"You're not. That's okay."
"I just. " His hands. He stared at his hands. Steady for the past three days, steady through the cleanup and the debrief and the sex and the morning after, and now they were shaking like they belonged to someone else. "I need a minute."
"Take all the minutes you need. Eggs'll keep."
Seth pressed his palms flat against the cool granite. Focused on the temperature. The texture. The solidity of a surface that didn't move, didn't bleed, didn't make sounds when it,
"Breathe," Jack said. "In through your nose. You know the drill."
He knew the drill. Zain had taught him. Count of four in, hold for four, out for four. A soldier's trick for when the body decided to process what the mind had shelved.
He breathed.
The kitchen reassembled itself around him. The eggs. The coffee. Jack's broad, patient face. The morning light through the dirty window, turning dust motes into tiny suspended universes.
"That happen to you?" Seth asked when he could talk again. "After your first?"
Jack was quiet for a moment. Then he plated the eggs. Set one in front of Seth. Sat down across from him with his own plate.
"I was twenty-three," Jack said. "Underground fight in Hamtramck. Guy came at me outside the ring. Knife. I didn't mean to kill him, just hit him, one hit, but he went down wrong. Back of his head on the curb." He took a bite. Chewed. "Threw up every morning for two weeks. Couldn't eat red meat for a month. My hands did that thing yours are doing right now, and no amount of telling myself he'd have killed me first made it stop."
"What made it stop?"
"Time. And Nate, actually. He showed up one day with a bottle of bourbon and said, 'The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Let it remember. Don't fight the shaking. Let it move through you.'" Jack shrugged. "Sounded like hippie bullshit. It worked."
Nate looked at him. That warm, implacable look. "You know what the difference is between damage and destruction? Damage can be repaired. Destruction is permanent. Every person in this house is damaged. None of them are destroyed. That's not luck. That's choice."
Seth looked at his hands. Still trembling. He set them flat again. Let them shake.
"It gets quieter," Jack said. "Not gone. Quieter."
"How long?"
"Depends on how much you fight it. Months, if you let it process. Years, if you shove it down." He pointed his fork at Seth. "Don't shove it down. We've all tried that. It doesn't end well."
Footsteps on the stairs. Zain appeared, hair damp, dressed for the day. His eyes went to Seth immediately, always, now, and his expression shifted when he saw the shaking hands.
He didn't ask. Didn't hover. Just poured himself coffee, sat on the stool next to Seth, and let his knee press against Seth's under the counter. A single point of contact. Warm and steady andthere.
Seth's hands slowed.
Jack caught Zain's eye. A look passed between them, the look of men who'd seen the same darkness and recognized it in others. Then Jack went back to his eggs, and Zain went back to his coffee, and Seth sat between them and felt the wave recede.
Not gone. Never gone.
But quieter
CHAPTER 24
Ghost cracked Mercer's network in forty-eight hours.
The data was beautiful. Seth hadn't expected beauty, hadn't expected anything from Ghost except efficiency and thefaint social discomfort of a man who preferred screens to faces, but the way Ghost had organized Mercer's network was architectural. Elegant. A cathedral of evidence built from stolen files and intercepted communications and the patient, obsessive labor of a man who fought injustice with code the way Zain fought it with weapons and Marcus fought it with strategy.
"This is everything," Seth said, scrolling through the files on Ghost's secondary monitor. Financial records going back seven years. Property holdings through shell companies. Communications with Vega: encrypted, but Ghost had broken the encryption with the casual disdain of a man swatting a fly. Witness lists. Shipment schedules. The complete taxonomy of a criminal enterprise, laid bare in folders and spreadsheets and the cold, devastating language of numbers that told the truth even when the people behind them lied.
"Not everything," Ghost said. "This is the regional operation. Mercer was a node, not the network. There are others." His fingers paused on the keyboard. "But this is enough to end him."
"And Vega?"
