I looked at the logs on the desk. Time-stamped entries. Camera stills. The face of the lead motorcycle rider staring up from a high-angle frame, features obscured by a helmet, body language carrying the coordination of someone who had been trained and was following orders.
“Find them.”
Ashe’s pen moved. One line, block-capital.
“Shell company dissolution records. Warehouse ownership history. Every frame of Portland street camera footage from the night in question, pulled and re-analyzed from scratch. I want the footage team on it personally. No algorithms. Human eyes on every frame.” Each point landed between us with the weight of something that had been building since the first night. “I want to know who wanted Jai badly enough to run a parallel operation and smart enough to stay invisible doing it. I want to know if they’re still watching. I want to know if they saw what happened last night and what they’re doing with that information.”
The pen kept moving. Ashe’s handwriting remained precise, each word allocated the exact space it required, nothing wasted.
“Preliminary report by end of week,” he said.
“Make it three days.”
“Understood.”
He closed the notebook. Slipped the pen back into his inside pocket. The thread gave another small warm pulse—Jai had picked Grace up, I could feel it through the bond, the weight of a small body against his chest registering as a shift in the current that traveled from my sternum down through my arms.
I filed that under things I would examine thoroughly later, when the study was empty and the security question had been given the attention it required.
“We’re done,” I said.
Ashe stood. Gathered the logs with the same precision he brought to everything. Stacked them. Aligned the edges. Then he paused at the study door with his hand on the latch and his back still turned, and said, “I’ll have it by Wednesday.”
The door clicked shut behind him. The study went quiet in the way rooms do when they’ve been holding weight and are suddenly relieved of it — not empty, exactly, but settled, the timber walls releasing a tension they’d been carrying without anyone noticing.
Down the hall, Jai’s voice carried. Low and dry, talking to Grace the way he always did — like she had opinions he found inconvenient but respected, like she was a person rather than a project, like the fact that she weighed less than a bag of groceries was irrelevant to whether her perspective deserved a hearing.
Grace answered in small, contented sounds. The exchange of two creatures who had decided, independently and with absolute conviction, that the other was worth the trouble.
I sat alone for one more moment with the open security question. A second party. Unknown resources. Unknown intentions. Still out there, still watching, still making calculations I couldn’t see.
The weight of it settled across my shoulders alongside everything else the night had cost us, and I carried it with me into the hallway to find my mate and my ward and whatever themorning looked like on the other side of a thread that had not existed yesterday and now lived in my chest like it had always been there, humming steadily, specific and warm and absolutely certain of what it was for.
Chapter Nineteen
~ Jai ~
Grace had the sleeping schedule of someone who believed time was a suggestion rather than a rule, which meant my morning coffee was only half-finished and already going cold.
I had her settled against my hip, one hand braced under her tiny back and head, the cherry sucker tucked in my cheek sending sugar through my system at a rate my body no longer processed efficiently, and I was staring at the stone fireplace trying to decide whether it was worth the effort to start a fire when the wood was already damp from last night’s rain.
Then Ashe Wilson materialized in the doorway of the great room, and I knew before he opened his mouth that whatever was about to come out of it would improve my morning the way a brick to the face improves your complexion.
He wore the expression. The specific one. Flat eyes, tight jaw, the look of a man who had been handed a situation he had no interest in managing and was already drafting the hand-off memo in his head.
“Jai.” My name in his mouth came out the way everything did—stripped of decorative emphasis. “You have visitors at the front gate.”
I pulled the sucker from my cheek. “Define ‘visitors.’”
“Two of them. Claiming family connection. Driving a 2017 Lexus with Washington plates.”
The cherry flavor went sour in my mouth. I set the coffee down on the side table with a click that caught Grace’s attention. Her head turned slightly against my chest, those too-alert eyes opening a fraction before deciding the situation wasn’t worth full engagement.
I knew before the sentence landed. Of course I knew. The universe had a specific sense of humor, and it tended to deliver my parents on the exact morning after I’d been claimed, knotted, and nearly murdered, because why the hell not.
“Send them through,” I said. “But if they try to leave pamphlets, I’m going to set them on fire.”
Ashe’s expression didn’t change. “Braham is in the study.”
