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I change out of my sweats, put on my shoes, and get my wallet. He’s waiting outside, scrolling through his phone.

“Nice threads.”

I look down at what I’m wearing, which I didn’t pay attention to. It’s jeans and a white button-down.

“Brunello Cucinelli,” he adds.

My eyes narrow. “How the fuck do you know that?”

He shrugs. “I like fashion.”

I close the door behind me. “Has anyone told you that you’re weird?”

“Day doesn’t go by when someone doesn’t.”

He leads the way, and I let him.

Ulvio is a block away on 24th, across from the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It’s got one of those Michelin Bib Gourmand signs.

“I like this place,” Kaz tells me. “Been coming here for a decade.”

I live down the street, and I’ve never been here, but he has. Obviously, he has. Kaz has layers. Despite being an asshole—because he is—I tolerate him better than I do most people.

We sit at the bar, and he does a complicated handshake with the guy across from him, who introduces himself as Steve from Puglia. He has an easy air around him—one that comes from making drinks since before it was fashionable and has outlasted several trends without changing anything he does.

“The usual?”

Kaz nods.

“What’s the usual?” I want to know.

“Sazerac. I make it with cognac,” Steve explains.

“Sounds good to me.”

Steve nods and gets to work, and the Sazerac he sets in front of us four minutes later is the kind that makes you understand why the drink exists—the absinthe rinse, the rye, the Peychaud’s bitters, the lemon peel expressed and discarded, the whole thing cold and precise and not apologizing for itself.

I pick mine up.

Kaz picks his up.

We don’t say anything for a moment as we drink, savor, which is the right amount of time.

“Fourteen months,” Kaz says when I ask how long he’s been working on the Jessup investigation.

He tells me the shape of it over the first drink. Not just the Whitman case but the whole pattern. Bribery across three states, the investor fraud in the resort projects, and the coordinated use of political office as an instrument for private land acquisition. Jessup, with his son-in-law and other family members running the same play in Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming for six years, with enough corporate separation between himself and the action that no single investigation could close on him.

Until now.

Steve sets menus in front of us.

“I’m out in six weeks.” Kaz opens the menu. “Official resignation filed last week. My boss is furious, which I understand. Fourteen months of Bureau resources, and I’m walking away before the formal case closes.” He closes the menu without reading it. “But I’m burnt out. And too many people in Wildflower Canyon know. The cover is done. And the case is too close to people I”—He stops and picks the menu back up. “It’s complicated.”

“Bree,” I deduce.

“Bree doesn’t know yet—or maybe she does. But she’s back next week from Denver and….” He says it the way you do when you know it’s going to cost you considerably, and you’re already making your peace with the price.

“Good luck with that one.”