It rings. Four times, five, then his voicemail. I end the call without leaving a voice message for him. Mostly because I know he never listens to them.
"You alright?" Miles asks behind me.
I turn around.
"When did any of you last speak to Cain?" I ask.
Nobody answers immediately.
Mason looks at Miles. Miles looks at me.
"Two weeks maybe," Mason says slowly. "He came to the house, remember?”
"And since?"
Silence.
That silence is its own answer, and I don't like a single thing about it.
I try the number again. Same result. Four rings, voicemail.
The door opens.
Declan comes into the room, he was out for most of the day, and then said he wanted to go to The Pit for something.
“What’s wrong with you?” I ask him, as he shakes his head, grabbing a beer for himself.
"The Pit," he says. "My prints don't work."
Nobody speaks.
Miles is already at the laptop before the sentence is finished, pulling it toward him, logging into the software which he works on for Cain. We watch him. The loading circle spins. The page loads.
Then it doesn't.
Access Denied. Credentials no longer recognized.
Miles sits back in the chair, and I know we are all thinking the same thing. What the hell is happening?
"He locked us out," Mason says. "He actually locked us all out."
"Looks like it," Miles says.
"Why would he?—"
"I don't know."
I'm staring at my phone and I'm doing the thing I've been trying not to do since I heard Lileah's voice in the kitchen. I'm thinking about Leo. Thinking about the rules. I'm thinking about the file Cain gave me with Patrick Holt's name in it, the careful planning of it. The fact that every target Cain has ever handed me has been prepared down to the last variable. Every angle covered, every risk accounted for before I was ever near it.
Leo wasn't in a file.
Leo wasn't planned. Leo wasn't covered. Leo wasn't accounted for.
Leo was me, alone, in an apartment, with a gun and three years of anger and the absolute certainty that it was the right thing to do.
Since I’ve known Cain, everything, through every job and every complication and every time something goes sideways, Cain does not go quiet.
He doesn't disappear, and he would have told Autumn where he was.
