Something moves in Dominic's pale eyes. Not fear. Something more complicated. "Big words from a man whose woman is tied to a chair in my warehouse."
"Tell me what you want."
He reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a phone, holds it up so I can see the screen. A recording app, already open, the red indicator waiting. "A confession. On video. Your voice, your face, your words. The full account of what happened at that cabin. Admissible in court."
The room I'm standing in is very quiet. My office, forty floors above Los Angeles, the city spread out below me in the late afternoon light, gold and smog-hazy and completely indifferent. The contracts on my desk. The cold coffee on the credenza. The family photo my mother insisted I keep, Jade laughing at something off-camera the day we took it, her head thrown back, her throat exposed.
"And if I give you that," I say.
"Then she walks out of here. Tonight." He glances back at Jade briefly, then returns his attention to the camera. "And I release everything. The recording, the full account, every detailof what happened at that cabin. Not to the police. To everyone. Every journalist, every outlet, every person who has ever done business with the Crawford name. I want the world to know exactly what Phoenix Crawford is capable of. What his father helped cover up. I want you to watch it happen and be able to do nothing about it.”
"And I'm supposed to take your word that she walks out of there.”
"I don't need her once I have what I want. She's a means to an end, not the end itself." His voice is flat. "I'm not my brother, Mr. Crawford. I don't take things that don't belong to me.”
I look at Jade again. She's watching me and I can see her working to keep her breathing steady, can see the effort it takes, and I want to reach through the screen and pull her out of that chair and put myself between her and every bad thing that exists in the world.
"I need time," I say.
"You have six hours." Dominic checks his watch. "That takes us to eleven o'clock. If I haven't received your confession by then, the situation changes." He doesn't elaborate on what that means. He doesn't need to.
"I want to speak to her."
A pause. Then Dominic steps back and turns the phone toward Jade.
Her eyes are red at the corners but dry. The mark on her face is already darkening into a bruise. She looks at the screen with the focus of someone who is holding themselves together through sheer force of will and knows exactly how thin that margin is.
"I'm okay," she says. Her voice is steady. "Phoenix, I'm okay."
The words come out rougher than I intend. "I'm going to get you out of there."
"Don't." She says it quietly, urgently, leaning forward as far as the binding on her wrists allows. "Don't do anything stupid. Don't give him what he wants just because?—"
Dominic pulls the phone back.
"Six hours," he says again. Then the screen goes dark.
I stand in my office and look at the phone for a long moment. The city hums forty floors below. A helicopter moves across the window's frame and disappears. Somewhere in this building a phone rings and goes to voicemail and rings again.
I set my phone down on the desk with great care and then I put both hands flat on the surface and breathe.
The calculation is not complicated. It is the simplest problem I have ever been asked to solve, stripped down to two variables with nothing in between. If I give him what he wants, the recording goes public and everything the Crawford name has ever meant gets dismantled in full view of everyone who ever respected it. Jade goes free and I spend the rest of my life watching the wreckage. If I don't, Jade doesn't go free.
I pick up my phone and call my father.
He answers on the first ring, which means he already knows. My father has a network of people whose entire function is to make sure he always already knows, and the measured careful quality of his voice when he picks up confirms it.
"I heard about Torres," he says. "My people had eyes on PCH. I'm sorry, Phoenix."
"He has Jade. He wants the recording released publicly. Every outlet, every journalist, everyone we've ever done business with. Six hours."
A pause on the other end. The quality of my father's silences is something I learned to read before I learned to read words, the difference between the silence of a man thinking and the silence of a man who has already thought and is deciding how much to share. This one is the second kind.
"He won't kill her," my father says finally. "Not yet. She's leverage, and Dominic Webb is not a man who discards leverage before he's extracted everything he can from it."
"You don't know that."
"I know men like him. He wants the public destruction because he wants us to watch it happen. That requires Jade alive and walking out of that warehouse. A dead hostage gives him nothing."
