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“She’s still scared,” I add. “She still checks the locks twice before bed and sleeps with her bag close enough to grab if she needs to run. But she’s not the same girl who stood shaking in that motel parking lot.”

He doesn’t answer.

“She’s not yours to protect,” he mutters after a beat, more to himself than to me.

I don’t let that go.

“She’s not yours to punish either,” I say. “She didn’t ask for any of this.”

“She brought it.”

“She survived it.”

Boone stands abruptly, the chair scraping back against the floor. He doesn’t storm off, but the tension in his body is enough to draw eyes from a table across the shop. He ignores them. So do I.

He steps toward the window and stares out, hands on his hips.

“She makes Finn soft,” he says finally. “You see it, right?”

“Yeah. And that’s not a bad thing.”

“It is when it clouds his judgment.”

“You mean when it makes him feel something?” I ask.

Boone turns, his expression sharp.

I stand up to look him in the eye. “She’s made him better. You know it. He’s more settled now than I’ve ever seen him.”

He doesn’t deny it. He just looks away again.

“Mae likes her,” I say. “Finn trusts her. I’m not asking you to write her name on the damn deed. But you need to stop pretending you’re not already invested.”

Boone’s mouth tightens, but he doesn’t speak.

“She’s part of this family now,” I finish. “Whether you like it or not.”

He exhales again, slower this time. “I told myself it was temporary. That we were helping her get her feet under her. That it wasn’t our fight.”

“It was always our fight.”

We finish our coffees and head toward one of the addresses Gunner gave us. It’s a shell business tied to the Sarkissian empire. It’s a distribution hub, supposedly moving warehouse surplus, but the paper trail points to something else entirely. We park two blocks away and approach on foot. Boone moves ahead without speaking. He knows how to do this. He’s been doing it longer than I have.

The lot is fenced but not guarded. That tells me two things. First, they aren’t expecting trouble. Second, they’re confident they’d see it coming anyway.

Boone ducks behind a row of parked cars and waits. I slide in beside him. The building ahead is plain—sheet metal siding, a row of loading docks, and a small sign that reads LUMEX INDUSTRIAL in faded white paint. There’s no activity at the docks. No trucks. No workers. Just a single black SUV idling by the front entrance.

He lifts his phone, snaps two photos, and lowers it again. I see him typing something out. A few minutes later he reports: “License plate’s clean.”

We stay where we are for another ten minutes. There’s not much activity. We’re about to head on to the next address when the door opens.

Two men step out. One is tall, broad across the shoulders, wearing a suit that looks too fancy for this side of town. The second man is in plain clothes with a narrow build, hair cropped close. There’s no visible weapons on either man.

Boone stiffens beside me.

“You recognize him?” I ask.

“The taller one. He’s on some of the surveillance videos with Davit’s men.”