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All four of us sit. Hayden and Declan take the chairs on the left, and Mason is beside me on the right. Cain looks at each of us. He’s taking his time, the way he always does. It’s like he's confirming something he already knew before we arrived. I hate when he does that.

"Good. College is a good place to be. The Leo situation is resolved. I want that on record between us before anything else, it's done, it's clean, and I don't expect it to come back. If it does, I'll know before any of you do." His eyes move across the four of us. "Understood."

"Understood," Hayden says.

We all nod and wait for what else he brought us all in for.

"Good." He leans back. "Now, going forward…"

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, to get back to business. The Leo situation took Cain longer than he wanted it to take to clean up, but it’s done, and I hope he’ll let us back in now.

"Hayden, you're still out. Declan, you’re back, go to the Pit this weekend, show your face." He pauses. "Mason."

Mason goes still beside me in a way that's almost imperceptible.

"Not yet," Cain says.

I feel Mason’s body tense up beside me, he’s not happy.

"Cain…"

"I don't want to hear it."

Six words and Mason closes his mouth. I’m not sure why he’s keeping Mason off, he’s never done anything wrong, he’s always followed Cain’s rules. He’s never even looked the wrong way, so there must be something we don’t know about.

"Miles."

"Yeah."

"You're back. Everyone leaves but Miles.” What’s going on? I’m back and not Mason. And then he wants to give me something with no one else in the room, that is strange. I wait for everyone to leave, wondering what job he has for me.

He opens the desk drawer and my whole body gets excited. He’s giving me an envelope. Yes, an envelope. I’m getting a big mission. It’s about fucking time. I mean I’m always behind them as the hacker, but this one is for me. I'm the lead.

He sets it in front of me. My name is on the front in Cain's handwriting. That means he wrote it himself instead of having someone else do it, which means whatever's inside it didn't go through anyone else's hands. I mean it’s only him, dad and Lincoln that know the hits, but this one, it’s all Cain.

I look at it, but don't touch it yet.

"This is not a quick fix," Cain says.

I look up at him confused. "Okay."

"I want you to understand that before you open it. This is not the kind of thing you look at once and resolve. This will take time. Everything is slow. Everything is with patient. You research every thread before you pull it and you don't move on anything until you're certain. Or even spoke to me."

"What is it?"

He looks at me across the desk with the expression he gets when he's giving you the answer to a question that isn't the one you asked. "It's in the envelope."

"Cain."

"One wrong move…" he says, "…and it goes badly. Not for you. Not just for this family…For a lot of people."

I look at the envelope again.

The weight of what he's not saying sits in the room like a third presence, this is something large and not yet fully formed, the shape of something serious without its details. I've sat across from Cain Crawford in this office more times than I can count and I know the registers he operates in, know the difference between calculated discretion and genuine complexity.

This is the second one.

"Take your time with it," he says. "All of it. Don't rush any part of this."