Atara.
I'm thinking about the way she looked at me in the study. About how she's already mapped my security protocols better than halfmy guards. About the fact that she's locked in the East Wing right now, almost certainly working out how to bury me under a stack of balance sheets. She's a distraction, and distractions get men killed. I dropped a variable into a closed system, and for the first time in ten years, I can't account for it.
"Two miles out," Kieran says from the driver’s seat. He doesn't look back at me. He knows better.
"Keep the speed steady," I say, my voice flat. "I don't want a reason for anyone to look twice at this vehicle."
My phone buzzes against my thigh. I ignore it—the Senator's office again, panicking about Cork. Not today.
"Slow down," I say.
"Boss?"
"Stop the car."
We’re on a dusty turn-off near the outskirts of the sector. It’s not the meeting point. My gut is twitching, a low-level static of unease that I’ve learned to trust over the last five years.
"Stay here," I say, opening the door.
The heat hits me like a physical blow. The air is dry and tastes of dust. I step onto the asphalt, my hand hovering near the holster tucked into my waistband.
A girl is riding a pink bicycle along the shoulder. She’s no older than ten, wearing a bright blue helmet that swallows her head. She doesn't look like she belongs in this part of the city. She stops right in front of the SUV, resting a small, grimy foot on the pavement. She doesn't look scared. She just looks at me with a hollow, practiced grace that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
She reaches into the basket of her bike and pulls out a small, black wooden box. She holds it out to me.
"For the man in the car," she says. Her voice is flat.
I step toward her, my hand tightening on my gun as I take the box from her. "Who gave this to you?"
"An uncle," she says. She doesn't blink. "He said you’d know what it’s for."
I start to reach for her, to get a name, but she turns the bike around in a sudden, jerky movement and pedals away into the scrub brush. I watch her go. There’s nothing on the horizon. Just dust and heat haze.
I walk back to the car, the box heavy and cold in my palm.
"Boss?" Kieran asks, his hand on his sidearm.
"Drive," I say. "And call the scouts. I want a perimeter sweep of this whole fucking sector. Now."
I sit back in the cool dark of the car. I’m not breathing right. I open the box.
Not a bomb. Not a threat.
A ring.
I know it before I let myself know it. Elara's ring. The world tips.
I'm back in the Vegas house, five years ago. The wetthwipof a silenced pistol. Elara's breath turning to a gurgle. Her hand twitching against the tile. This ring sliding off her finger as the blood spread under her hair, dark and slow. And then the silence after.
Silas.
The headache comes in behind my eyes like a driven nail. I want to tear something apart with my hands. I want the throat of the man who held this, who touched it, who put it in a child's basket and sent it across the desert to me.
"Boss." Kieran's voice comes thin and far away. "Boss—your hand."
I look down. I've crushed the box. The velvet is shredded, and the edges of the ring have opened the skin across my knuckles. I didn't feel it.
"Drive," I say.
