"That's everyone's read." She pulled the licensing complaint back up. "Thirty days to respond to this one. Cole's contact at the board flagged them on Thursday. You'll want a lawyer for the response."
"I'll have one by the end of the week." My voice came out level. The room had gone still around the edges, but my voice came out level, and I held on to that. "What else? You're holding that tablet like there's a second act."
Kelly held my gaze a beat longer than necessary. Then she swiped to the next screen.
It was a summary with screenshots attached. Elevate had hired someone to compile background research on the people connected to my business. The collective members. My suppliers.
Daemon.
His name. His arrest. The charges, the conviction, the sentence. Three years in county, laid out in clean bullet points for whoever was supposed to use it, and I understood what it was for before Kelly said a word.
Conservative corporate clients. Due diligence. A word in the right ear suggesting that Nadia Becker kept questionable company.
The anger arrived ahead of everything else, and it wasn't for me. They'd taken the worst years of a man's life, the dead mother and the cell he'd grieved in, and formatted it into a weapon.
Then the second thing arrived, slower, the way the important reads always did.
"Where did this come from?" I asked.
"Malakai found it. He dug into Elevate's contractors after the complaints flagged."
"Malakai." I set the tablet down. "Who sent it to you?"
"Daemon. This afternoon."
"He has my number."
Kelly said nothing.
"When did Daemon see this?"
"This morning." She held my eyes, because Kelly didn't flinch from delivering things, which was probably why she'd been chosen. "Malakai asked him whether he wanted to bring it to you himself. He said he’d route it through me. He thought you wouldn't want to hear it from him."
This morning. He'd known at eight a.m. He'd known while I plated arancini and practiced being fine. His own record was being loaded into a weapon aimed at my business, and his response had been to design a delivery route that didn't include his voice.
I recognized the method. That was the part that sat wrong, deep and specific. Compartmentalize the damage. Keep the operation running. Move the painful cargo along whatever line doesn't pass through you.
I'd built my whole life on that system after I came home from my last deployment and found my old life reorganized without me.
It worked. I knew it worked.
I'd never once stood on the receiving end of it before.
"Thank you for telling me straight," I said.
"I told Malakai that next time, Daemon calls you directly." Kelly picked up her tablet. "You don't need handling."
"No," I said. "I don't."
She let herself out. I locked the door behind her, came back to the table, and sat down in front of a mug of lukewarm tea.
I drank it anyway. Waste was waste.
Three weeks I'd spent assuming his silence was paralysis. Something that happened to him, a wall that went up faster than he could talk. Tonight I'd learned that silence had architecture.
He'd built a supply line for the bad news so it wouldn't come directly from him, and I was the destination at the end.
I sat with that for exactly as long as I could stand it. The same way I'd done every night since I'd learned that being wrong about a person you'd been that certain about doesn't get easier on a schedule.
