He sits up, water sliding down his chest, and reaches for Kade with both hands. Kade is twice his size and still somehow the one who looks caught when Emrys frames his face and pulls him down. Their foreheads touch. Emrys holds him there, thumbs moving slow along his jaw, and Kade lets him.
That is the thing. Not the confession. Not even the words. Kade lets himself be held.
His eyes close. His hand comes up, not to take control, only to cover one of Emrys’s wrists like he needs to feel the contact from both sides. I sit behind Emrys with my hands resting lightly at his waist and watch the man who has been holding every room together put a little of his weight into someone else’s hands.
Amber opens under my skin, warmer than it has been in years.
No one speaks for a long time. Emrys keeps Kade’s face between his palms. Kade stays bent over the edge of the tub, forehead to forehead with him, breathing carefully through something that looks too deep to rush. The water cools by degrees. My back aches against the porcelain. None of that matters enough to move.
Kade’s hand eventually shifts to the back of Emrys’s neck, steady and careful. “Sweetheart,” he says, voice low.
“I know,” Emrys whispers, though I do not know what he is answering.
Maybe he does. Maybe that is enough.
My phone rings from the living room.
The sound cuts through the room hard enough that Emrys flinches against me. Kade’s hand tightens once at the back of his neck before he lets go. The phone rings again, muffled through the bathroom door, and whatever softness had settled over the morning starts pulling back before I even stand.
“I have to get that,” I say.
Neither of them argues. Kade shifts off the edge of the tub and reaches for a towel without being asked. Emrys looks up at mefrom the water, eyes still too soft from what just happened, and I hate the way the case has already stepped between us.
The phone is still ringing when I cross the living room with a towel around my waist and water dripping down my back. Caldwell’s name lights the screen.
I answer on the third ring. “Grayson.”
Road noise comes through first, then Caldwell’s voice, clear and focused in the way it always gets when something has gone wrong. “You sound like I interrupted something.”
“You did,” I say, because I do not have it in me to lie this morning. “What do you have?”
“Vesper and Cardinal. I ran what you gave me against the task-force files. The overlap is real. Same shell structure, same routing patterns, same kind of laundering behavior we saw around Hex’s supply lines.”
I lean against the back of the couch, towel damp at my waist, and look toward the bathroom door. Low voices carry from inside, Emrys saying something I can’t make out, Kade answering in that steady baritone that still sounds a little raw. “Kade’s company files show the same spine. The approaches to Rourke Securities, the Vesper donation overlap, the money moving before the latest request. They went after Kade because he wouldn’t give them client access. Then Emrys became the lever.”
“That tracks with what we’re seeing.” Caldwell’s road noise shifts, a turn signal clicking twice before it cuts off. “The Vesper matters more than we thought. Before Hex was caught, the task force tracked him taking meetings there. Three confirmed. Maybe more. We never got a clean ID on who he met.”
My grip tightens on the phone. “You’re saying Hex was meeting someone tied into the same money pattern that just touched Rourke.”
“I’m saying Hex, Cardinal, the Vesper, and your assault case are no longer separate threads.”
The room seems to get colder despite the steam still on my skin. “Who was he meeting?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“Caldwell.”
“I know.” His voice flattens. “We are pulling the old hotel requests, but the first pass came back polished. Private events, donor traffic, several names hidden behind legal entities and staff accounts. Whoever he met knew how to use a hotel like that as cover.”
I close my eyes for one second. Behind the bathroom door, water moves. Emrys laughs softly at something Kade says, the sound gentle and half-broken from the morning we were having. I open my eyes again because I cannot afford to keep them closed.
“Why are you driving?” I ask.
Caldwell does not answer right away.
That is the answer before he says anything.
“Hex got out,” he says.
