I move to the window. The sun is almost at the water now, the smog turning everything amber and the color of old blood. Somewhere in this city, in a warehouse whose location I don't yet have, Jade is sitting in a metal chair with her wrists bound and a bruise forming on her jaw.
"Torres had a tracker on her car. If they transferred vehicles in the lot?—"
"Already running it." My father's voice shifts. "I have people pulling the PCH camera footage. We'll have a plate within the hour."
"And then?"
A pause. "And then we go get her."
The simplicity of it lands differently than it should. I've been standing here running calculations about public confessions and reputational destruction and the Crawford name reduced to a cautionary tale, and my father says and then we go get her like it's a logistics problem.
"Dominic has men with him. At least two. Possibly more now."
"I'm aware."
"Torres is dead."
"I'm aware of that too." Something shifts in his voice, something that sounds almost like grief before it gets managed and put away. "Torres knew the risks. We honor that by finishing what he started.”
I think about Torres. The way he moved through spaces, quiet and efficient, always exactly where he needed to be and never where he wasn't. He'd worked for my family for eleven years, longer than most of my father's people, long enough that he knew which coffee my mother took in the mornings and which entrance my father used when he didn't want to be seen. He had a daughter in the seventh grade whose soccer games he never missed if he could help it, and a wife who sent him to work every morning with lunch packed in a black bag he kept in the car. He talked about them the way men talk about the things they're most afraid of losing, briefly and carefully, like saying too much might jinx it.
The text he sent this morning said,I’m watching her. My response never came because I was on a call and thought there would be time later.
There is a kind of guilt that lives in the things you didn't do when you had the chance. It doesn't resolve.
"I need that plate," I say.
"You'll have it." My father pauses. "Whatever happens tonight, I need you controlled. Dominic wants you reactive. Don't give him that."
I think about Jade's face on the screen. The bruise darkening. The red at the corners of her eyes that she refused to let become anything more. The way she said don't do anything stupid with the same voice she uses when she's trying to take care of me from inside her own disaster.
"Call me when you have the plate," I say, and hang up.
The sun drops below the water. The city lights come on one by one and the office fills with the blue of early evening, and I stand at the window and think about six hours and what I am willing to do inside them.
The answer is everything.
CHAPTER 29 - JADE
The warehouse has a smell that gets into everything.
Machine oil and old concrete and something underneath both of those, something damp and organic that has been living in the walls for years. The cold comes up through the floor and into my knees and shins where they press against it, a deep bone-level cold that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the quality of a place that has never been meant for people to stay in. My wrists ache where the binding cuts in. My jaw throbs where the floor caught it when they threw me in the vehicle.
I think about Marcus.
Not the way I usually think about him, the flinching involuntary replay that ambushes me at odd moments. I think about him deliberately, the way you press on a bruise to remind yourself it's there. I think about the cabin and the firelight and the moment I understood what was about to happen, and I think about the woman I was in that moment, how terrified she was, how certain she was that terror was the only available response.
That woman survived.
So will this one.
Dominic leaves within the first hour, two guards taking up positions near the door with the bored efficiency of men doing a job they've done before. They don't look at me the way Marcus looked at me, which is the only mercy in the room. What they do instead is almost worse, the low-grade cruelty of men who have been told not to touch something and have found every way to make you feel that restraint as a threat rather than a protection.
The first one is broad across the shoulders with a thick neck and small eyes that slide over me when he thinks I'm not watching. The second is leaner, younger, with a mouth that seems to be in a permanent state of finding something funny that no one else can see.
The younger one gets a bottle of water from somewhere and drinks it slowly, watching me. When he's finished he walks over and upends what's left of it directly onto my lap. The cold hits all at once and I gasp before I can stop myself, and his face does the thing it's been waiting to do.
"Sorry about that," he says, not sorry at all.
