The house creaks. Once. Quiet. Almost like an answer.
Almost.
Chapter 16
Liam
The case file sits on my desk where I left it.
Foxglove Inn. 412 Sycamore Lane. Client: Engstrom, Kari. The tab is still open on my laptop — camera feeds dark, disconnected. Novak's arrest report paperclipped to the inside cover. Evie's financial trace, clean as surgery, every shell company peeled back to the bone.
I close the file. It makes a sound like something finished — the dry whisper of paper against paper.
Three days since I walked out of her kitchen. Three days of The Glasshouse humming the way it always does — climate control, the muffled bass of the gym two floors down, elevator doors chiming at intervals I could set my watch by. My coffee is black. The chair is ergonomic. The windows are reinforced glass with a UV coating that makes the city look slightly blue.
I used to like this desk. The clean lines of it. Everything in its place — files left, laptop center, phone right, coffee at two o'clock. A system. A perimeter I could control.
Nothing is wrong with any of it.
That's the problem.
Vance finds me in the gym.
Not the main floor — the back room where the heavy bags hang, where the rubber mat smells like sweat and cleaning solution, where nobody comes unless they're trying to hit something they can't name. I've been here long enough that my knuckles ache through the wraps. Jab, cross, hook. Jab, cross, hook. The kind of pattern that doesn't ask anything except repetition.
"Cade."
I don't stop.
"The Novak debrief is filed." Vance stands at the edge of the mat, arms crossed. Charcoal suit, no tie — his version of casual. "Evie's team handed the financials to the DA's office this morning. Halcyon Ridge is done."
Jab. Cross. Hook.
"The assignment's closed. You did the job."
"I know."
The bag swings. I catch it, hold it still. My breath is the only sound in the room.
Vance doesn't move. He has this way of occupying silence — filling the entire space with the fact that he's choosing not to speak. More effective than anything he could say.
"She's safe," I tell him. Or the bag. Hard to say which.
"She is."
I let the bag go. It sways once, settles.
"What you do next isn't HPG's call." He says it the way he says everything — like a fact pulled from a file. No inflection. No suggestion.
My jaw tightens. The scar on my left forearm itches under the wrap. I want to tell him he's wrong — that the job is the only thing I'm good at, that the rest of me is a controlled detonation in a dark apartment with no furniture that matters.
"You're the best operator I've got, Cade." He turns toward the door. Pauses with one hand on the frame. "But you've been useless for three days."
The door closes behind him.
I hit the bag once more. The impact shudders up through my wrist, my elbow, my shoulder. None of it reaches the thing that actually hurts.
Evie catches me in the corridor outside the ops floor.
