Another pause. Shorter this time. “Location?”
“Bakery apartment. You have the address.”
“Ten minutes,” he said, and hung up.
I handed the phone back to Ashe. He pocketed it without looking at the screen.
My father was still talking. The words washed over me like rain on glass—something about respect, about the family name, about opportunities I was too blind to see. His fists were still clenched. The veins in his forearms stood out like cords.
I looked at all three of them. My mother by the shelf, her hand frozen on the spine of a book she’d been about to throw away. My father at the desk, red-faced and righteous. Denise on the couch, one nail half-filed, looking up at me with the mild curiosity of someone watching a car accident in slow motion.
I held the look for one beat. Long enough to make it deliberate. Short enough to make it dismissive.
Then I turned and walked to my bedroom.
The door shut behind me with a click that felt final. I braced my shoulder against it, listening to the muffled thud of my father’s fist hitting the frame, the rise and fall of his voicethrough the wood. My mother said something I couldn’t make out. Denise’s nail file kept clicking.
I braced my shoulder against the bedroom door until the latch clicked, then jammed my boot against the door for good measure. My father’s fist hit the frame on the other side, the wood vibrating under my palm.
“Open this door, Jai. This is not a discussion.”
It wasn’t. He was right about that much.
Behind him, I could hear my mother’s trash bag rustling—novels being shoved in, spines cracking, the particular sound of paper giving way under someone who didn’t care what was written on it. Denise’s nail file kept up its metronomic click from the couch. The soundtrack of a home invasion, scored for percussion and misplaced entitlement.
My heart pounded in three-second bursts. Steady, skip, steady. The kind of rhythm that used to mean incoming, back when incoming was something you could shoot at.
I ran a quick triage on the feeling in my chest and filed it under things to examine later, when I wasn’t standing in a bedroom with my father’s fist still hammering the door frame.
Betrayal was too clean a word. This was something older, something that lived in the marrow: the certainty that the people who were supposed to keep you safe were the ones most likely to take something you couldn’t replace.
The low rumble rose from the street and morphed into something specific: two engines, idling at a pitch that meant professional drivers keeping revs low.
I counted the footfalls on concrete—four sets, maybe five, moving in the kind of lockstep that didn’t happen by accident. Boot soles scraping wet pavement. The sound of men who’d been told to hurry but not to run.
The door shuddered. Not my father’s fist this time—something firmer, something that hit the wood with the flat of a palm and waited.
I tucked the box under my arm, laptop in my other hand, and took one last look at the room. The bed was stripped. The nightstand drawer hung open. The water stain in the corner looked exactly the same as it had when I moved in, and exactly the same as it would when I was gone.
I opened the door.
My father stood there, arm still raised, face frozen in an expression I’d seen a thousand times—a mix of anger and confusion that happened when his version of the world collided with something that refused to comply.
Behind him, my mother had the trash bag clutched to her chest like a shield. Denise had finally put down the nail file. She was watching the hallway with the alert curiosity of someone who’d paid for front-row seats to a show that had just gotten interesting.
Ashe was already in the hallway. He hadn’t moved from his position by the door, but somehow he’d acquired two more men—wolves, both of them, built on the same assembly line as their boss, standing at parade rest with their hands loose at their sides. A third man was already coming up the stairs, a stack of flattened cardboard boxes under one arm.
“Mr. Flynn,” Ashe said. Not a question. A confirmation.
I nodded.
My father found his voice. “Jai, what is this? Who are these people?”
I looked at him. Really looked. The lines around his mouth had deepened since the last time I’d seen him up close. His tie was still perfect. His fists were still clenched.
And then Braham stepped into the apartment like he owned the entire block and was here to collect rent. He’d brought backup.
My chest did that thing again. Steady, skip, steady.
