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Now I can’t even make a fist.

The doctors keep saying nerves take time. It might come back in a month. Might be a year. They never say the part that matters: it might not.

I open my knife roll and begin zipping it shut when my gaze snags on the empty slot. My karambit is missing.

My jaw tightens.

Last time I used it was a couple of jobs before Drew took that bodyguard gig. Some mid-level executive who’d gotten brave and reneged on a deal. He had the expensive suit, the corner office, the big windows. He thought those things made him untouchable.

They didn’t.

For a clean end, I like a gun. Fast. Simple. No room for confusion. But a gun is shit for negotiation. Once you pull it, you either use it or everyone in the room knows you weren’t going to. And if you use it, things get final real quick. And dead men don’t sign checks.

A knife is more flexible. You give a man one cut and let him sit with the fact that you’re willing to make another. He stays alive, he stays scared, and his hand still works well enough to hold a pen.

So that’s what I used.

One clean slash along the side of his neck—not deep, just enough to open the skin and let him feel warm blood running into his collar.

The guy folded instantly. Crying. Shaking. Snot running down his face. I handed the knife off to Drew so I could shove the contract under his nose.

I never saw the karambit again.

I stare at the empty slot.

Of course Drew kept it.

When I’m done packing, I drive across town to Drew’s apartment.

Ray said the place was abandoned. Said his crew had torn it apart while I was still unconscious in the hospital, looking for anything that might lead them to him.

If I’d been awake, I could have saved them the trouble.

Drew wouldn’t leave a trail.

That’s the thing about him. He talks too much, smiles too easily, and gets distracted by a decent pair of legs.

He might be a moron, but he’s not stupid.

If Drew disappeared, he did it properly. No forwarding address. No useful name scribbled in a notebook. No scrap of paper for Ray to find and follow.

He knows better than that.

I should know.

I’m the one who taught him.

It takes me thirty seconds to pick the lock.

The place is a disaster. Cardboard boxes everywhere, half of them still open, drawers yanked out and left where they fell. I glance into one box: women’s clothes folded into neat stacks, shoes lined up in their original boxes with labels facing out, fragile items wrapped properly with straight tape. Drew’s work, no question.

So, this was planned. Drew and the billionaire’s daughter—whatever her name is—had been getting ready to leave for good. Then her father found out, called Ray, and everything went to shit.

The memory slams into me: the sharp crack of gunshots, the white-hot burn ripping through my shoulder, Drew stepping over my body like I was nothing. Twenty years of watching his back, and he threw it all away for a woman he’d barely known.

I take a breath and keep moving. Then I see it.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.