I knew Sterling was right—had known it the moment he’d walked through the door with that look on his face. The mission was clean and moving on schedule, and eight days of financial tracing had given us everything we needed to take Hughs’s network apart at the joints.
“I’ll have the final report by 0600,” I said, my voice level. “Should be enough to move on.”
Sterling nodded once, his eyes on my face. “Copy that,” he said.
He clapped me once on the shoulder—not quite a gesture of affection, not quite an operational directive, but something that was just Sterling—and then he was gone, the door closing behind him with careful attention.
I stayed where I was for another thirty seconds, making sure the calculation I’d just made was the right one, then got up and moved to the window in the front room.
The view from here was different than the kitchen’s—a different slice of the same city, a different angle on the same gridlocked traffic.
A delivery truck was double-parked across the street, its hazard lights blinking in the rhythm that meant the driver was making a quick drop. A woman walked a small dog along the sidewalk. A man in a suit checked his watch at the corner, then turned and walked back the way he’d come.
I watched it all with careful attention, my brain running the calculations that came with Sterling’s intel.
A patient, well-resourced man with a property acquisition firm could do a lot to a ranch in a Montana valley. Could file environmental impact statements that would trigger mandatory inspections. Could request easement reviews on the access road. Could challenge the water rights that came with the property. Could push for tax reassessments that would double or triple the annual bill.
Could do it all without ever firing a shot or breaching a fence line, could create exactly the kind of slow-building pressure that would eventually make the property too expensive to maintain and too complicated to defend.
Could do it all while I sat in a city on the wrong side of the country, running financial traces and watching the distance between Jackson and me grow by measurable degrees each day.
My phone sat in my pocket—the weight of it both strange and familiar after eight days of checking it every seventeen minutes. I knew exactly what would happen if I pulled it out: I would call Jackson, would tell him about Hughs and the property firm and the county assessor, would watch him process it.
Would watch him decide, without being told, that the farmhouse wasn’t secure anymore, that his parents’ visit had put a target on the property that hadn’t been there before, that the life he’d built with such careful attention was suddenly, measurably at risk.
I did not pull out my phone. Did not call Jackson at 15:17 on a Thursday when he was three weeks from his due date and sleeping alone in a farmhouse I was not in. Did not tell him that the man who’d sent three armed teams to breach the property had just retained a law firm with a specific specialty in making land disappear.
It wasn’t my information to hand him in a text. Wasn’t my call to make about how much risk was acceptable or how much pressure was too much or whether the farmhouse was still worth the fight it would require.
I turned from the window and went back to the back room, to the financial trace that had brought us here and the work that would, eventually, get me home.
The dossier pages were stiff under my fingers—bank transactions, property holdings, a pattern that emerged when you knew what you were looking for. I had traced it through shell companies and offshore accounts and front organizations so elaborate they became their own kind of truth.
The work was good—clean, precise, the kind of thing that would stand up in any court in the country if it ever got that far. It did not make the distance between the safe house and Black Butte feel any shorter. It did not make the calculation I’d just made sit any easier in my chest.
I worked through three more pages before I set the dossier down and reached for my personal phone. The screen showed one new message—Jackson, sent at 14:42:“Was there when I woke up. Went quiet after breakfast. Doctor says that’s normal—they’re most active when you’re still.”
I read it twice, then a third time, focusing on the phrases that kept landing differently each time I saw them.
“Was there when I woke up.”
“They’re most active when you’re still.”
I typed back:“I’ll try to be quieter next time,”and sent it before I could stop myself.
Then I put the phone face-down on the table and went back to the financial trace. The work was good and clean and did not make the distance feel any shorter.
* * * *
That night, I broke the established rhythm. Instead of texting at 22:00 as I’d done every night for eight days, I called. The phone rang twice before Jackson picked up, his voice coming through with the rough edge that meant I’d woken him.
“Cruz,” he said, my name arriving with the careful neutrality he used when he wasn’t sure what kind of conversation we were having. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, already regretting the call and also, somehow, not regretting it at all. “Mission’s on track. I just wanted to hear your voice.”
There was a pause on Jackson’s end, then he said, “You’re a bad liar.”
I made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Not usually.”
