I open my eyes. She is above — no, beneath me in the lamplight, hair spread across the pillow. The expression she wears is not performance. It's the unguarded, terrifying face of a woman who sees what she's looking at and isn't flinching.
"Kari." Her name comes out wrecked.
Mine. Not surprised this time. Not the unauthorized intrusion it was that first morning. A statement. A claim I'm making with my eyes open, knowing the cost, choosing it anyway.
I feel her tighten around me. Her breath catches. Her fingers crush mine against the bedspread.
"Come with me," she whispers.
My forehead drops to hers. Three more strokes — deep, unraveling, the last shred of control dissolving — and I come inside her with a groan that I couldn't contain if I tried. Her orgasm hits at the same moment, her body clenching around my cock in waves, and the sound she makes is quiet this time. A breath. My name. Just my name.
I stay inside her. Don't move. Don't pull away. My face pressed into her hair — coconut, always coconut, the smell that rewired something in my brain weeks ago and never switched back.
When I finally shift to the side, she curls into me. Her head on my chest. Her hand resting over my heart.
Not the operative maintaining position. Just a man holding a woman in a bed with a yellow bedspread, in a house that creaks around them like it's settling into something permanent.
She sleeps.
Her head on my chest. Her hand resting over my heart — not possessive, just there. Breathing slow. Even. Trusting.
The anger is still here. At Novak. At the patience of a man who spent months learning a dead woman's house, buying bypass tools, leaving threats with methodical precision.
Tomorrow, Reese sits across from Gus Novak. The evidence is circumstantial but heavy — heavy enough to crack a man who thinks of himself as a problem-solver, not a criminal.
Kari shifts against me. Murmurs something. Her fingers curl against my chest.
This woman — asleep on my chest with coconut in her hair, plaster dust still under her fingernails — has turned me into someone who can't go back. She asked me to be inside the perimeter.
I'm so far inside I can't see the walls anymore.
Tomorrow, we move.
Tonight, I hold her.
Morning comes gray and sharp.
Kari is already up when I swing my feet to the floor. The shower running. The smell of coffee from the kitchen, which means she went downstairs before I woke — something I'll address later, or won't, because the woman does what she does and the only thing that changes is whether I waste energy objecting.
Reese arrives at seven-fifteen in Saint — HPG's blacked-out Suburban, tinted glass, reinforced panels, the kind of vehicle that tells a neighborhood nothing good is about to happen somewhere else. Two knocks on the front door. No third. His signal, not ours.
He's exactly what I expected from his file. Mid-thirties, lean build, the kind of face that disappears in a crowd because it was designed to. Polo shirt, dark jacket. Nothing that announces what he does for a living.
"Cade." He nods once. No handshake.
"Kitchen."
He follows me through the hallway. Kari is at the counter with her coffee, hair still damp, wearing a flannel that isn't mine. She looks at Reese the way she looks at anyone new in this house — open, assessing, warmth on the surface with architecture underneath it.
"Reese, this is Kari. Kari — Reese is taking point today."
Reese gives her a nod that manages to be both professional and human. "Ma'am."
"If you call me ma'am again, I'll make you sand baseboards." She holds up the coffee pot. "There's plenty."
"Thank you, ma'am." The ghost of something that might be humor crosses his face. "I'll take mine to go."
I spread the file on the kitchen table. The pages Evie sent overnight — Novak's rental address, his work history, his schedule for the past two weeks. The man is predictable. Same coffee shop at seven-thirty. Same route to the Halcyon Ridge satellite office. Same parking spot.
