“We’ll enter it into the record.”Bang. Gavel. Done.
I leaned into Calloway and dropped my voice. “This is the best outcome under the circumstances.”
He muttered something about an appeal, about how his former CFO would fold under pressure. I nodded and didn’t bother answering. He wouldn’t last long in prison, not with one of his victims being related to a con inside—someone with a reputation for shivving anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way. By the time he spluttered some othershit about appealing, I was already heading back into the corridors of cold marble and fluorescent light.
Inside? I wasrelieved. Because letting him fall was the first thing all day that felt clean.
By the time I returned to the office, the sun was beginning to dip behind the high-rises, casting sharp golden streaks across the glass, and Andrea was at her desk, typing something at inhuman speed.
“All good, sir?” she asked.
“A loss,” I said with a wink, and she smiled. “Feel free to leave early.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Nothing.”
She hesitated, closed her laptop, gathered her coat and bag, and was gone with her usual quiet grace. I headed through the quiet outer offices until I reached the Cave. Caleb and Sonya were already in there. Sonya cross-legged on the floor, laptop balanced on her knees, earbuds in, a pen tapping against her leg.
Caleb was by the six-foot stretch of pushpins, yarn, and printed photos that was our cork wall. Old school. Deliberate. He threw me a smile. “Good result there, boss.”
“Yep,” I said. ”Okay, so…” I pinched the bridge of my nose. Now we had to face the next big fuck-up. “Coffee first.” I dropped my briefcase and moved toward the coffee machine. “Anyone else need a hit?”
Sonya lifted her cup without looking away from the screen, and Caleb raised two fingers. Doing something with my hands helped push the static out of my brain. I’d been focused on putting Calloway down, unable to deal with the whole Jamie thing, which was so noisy in my thoughts I was starting to lose my shit.
I handed out coffees, then joined Caleb. Standing beside the new picture at the center of the wall—fresh printed and tacked with two steel pins—was the photo of Lassiter, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District and prosecutor for organized crime and human trafficking cases.
A guy who’d made a name for himself hammering on predators. The kind of man who liked televised raids and soundbites about justice. He went to church every Sunday. Perfect blonde wife named Camille. Two grown kids—Christopher, a surgeon; Ellie, a tech CEO in Silver Lake. Their house in a gated community in Bel Air Crest, a family home, and he genuinely seemed to live that life.
I stared at the photo. The man in it was smiling—big, white teeth, an expensive suit, and an American flag lapel pin. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning.”
ELEVEN
Jamie
The smellof coffee hit me a second before the sound of someone shifting at the edge of the bed. I cracked one eye open to find Rio sitting there, calm as anything, holding out a mug.
He was already dressed for work in his faded Redcars T-shirt, the sleeves snug over his biceps, and jeans streaked with grease at the thigh. His expression was unreadable—but not closed. He looked like someone waiting to continue a conversation he’d already started in his head. I had been half-expecting him to confront me the next morning, but it took him two nights and a full day to finally speak up. He’d ignored me at work yesterday, and for a while, I’d convinced myself that he didn’t know what I’d done, but he’d known.
And now it was time to pay the piper.
“Morning,” I muttered, sitting up and taking the mug. The heat of it felt good against my fingers.
Rio didn’t smile, just leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his posture casual, but I braced myself for the storm. When he showed up with this tension in him, it was because it mattered.
I mattered to him.
“What did you do?” he asked. There was no judgment in the question. Just a quiet need to know. Just Rio, being who he always was—steady, grounded, someone who could look at the ugliest thing about you and not flinch. I sipped the coffee before I answered.
He was to me what others would call a best friend, but he was also the lightning rod to my storm. We were both angry men, sharp around the edges in ways that didn’t always show. But where Rio threw his fists, I threw fire. He’d grown up fighting in alleys and gyms, learning control and earning cash with his fists. I’d grown up behind a keyboard and a wall of flames, learning to make something burn enough to vanish and give me what I needed.
He’d seen me early on—reallyseenme. Not the smart mouth, twitchy hands, or half-smiles I used to deflect people. He’d pulled me into the garage as oneof Tudor’s rescues, handed me tools with grease still on the handles, and told me cars were simple. If something broke, you fixed it. If you didn’t know how, you learned. I already liked the big old muscle cars, and I took to mechanics like a duck to water. He acted as if he was way older than me when, in fact, he only had five years on me.
“Stick with these over killing,” he’d said once, wiping his hands on a rag while I stared at the guts of a rebuilt V8. “It’s slower. Makes you breathe.”
I tried.
I stayed away from computers for a while. Let the fire rest. I focused on things I could hold and fix with patience instead of destruction. Tried, for once, to be something close to normal. But some nights, the itch came back in nightmares. One night, it had gotten too loud.
