He nods and leaves. I give him thirty seconds and then I walk to the side room.
The prospects straighten when they see me. "Any trouble?"
"No Prez. She was quiet mostly. Spent a while staring at the operations screens through the window though. Kept writing things down."
I look at them. "Writing what?"
"Don't know. On a napkin."
I push the door open. Tia’s at the small table, the napkin in front of her. She's drawn what looks like a branching diagram—lines connecting to circles, numbers beside each one. Her hair has dried into loose waves. The sundress clings in places it shouldn't.
She looks up. "Meeting go okay?"
I step inside and pick up the napkin. She lets me take it. The diagram is a rough timeline. It shows the camera feed gaps marked at intervals, with question marks where the pattern breaks. She's mapped it spatially, the way someone would if they thought in data rather than in gut feeling.
"Where did you get these timestamps?" I ask.
"The screens in your meeting room. I could see two feeds through the window. I wasn't snooping." She pauses. "Okay I was a little snooping. But look, the gaps aren't random. There's an interval. Eleven minutes between each dropout. Exactly eleven. That's not a jammer. A jammer would be continuous or proximity-triggered. This is scheduled."
I look at the diagram. Then back at her.
She's right. The thought lands flat and certain. Whoever killed the cameras set a timer, which means they needed to get in and out within a specific window, which means they knew exactly how long the handoff took. That's not cartel muscle. That's someone inside who knows our rotation.
I set the napkin down.
"I'll have someone look at it," I say.
Her chin comes up slightly. "Iamsomeone."
The room goes quiet between us. She holds my stare without flinching. There’s no nervous joke to defuse it, no biting her lip. Just waiting to see what I do with that.
I want to close the four feet between us. I want to tell her she's the sharpest person I've let inside this compound in three years and that terrifies me more than the cartel does. I want to do something about the way she looked at me on the beach today.
Instead I pick up the napkin and fold it once.
"Stay in the compound," I say. "I mean it this time."
I leave before she can answer. The hallway is cooler. I unfold the napkin in my hand without looking at it again. I already have it memorized.
Eleven minutes. Scheduled. Someone inside.
She walked onto my compound twenty-four hours ago and spotted something three of my best men missed.
That's the problem with Tia November. She keeps being more than I'm ready for.
7
Tia
I head to my room to shower and get out of these wet clothes. The shower helps. Mostly.
I stand under the hot water until the steam fills the whole bathroom and I can't see the mirror anymore, which is fine because I don't particularly want to look at myself right now. I look like a woman developing feelings she has absolutely no business developing, and that's a terrible look on anyone.
I turn the water cold for the last thirty seconds. It doesn't work.
I change into jean shorts and a flowy blouse and sit on the edge of the bed and look at Kevin.
"Don't," I tell him.
