Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 66697 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 333(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66697 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 333(@200wpm)___ 267(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
“Somebody inside that operation,” Knight said, “burned every bridge on his way out a side door, in real time, while the fighting was still live.”
I stood there a long moment, running it the way I ran everything, backward and forward, looking for the seam. Knuckles hadn’t moved from the wall. Seth watched me with deadly stillness. My father and I were rarely not on the same page, so I knew he thought the same as me.
“Walk me through the whole night again,” I said. “From the beginning. Slowly.”
Knight didn’t need convincing. He pulled feed after feed and laid it out. Rourke’s fallback house, the one that should’ve taken hours to crack, folding in under ten minutes once we hit the door, like the men inside had been told not to fight too hard. The passcode on the second safe that opened on the first try, no duress, or struggle, handed over by a man who should have died instead of giving it up. Denton’s own recorded order, pulled off the phone I’d taken off his desk. Then, of course, the looped feeds. That pissed me off. Ten weeks I watched that fucking place sit dark. I’d been watching a loop somebody built for me while they restocked the place and staged a buyer’s night. He didn’t just want Denton dead. He wanted him dead in front of an audience, holding the evidence.
“And him,” Knight said, pointing to an image on another screen. “I pulled every camera in a four-block radius. Every camera inside that building. I’ve got four years of footage to work with if I need it.” He shook his head slowly. “I cannot put him on a single frame. Not one. In a building he owned.”
Iron.
I understood it then, all at once. “I had it backward from the start,” I murmured. I thought Denton was the head of the thing, the mind behind Éclipse, and I’d spent three weeks feeling relief that we’d cut it off clean. Denton had never been the head, he was the liability. The name that could be sacrificed if shit got too hot. Iron hadn’t lost his network that night. He’d shed it. Aimed the whole Miles machine at exactly the target he wanted gone and stood back and let my own nature finish the job for him. “Touché,” I muttered.
“So it would seem,” Seth agreed.
The network hadn’t fallen. It shifted to another spoke in the same wheel. I felt the horror of it settle into my chest slow and cold, and the worst part, the part I’d never say out loud to anyone in this room, was that I couldn’t even hate the craftsmanship of it. Somebody had built a trail meant to end at exactly one corpse, and I had walked every step of it exactly the way he’d wanted, right down to the Goddamned bullet.
“Fucking Iron,” Seth bit out.
“Fucking Iron.” I growled. “He used us. Aimed us at Denton and let us do the rest while he walked.”
Knuckles growled but I could tell he thought the same way I did. You had to admire the beauty of the execution.
“Log it,” I told them both. “For the club, for the family. Everyone who needs to know his name knows it starting today. Get this file out to all our major intel sources. Knight, see if you can get Ice at Bones to suggest assistance.” Too late I remembered the man’s prickly personality. Before he could cut me off with a snide remark, I raised my hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll be getting help too. Whoever this guy is, he’s not a moron.” I looked at the screen a moment longer, at the dead timestamps, at the empty frame where a man should have been standing and wasn’t. “He knows us. Now we know him too.”
I left the room without looking back. Down the hall, past the noise of the kitchen, I could already hear Tessa’s laugh and Darby’s voice arguing with somebody over the last of the coffee, and I let all of it pull me forward, out of the cold of Knight’s revelation and back toward the warmth of love and life.
* * *
Tessa
Two weeks after that
I had my keys in my hand and my jacket zipped when Antonio walked into the kitchen. The man stood in the doorway a second, taking in the scene -- me dressed, keys dangling, coffee mug already empty in the sink.
“Tessa?”
“Appointment’s in an hour.” I held up the keys. “You showering, or you riding shotgun in what you slept in?”
He ran a hand over his jaw. “Knight found something.”
“I figured.” I handed him a travel mug of coffee I’d already poured. “And you can tell me in the car, because we’re not rescheduling. Not for Knight, not for Iron, not for God Himself if he showed up with a petition.”