"My mother used to use it," Ghost said. And then closed his mouth as if he'd said too much, which, for Ghost, he had.
The kitchen went still for exactly two seconds. Then Jack said, "I'll write down the recipe," and Ghost said, "Don't," and everyone pretended the moment hadn't happened, but Seth saw Nate's hand tighten on his coffee mug and Zain's eyes go soft and the whole safehouse hold its breath around the rarest thing any of them had ever witnessed: Ghost, volunteering a memory.
Ghost ate his lamb and said nothing and didn't leave the kitchen for forty-seven minutes, which was, as far as any of them could remember, a record.
Zain watched the crew from his end of the island. Jack holding court. Nate refilling glasses. Ghost eating with the cautious attention of a man relearning a forgotten skill. Elijah between Ghost and the wall, always between someone and the threat.
And Seth. At the other end of the island. Close enough to reach. Far enough to hurt.
Their eyes met once. Across the plates and the noise and the careful distance they'd built between them.
Zain looked away first. The walls went up. The evening continued.
Later, he heard Seth helping Jack wash dishes. Their voices carried up through the floorboards, low and easy, and Zain lay in his bed and listened and felt the distance between wanting and deserving stretch like a wire pulled taut.
CHAPTER 12
Ghost's domain was the basement.
Not the gym, that was the west half of the lower level, separated by drywall and a door that didn't lock. Ghost's space was the east half, a server room that he'd designed and builthimself, cooled by a ventilation system that hummed with the constant, low-grade fever of machines working at capacity.
Zain had been down here maybe six times in five years. Ghost's territory was Ghost's territory, and the unspoken rule was that you didn't enter without invitation. But tonight, Ghost had left the door open. In Ghost's language, that was practically a dinner invitation.
He knocked anyway. Habit.
"Come in." Ghost's voice was flat, distant, the voice of someone whose attention was distributed across multiple screens and only partially available for human interaction.
The room was dim. Blue light from four monitors cast everything in submarine glow. Ghost sat in a chair that had been modified, extra cushions, lumbar support, armrests worn smooth by years of use, surrounded by the tools of his particular genius. Two laptops. A desktop rig with a custom case. A server rack against the wall that blinked green and amber in patterns that probably meant something to Ghost and nothing to anyone else.
The walls were bare except for one thing, a map of Detroit, covered in pins and string, the physical manifestation of Ghost's digital investigations. Red for active. Blue for confirmed connections. Black for closed.
More red than black.
"You wanted to talk?" Zain asked.
"I wanted to show you something." Ghost pulled up a window on the central monitor. Code: dense, scrolling, meaningless to Zain. "Mercer's encrypted communications. I've been working on a decryption algorithm for three months. It broke last night."
"And?"
"And Mercer isn't the top of the chain." Ghost's voice was still flat, but his hands had gone still on the keyboard. Ghost's hands were never still; this was the equivalent of someone elseshouting. "He's regional management. There's a network. Multi-state. The communications reference a coordinating entity that oversees operations in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois."
Zain let that settle. "How big?"
"Big enough that Mercer's four sites are a rounding error. We're talking dozens of locations. Hundreds of victims. Millions in revenue." Ghost swiveled his chair to face Zain. In the blue light, his face was all angles, sharp jaw, deep-set dark eyes, the pallor of someone who lived in artificial light. He was younger than he looked. Or older. It was hard to tell with Ghost. "This is bigger than us."
"Everything's bigger than us. We do it anyway."
"This is different." Ghost's eyes held something Zain had rarely seen there, not fear, exactly. Urgency. The look of a man who had stared into a data set and seen what changed the shape of the problem. "I'm going to need help. Real help. The kind of digital forensics that I can't do alone."
"Ghost. "
"I know someone." The words came reluctantly, like they'd been pried loose. "Someone with the skills. Someone I… knew. Before."
Ghost never talked about before. That was the deal, as Nate had said. The unspoken agreement that Ghost's past was Ghost's past, sealed behind encryption more complex than anything on his servers.
"Who?" Zain asked.
"It doesn't matter yet. The point is, Mercer going down is going to attract attention. Federal attention. People with badges and subpoena power are going to start asking questions that lead to Lakefront."
