"Shocking. A thriller character making bad choices."
"He keeps trusting the wrong people."
"Maybe he knows they're the wrong people and trusts them anyway."
His thumb stills. The muscle in his jaw shifts. He doesn't look at me, but his attention thickens, narrows, focuses — like I said something that landed closer than I meant it to.
"Maybe," he says. Low and rough and stripped of everything except honesty.
We sit until the light goes amber, then blue, then dark.
The pillow wall has gone back up. We both know it's meaningless. We build it anyway.
I lie on my side and think about hands. His hands — the way they moved on the paperback, the way they move on everything. Deliberate. Purposeful. He touches things like every point of contact matters.
The sticky drawer. The porch step. The screen door latch. The coffee made before I wake up. Nobody asked him to do any of it.
He fixes things in the dark. Quiet repairs while the house sleeps. He doesn't leave a list. Doesn't mention it. And from a man whose vocabulary for emotion is a jaw tick and a perimeter check and manufactured breathing — those silent fixes are the loudest thing I've ever heard.
The problem isn't that I'm catching feelings for Liam Cade. The problem is that I caught them a while ago and I'm only now admitting it, here in the dark, with the pillow wall between us.
The problem is that he's temporary.
His job will end. The threat will resolve, and he'll pack his duffel bag of identical dark henleys and drive away, and I'll be here with the drawer that slides open smoothly and the porch step that doesn't catch and the coffee maker that sits on the counter like a monument to a man who was here and isn't anymore.
I've rearranged my life around men who leave before. I won't do that again.
Except I called him my boyfriend today and didn't flinch. And he looked at me — jaw soft, ears red, gray eyes holding something he'll never name — and I thought, oh.
Just oh. The smallest, most dangerous word in the language.
His breathing evens out. The pillow wall holds. The ceiling fan clicks.
He fixed the drawer without telling me. He fixed the step without telling me. He held me in the dark without telling me.
And I don't know what to do with a man who says everything without speaking — except want him. Quietly. Desperately. With the full and terrible knowledge that quiet, desperate wanting is exactly how you get wrecked by someone who was never yours to keep.
Chapter 8
Liam
The law offices of Prescott & Yates occupy the third floor of a limestone building on Carver Street, wedged between a bail bondsman and an accountant whose window sign promises discretion.
Suite 310 has a brass nameplate that reads COASTAL ATLANTIC CONSULTING a division of Halcyon Ridge Development. The door is locked. No receptionist through the frosted glass. Mail slot taped shut from the inside. I press my ear to the door and get silence — the dead kind.
My phone buzzes. March.
"Prescott & Yates registered their DBA through a service in Wilmington," she says, no greeting. "Same registered agent as three of the Halcyon Ridge shells. The Carver Street address is a mail drop — month-to-month, cash. No employees on file."
"So a ghost."
"A well-funded ghost. The incorporation docs are nested — LLCs inside LLCs, at least four layers deep. Whoever built this wanted to stay buried. I'll have more by end of week."
I file it. "Vance wants an update?"
"He says you're supposed to be assessing, not investigating."
"Tell him I'm assessing aggressively."
