens in the distance, still minutes away. People running, people frozen, the ordinary chaos of a scene that hasn't finished unfolding.
I scan the wreckage.
The blast radius extends thirty feet from the vehicle, maybe more. Glass scattered across the pavement. A delivery cart overturned. A woman sitting against the building wall with her hands over her face, uninjured, just shocked. Not her. A man facedown twenty feet from the vehicle, not moving — security, one of ours — I file it and keep looking.
