Burke set down his cinnamon roll.
And that—that right there—was how I knew it was serious. Burke Callahan did not set down food. Burke Callahan treated baked goods the way other men treated ammunition: with reverence, focus, and a complete unwillingness to surrender them under any circumstances short of direct orders.
He picked up the phone. Zoomed in on the tread photo with his thumb, his eyes narrowing, the joke draining out of his face like someone had pulled a plug. “I’ve seen this pattern before,” he said. Quiet. Flat. Not Burke’s voice at all. “Not here.”
He didn’t say where. He didn’t have to. The way he said it said everything the rest of us needed to know.
Rawley asked the obvious question. “Peterson family?”
Sterling shook his head once, sharp. “Eleanor’s in custody. The remaining faction’s too fractured and too watched to mount anything coordinated.”
He said it like a fact. Not a reassurance. Facts were what Sterling dealt in. Reassurance was something he left to people who were better at it, which was most people, because Sterling’s version of reassurance usually involved telling you exactly howmany ways something could go wrong and then expecting you to feel better about it.
Rawley nodded. Once. The tight nod of a man who had heard what he needed to hear and was already three steps ahead.
Macon leaned forward. His voice, when it came, was low and unhurried, the way it always was, like he’d thought the words through before saying them and found no reason to rush. “What about Hughs?”
“Gerald Hughs is in federal custody awaiting trial,” Sterling said.
“So not them,” Macon said.
“Not directly.”
“But adjacent?”
Sterling’s lip curled as if he was going to smirk, then thought better of it. “That’s one word for it.”
Burke leaned forward. His cinnamon roll sat forgotten on his plate, icing going stiff at the edges, and I watched the shift happen in real time—Burke Callahan stopping being the funny one and becoming the other thing, the thing that made me very, very glad he was on our side. His eyes went flat. His mouth set.
The man who made jokes about sensor arrays at three in the morning was gone, replaced by someone who looked like he could field-strip a threat assessment in the dark and have it reassembled before you finished blinking.
“Then who?” Burke asked. “If it’s not Petersons and it’s not Hughs directly, then who the hell is it?”
Jackson spoke. Quietly. Carefully. Each word chosen with the precision of a man walking through a minefield he’d mapped himself. “When the Peterson operation was running, they had contractors. Outside people. Paid for access and information. Never formally connected. Never arrested because they were never named.”
Sterling looked at Jackson for a long beat. The kind of look that contained an assessment, a recalibration, and something warmer underneath that I was starting to recognize as respect.
“That’s what I think too,” Sterling said.
Jackson nodded. The tight nod of a man who was hoping to be wrong and had just discovered he wasn’t.
From the end of the table, Cruz spoke without inflection. “Then they’re cleaning up.”
A beat. The room held its breath.
“Before the trials get close enough for testimony to matter,” Cruz added.
Sterling said, “Yes.”
Cruz said nothing else. He didn’t need to. Ten words, delivered in that deep, gravelly voice that carried the weight of absolute certainty, and the table absorbed them the way it absorbed everything Cruz said: completely, without debate, because arguing with Fernando Cruz was the same as arguing with gravity, and gravity had better manners.
Caleb set a fresh plate of cinnamon rolls in the center of the table. Steam rose. Nobody reached for them.
I reached for one because someone had to. Morale was a thing. Leadership was a thing. And if the choice was between letting a plate of perfect cinnamon rolls go untouched during a security briefing and making a principled stand for baked goods, I was going to make the stand.
History would vindicate me.
Caleb gave me a look. The Look. The one he’d been perfecting since we were nine, pleasant and patient and completely immovable.
