“She is.”
Cable looks at me again, and this time there is something in his face that is less assessment and more something quieter. Something that recognizes a connection without needing it spelled out.
“Tracker talked about you. A lot.”
Not prepared for that.
“He talked about you too,” I manage. “He said you were the best at what you do.”
Something moves behind Cable’s eyes, brief and quickly controlled. He gives a single nod and looks back at his screens.
“Working on something?” Tate asks, his voice dropping.
“Always,” Cable says. “Our target’s people have been quiet since New York. Too quiet. I’m tracking some movement that doesn’t add up yet, but it will.” He pauses. “I’ll have something for you by tonight.”
Tate nods once and straightens. “Good.”
He places a hand briefly on Cable’s shoulder, just for a second, the way you touch someone you trust completely, and then he moves on.
Glancing back at Cable as we walk away, he is already back in his screens, both phones lit up, unreachable.
He reminds me a little of Tracker. Not in the way he looks or carries himself, they are completely different in that regard, but it’s in the way he sits inside his own focus, like it is a room onlyhe has the key to. It’s that quality of a man whose mind never really stops working, even when everything else does.
Turning back to the room, I swallow the ache that comes with that thought.
Tate looks around properly.
And his expression changes.
The clubhouse is a mess.
Not catastrophically, but enough. Bottles on surfaces that aren’t bars. Ashtrays that need emptying. A general air of a space that has been lived in hard, cleaned reluctantly, and not recently enough.
“Where are the girls?” Tate asks, directing the question at no one in particular.
“Around,” Flame says from behind the bar, appearing with two beers and setting one in front of Tate without being asked.
Tate looks at the bar surface.
Then at the room.
Then back at Flame with a look that communicates several things at once without a single word.
“Get them out here,” he says. “This place needs sorting. Sophia’s going to be around regularly, and I want it kept to a standard. A decent one.”
Flame raises an eyebrow, just slightly, but nods and disappears.
I lean close to Tate. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I did,” he says and hands me the beer.
Maybe forty minutes in, perched on a barstool nursing my beer, I watch Tate move through the clubhouse the way presidents do, while he has brief, low conversations with various members, with a quiet authority that needs no announcement when I feel it.
That shift in the energy of a room when someone walks in who changes it.
Turning, I see her immediately.
She is stunning.
