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I turned my head, my pulse skittering. “You think it’ll work?”
He exhaled sharply, then leaned in, lips ghosting the shell of my ear. “It’s already working.”
My skin erupted in chills.
The laptop screen was lighting up with messages, notifications flying in at breakneck speed. My email was already pinging with tips, theories, names, locations.
We had set the fire. Now we just had to watch it burn. And when it did?
Evelyn Hart would have nowhere to hide.
30
MARCUS
Istood in the ops room, watching Claire work, and I couldn’t shake the amazement buzzing through me. Never in a million years would I have thought to use a podcast like this. Me? I’d been ready to break bones, burn bridges, tear the city apart brick by brick until Evelyn Hart coughed up what she knew. That was my playbook—direct, brutal, effective in its own way.
But Claire? She’d flipped the script, turned her voice into a weapon, and unleashed a goddamn army of listeners to hunt for us. It was genius, and I’d been too buried in my own rage to see it coming.
Sure, this took the operation public to a degree—flashed a spotlight we usually kept dim. Who cared? Maybe it’d piss off Department 77 enough to make them slink back into the shadows, give us some breathing room.
I didn’t think that’d hold for the long haul—ghosts like them didn’t stay spooked forever—but in the short term? It was a nudge forward, a shift from defense tooffense. We weren’t just reacting anymore; we were hunting. And it was all because of her.
Claire sat at the steel table, her laptop open, her gray eyes locked on the screen as notifications poured in like a flood. I leaned closer, arms crossed, trying to play it cool, but my pulse was hammering. Her voice—steady, raw, cutting through the air—had just set the world on fire. She’d laid Diego’s death bare for millions, turned her grief into a rallying cry, and now her listeners were answering. It was like watching a general call her troops to war, and fuck if it didn’t make me want her more than I already did.
I pushed off the chair, moving to the bank of monitors behind her. “Let’s get some order to this chaos,” I said. I fired up Dominion’s AI—custom-built, bleeding-edge, the kind of tech that could sift through a haystack of bullshit and find the needle in seconds. “Feed it everything coming in. Emails, comments, whatever’s hitting your inbox.”
She nodded, quick and sharp, her fingers flying over the keys to forward the data stream. “There’s a lot of noise already. People are gonna jump at the chance to be part of this.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, watching the AI’s interface light up as it started chewing through the flood. “Most of it’ll be garbage—attention whores, wannabe sleuths, trolls looking for a shoutout.”
And it was. The first wave was a mess—bogus tips like “Saw Hart at a gas station in Ohio” or “She’s hiding in my grandma’s attic,” dumb shit from people who just wanted to be famous for fifteen seconds.
I rolled my eyes, scrolling through the junk as the AI flagged it red—useless, irrelevant, out-of-state nonsense. But then, buried in the noise, a pattern started to pokethrough. Little comments, anonymous but steady, from people in the Lowcountry. Stuff like,“I’ve got friends in low places. They’re on the lookout.”Or,“I’ll keep an eye out during my shift.”Nothing flashy, nothing specific—just quiet, earnest promises from folks who lived here, worked here, knew the streets.
I froze, staring at the screen, a slow grin tugging at my lips. “Holy shit.”
Claire glanced over, her brow furrowing. “What?”
“Look at this.” I tapped the monitor, highlighting a cluster of those messages. “They’re not screaming for attention. They’re just … doing it. Working the case like it’s theirs, too.”
She leaned closer, her shoulder brushing mine, and I caught the faint scent of her—something clean and smooth, cutting through the stale air of the ops room. Her eyes scanned the lines, and a small, surprised smile flickered across her face. “They’re with us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They’re fucking with us.” I turned to her, meeting her gaze head-on. “You did this, Claire. You turned a million strangers into your eyes out there. I’m amazed—fucking floored, honestly.”
Her cheeks flushed, just a little, but her eyes didn’t waver. “You’re not so bad yourself, Dane. That AI’s a hell of a trick.”
I smirked, leaning in a fraction closer, letting my voice drop. “Not as good as you. Never would’ve thought of this. You’re a goddamn force.”
She held my stare, and fuck, the air between us crackled. I’d always been drawn to her—those curves, that New York bite, the way she didn’t flinch when I pushed—but this? Seeing her wield her power like a longsword, slicing through the dark with nothing but her voice and her will? It lit something in me, hot and fierce,and I had to clench my fists to keep from dragging her against me right then and there.
Almost forgot what I’d done to Sinclair. Almost.
The memory hit like a cold splash—Gibson’s blood on my knuckles, his whimpers echoing in that concrete box, the way I’d lost it, unraveling like some rabid animal. I was supposed to be the cool one, the guy with the surfer vibe who didn’t crack, who kept his shit locked down no matter what.
Well, I’d cracked wide open, and why? Hart’s taunts about my father, sure—those had cut deep, reopening wounds I’d thought were scarred over. But it wasn’t just that. It was Claire, too—her grief, her fight, the way she’d looked at me like I could fix this for her. I’d wanted to. Needed to. And when I couldn’t, I’d taken it out on that kid’s face.
I’d have to figure that out—why I’d let it get that far, why I’d let myself become something I didn’t recognize. But not now. Not with Claire beside me, her fire pulling me back from the edge.