Something moved across his face that wasn’t fear but lived in the same neighborhood—the tightness around the eyes that happened when someone who was used to calculating odds realized the math had changed.
He turned back. Looked at me directly. “Does Declan know Grace is here specifically, or is he still working from probability?”
“I don’t know yet.”
I said it without flinching. Without padding. Jai had made it clear, in ways both verbal and otherwise, that managed information was the fastest route to losing his cooperation, and I was not in the business of losing things that belonged to me.
He absorbed this. His thumb tapped once against his opposite forearm, a small, rhythmic press that I recognized as the tell he deployed when he was running scenarios. One tap. Two. Then he stopped, and his eyes found mine again, and the question he asked was the one I’d been waiting for.
“What do you need from me?”
I kept my face neutral. Gave him the three things, in order. “Stay inside the building today. All day. Keep Grace away from the east-facing windows. And if anything feels wrong—anything, Jai, any shift in the air, any sound that doesn’t belong—you call me first. Not Ashe. Me.”
His jaw shifted. A fraction of an inch, the particular movement that preceded an argument he’d already decided he was going to have. “I’m not going to just sit here.”
“I know.” I didn’t soften it. Didn’t need to. “I’m not asking you to sit. I’m asking you to stay inside the perimeter while I close the gap in it.”
The beat that followed ran long enough to count. Jai’s eyes held mine, and I watched the calculation happen behind them—weighing the argument against the energy it would cost, measuring the perimeter against whatever plan was alreadyforming behind that sharp, restless intelligence. His thumb tapped once more against his forearm. Stopped.
“Fine.” Flat. Final. “One day. If you haven’t closed the gap by tonight, we’re having a different conversation.”
“That’s fair.”
He nodded once. The kind of nod that settled something between us without requiring the words to do the work.
From down the hall, Grace’s pre-cry sounds carried—the soft, escalating fuss that started in the back of her throat and had about ninety seconds before it committed to volume. Wet. Indignant. The noise of a creature who had been asleep and was now awake and found this state of affairs personally offensive.
Jai was already moving. No hesitation, no pause, yesterday’s socks nearly silent on the dark walnut floor as he turned and walked back toward the guest suite with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything that mattered.
His shoulders carried the tension I’d come to recognize—not fear, not quite, but the alert readiness of a man who had decided, against his better judgment, that something was worth protecting.
I watched him go. The cherry-blossom scent trailed behind him, warm and specific, cutting through the coffee and the paper smell of the logs.
He disappeared around the corner into the hallway, and a moment later I heard the guest suite door open, then the soft, immediate drop in volume as Grace registered his presence and decided, temporarily, that the universe might be worth tolerating after all.
I turned back to Ashe. The logs were still spread across the table, time-stamped and annotated, the face of the lead man staring up from the high-angle still with the blank focus of someone doing a job he’d been trained for.
I pulled out my phone and called the head of my security division. The line picked up on the second ring, a voice I’d hired for competence rather than warmth, and I gave the orders in the sequence they needed to happen, no wasted breath, no repetition.
The day began. The wrongness had a name, and the name had resources, and I had exactly until tonight to make sure those resources became irrelevant.
I picked up the cold coffee and drank it anyway.
Chapter Fourteen
~ Braham ~
The second cup had gone cold on the counter. I didn’t remember setting it there. The coffee had formed a skin across the surface, that gloss that happens when something hot surrenders to room temperature, and I was staring at it with the kind of attention that had nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with the fact that I’d been waiting for a call for two hours.
The penthouse hummed. Quiet systems, the low ambient drone of a building forty floors above street level, the kind of engineered silence that cost more money than most people made in a year.
Mt. Hood held the morning light through the east windows, snow-capped and distant, turning the dark walnut floors the color of old gold. My phone sat face-up beside the abandoned mug, screen dark, the black glass reflecting the ceiling beams in a distorted smear.
I’d been monitoring the building feeds in my peripheral awareness since the briefing ended. Three separate camera arrays, the service elevator logs, the rooftop motion sensors Ashe had recalibrated after the first intrusion.
Nothing had triggered.
The recycled air carried the same cedar-and-scotch baseline it always did, layered now with the faint cherry blossom residue that clung to the hallway outside the guest suite.
