"Yes."
"Okay." She turns back to the laptop. "Then let me work."
I pull up a chair and I stay.
Remy comes in at four.
She moves to the bar the way she always moves through the compound. Like she owns the floor under her feet, which she more or less does, three years of presence giving her a claim that isn't written anywhere but is understood by everyone. She pours herself a drink, leans against the bar, and looks at the room.
Her eyes find Jesslyn.
I feel it before it happens. The specific shift in Remy's posture; the setting of her shoulders, the quality of attention that means she's decided to do something. I'm at the table. I'm close enough. I'm not moving fast enough.
"How long are you planning to stay?" Remy asks.
Jesslyn looks up from the laptop as she takes the question in. "I don't know," she says.
"Because this isn't a hotel." Remy's voice is casual in a way that isn't casual at all. It’s the weapon tucked inside ordinary conversation, designed to cut without leaving a visible mark. "The club has guests and then it has people who belong here. You're a guest. Guests have an expiration date."
The common room goes quieter than it was. Not silent. The brothers move through it, the lockdown creating its own low-level noise. But the specific quiet of people pretending not to listen.
Jesslyn closes the laptop. Sets her hands flat on the table. Looks at Remy the way she looks at something she's deciding how to photograph: with patience, without judgment, with the specific quality of a person who sees more than they're supposed to see.
"I know what fear looks like when it's wearing anger's face," she says. "I grew up watching it."
Remy goes still.
The sentence lands in the common room like something dropped from a height. It’s not a confrontation. Jesslyn's voice is quiet, even, stripped of anything combative. It’s not a rebuke. Just a statement of fact, delivered with the precision of a woman who has spent seven years learning exactly how much weight a well-placed observation can carry.
Remy doesn't answer.
She picks up her glass and walks to the back hallway, and the common room slowly returns to its ambient level.
Jesslyn opens her laptop again and goes back to work as if nothing happened.
I sit at the table, watch her do it, and I think about what it costs to say a thing like that. Not the anger of it. There's no anger in what Jesslyn said, which is exactly what makes it land so hard. Just the observation, delivered cleanly, and then she went back to work.
She was right. Remy's anger is fear. Fear of losing the place she carved out for herself, fear of being temporary when temporary is all she's ever been. Fear wearing territorial like armor because armor is easier than the thing underneath.
I'm not the one who's going to say that to Remy. But Jesslyn said it, quietly, in a room full of people, without cruelty and without apology, and then she went back to work.
Something in my chest does something I choose not to examine right now.
I go find Templar.
"Double the perimeter tonight," I say. "Nobody goes outside without a partner. Including the club whores."
He looks at me from behind his desk. "You think they're coming."
"Sal is scared. He's talking. The people above him are listening." I hold his gaze. "A phone call is a warning. If they decide the warning didn't work, the next move is different."
"How different?"
"Different enough that I don't want anyone alone outside after dark."
Templar picks up his radio.
* * *
