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“Email those to my phone, please,” I said, taking the coffee, nodding as if I’d slept more than two hours and my bones didn’t ache from clenching through every hour of the night. I gave her a small smile I didn’t feel. “You’re the best, Andrea.” She smiled back. “Can you give me an hour?”

She knew exactly what the team huddled in the Cave did, but she stayed away from it all—plausible deniability—on my instructions. She was the everyday face of what I did, and she understood I needed that separation.

I shut the door behind me, inhaled the scent of dark roast, bergamot, and leather.

Familiar ground. My office looked the same as it always did—clean lines, chrome and charcoal, a view of the city’s bones below.

Controlled. Ordered. Mine. I locked the door, then moved to the side entrance into the Cave.

Caleb was already there, laptop open, sleeves rolled, the edge of his tie slightly crooked.

He looked as if he’d been up all night too.

“And?” I said, sipping my coffee.

Caleb nodded, fingers flying over the keyboard as windows and tabs cascaded across his screen.

“We had three angles on the entrance. One traffic cam two blocks over, one drone—user-tagged footage from an influencer with a vape sponsorship, of all things—and a probable illegal internal feed from the back hallway. All cached. All scrubbed.” He turned the laptop so I could see it.

“Dark web forums have already deleted the threads. I reached out to a contact in Metro Server Compliance—whispered in the right ears about shutting down that backchannel surveillance company. The botnet that indexed the club’s social tags is down.

And the local news stations are running the gang line, nothing else. Then?—”

“Cut to the chase, nerd,” I deadpanned.

Caleb looked up with a raised eyebrow. “It’s all good.”

I let out a slow breath and leaned back in my chair. “Thank you.”

“You want to talk about the shit that went down?”

“No.”

He nodded, sat back, and folded his hands. “Okay. Then let me cut to the chase. Jamie freaking Maddox? On scene. Three bodies and a fire.” He’s a loose cannon. Volatile. He killed three men; he burned the back rooms. That’s not nothing. Why is a former hacker, who is also a pyromaniac murderer?—”

Arsonist,” I corrected.

Caleb cursed. “What was he doing at the club, and did he even have an exit plan? Oh, and why did he take down the security at your place, which needless to say, I’ve fixed everything remotely, but the wiring… what he did…”

Caleb was working his way up to a meltdown. “I know,” I said quietly .

“We need to manage him. He could wreck everything if we’re not careful.”

As much as we could manage a live flame.

I didn’t answer. Not right away, because the truth was—Jamie was a loose cannon, and it scared me, and intrigued me all at the same time. I had a lot to lose—we all did, and Jamie was the unknown quantity.

“Watch him.”

“Already on it,” Caleb said, and turned back to his laptop and screens.

Two monitors showed the outside of the apartment Jamie shared with Rio, and the other the garage.

“We have internal hookups to the security system, I assume Jamie aka DaemonRaze installed, and so far, he hasn’t cut it off despite knowing we’re in there.

” He hesitated, then added, “I’m not happy about this. ”

“But you’ll keep an eye on things, yeah?” I said, glancing over.

“Damage limitation,” Caleb muttered, fingers flying over the keyboard again.

Our private elevator chimed, and Sonya came in holding a paper bag, dropping the pastries on the table and tossing me a sharp look. “What the fuck happened last night, Killian?”

All I could do was groan—I didn’t want to go through this again. “Caleb can explain,” I said, already moving toward my actual office. “I have court.”

By 9:59 a.m., I was back in full performance mode—file under my arm, mask locked tight, coat buttoned with precision as I entered the courtroom.

Judge Alston didn’t look up as I slid into my seat at the defense table, but I caught the flick of her pen. She never looked at you until you were close to losing.

Across from me sat Martin Calloway.

Silicon Valley transplant. Private equity vampire. A man who’d built three fake holding companies to funnel investor funds into shell corporations. The SEC had noticed when a junior analyst flagged a 1.7 million dollar transaction for “ecosystem regeneration consulting.”

Translation: Calloway had paid his mistress to keep her quiet, and paid off the two hookers he’d nearly beaten to death.

I wished he was there answering for the latter, but, no, like Al Capone he’d go down for financial reasons, not the pain he’d inflicted.

Calloway was guilty. Rotten to the core.

And I’d known it the second I shook his hand.

So the team and I had laid the groundwork weeks ago.

Sloppy motions. Just enough missed objections.

Hints of incompetence tucked in like breadcrumbs.

The judge would never accuse me of tanking the case—but I knew how to help a guilty man go down.

The plea had come in at 2:48 p.m., right on schedule.

Three counts of securities fraud. Ten years suspended to five with federal supervision, full restitution of 5.

6 million dollars in investor funds. Probation recommendation: denied.

Calloway was stunned, but I’d already packed my briefcase.

The poor bastard still thought he might walk. I kept my expression grim.

“Mr. Vance, your client accepts the terms?” Alston asked, peering over her glasses.

I stood. “He does, Your Honor.”

“We’ll enter it into the record.” Bang . Gavel. Done.

I leaned into Calloway and dropped my voice. “This is the best outcome under the circumstances.”

He muttered something about an appeal, about how his former CFO would fold under pressure.

I nodded and didn’t bother answering. He wouldn’t last long in prison, not with one of his victims being related to a con inside—someone with a reputation for shivving anyone who so much as looked at him the wrong way.

By the time he spluttered some other shit about appealing, I was already heading back into the corridors of cold marble and fluorescent light.

Inside? I was relieved . Because letting him fall was the first thing all day that felt clean.

By the time I returned to the office, the sun was beginning to dip behind the high-rises, casting sharp golden streaks across the glass, and Andrea was at her desk, typing something at inhuman speed.

“All good, sir?” she asked.

“A loss,” I said with a wink, and she smiled. “Feel free to leave early.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Nothing.”

She hesitated, closed her laptop, gathered her coat and bag, and was gone with her usual quiet grace.

I headed through the quiet outer offices until I reached the Cave.

Caleb and Sonya were already in there. Sonya cross-legged on the floor, laptop balanced on her knees, earbuds in, a pen tapping against her leg.

Caleb was by the six-foot stretch of pushpins, yarn, and printed photos that was our cork wall. Old school. Deliberate. He threw me a smile. “Good result there, boss.”

“Yep,” I said. ”Okay, so…” I pinched the bridge of my nose. Now we had to face the next big fuck-up. “Co ffee first.” I dropped my briefcase and moved toward the coffee machine. “Anyone else need a hit?”

Sonya lifted her cup without looking away from the screen, and Caleb raised two fingers.

Doing something with my hands helped push the static out of my brain.

I’d been focused on putting Calloway down, unable to deal with the whole Jamie thing, which was so noisy in my thoughts I was starting to lose my shit.

I handed out coffees, then joined Caleb. Standing beside the new picture at the center of the wall—fresh printed and tacked with two steel pins—was the photo of Lassiter, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District and prosecutor for organized crime and human trafficking cases.

A guy who’d made a name for himself hammering on predators.

The kind of man who liked televised raids and soundbites about justice.

He went to church every Sunday. Perfect blonde wife named Camille.

Two grown kids—Christopher, a surgeon; Ellie, a tech CEO in Silver Lake.

Their house in a gated community in Bel Air Crest, a family home, and he genuinely seemed to live that life.

I stared at the photo. The man in it was smiling—big, white teeth, an expensive suit, and an American flag lapel pin. “Okay, let’s start from the beginning.”