"There it is." He reaches up and straightens his lapel. "That temper. That's what killed my brother, isn't it?"
I don't answer. My breathing is too loud inside my own skull. My father still has one hand on my arm, grounding me, and I can feel the controlled tension in his grip.
Dominic straightens his jacket one final time, the same sequence of adjustments I've watched him make before. He surveys the wreckage of the table with those dead eyes, one broken glass, wine spreading slowly across the white linen, an orchid from the centerpiece lying on its side. He looks at it the way a man looks at something that has confirmed everything he already believed.
"I'll be in touch." He buttons his jacket. "Enjoy your evening, gentlemen."
He walks out. The door closes behind him with a soft, final click, and that quietness is somehow the worst part. No drama. No raised voice. Just a door closing, and a man gone, and the feeling that the trap has already been sprung and we are only now beginning to understand the shape of it.
My father and I sit in the ruins of the table and say nothing.
A full minute passes. The wine finishes spreading across the linen and goes still. Somewhere beyond the walls a woman laughs, bright and uninhibited, the sound floating through and then dissolving into nothing. Someone out there is having the kind of night you remember for good reasons.
"He can't be bought." My father says it quietly, the tone of a man arriving at the end of a calculation rather than the beginning. "And he won't go to the police."
"So what does that leave us?"
He picks up his wine glass. Studies the color of it. Sets it back down without drinking. “We have very few options."
I understand what he means. I understood it the moment Dominic walked out wearing his satisfaction like a second skin. There is a logic to men like Dominic Webb.
"The recording." My voice sounds strange to me. "It's in the cloud somewhere."
"Yes. We need to find out where." A pause. "And we need to destroy it."
"And Dominic?"
My father is quiet for a long moment. The candles burn. The fallen orchid lies between us on the wet linen, white and still and dying.
"One problem at a time."
I don't like the sound of that. I don't like it because it means he's already thought past the recording, already mapped the territory that exists beyond it, and he's choosing not to say it out loud yet.
He's waiting to see if we have any other roads first.
Dominic Webb came here tonight to declare war, and he did it over good wine with his hands folded and his jacket buttoned, with the confidence of a man who doesn't believe there is anything we can do to reach him. He walked out without looking back.
He has to be wrong about that.
But the shape of what being right will require sits in my chest like something swallowed wrong, impossible to move past, impossible to ignore. I think about Jade again. The way she looked this morning, her hair loose around her face, her coffee going cold on the counter while she read, laughing quietly at something on the page. She smiled at me when I kissed her goodbye and told me to drive safe and I stood in the doorway for one extra second just to keep the image of her, easy and whole and unafraid.
Dominic Webb looked at me tonight and said her name like it was a key he'd already cut.
Some things you can't allow. Some lines, once someone crosses them, change everything about what you're willing to do next.
My father is right. One problem at a time.
But I already know which problem comes last.
CHAPTER 26- JADE
Inotice the car on a Tuesday.
It's a black SUV, parked at the end of the block when I walk to the coffee shop in the morning. It’s still there when I come back two hours later. I tell myself it means nothing. People park on streets. People sit in cars. The world does not rearrange itself around my paranoia just because a man with told me he was going to take everything from Phoenix and smiled like he meant it.
On Wednesday, the car is there again.
On Thursday, I take a different route to the coffee shop, cutting through the side street behind the house and doubling back along the beach path. Halfway back, I glance over my shoulder and see a man standing at the top of the cliff steps, hands in the pockets of a dark jacket. He's too far away for me to see his face. He's watching me anyway. I can feel it the way you feel eyes on you in a dark room before you turn on the light, a prickling along the back of the neck, a cold settling in the stomach that your brain registers before your eyes catch up.
