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When Kamola got cautious, Nolan backed off and let him set the pace. When Kamola needed to feel like the smartest person at the table, Nolan handed him that without hesitation.

But what Ryder was watching now was something smaller. Kamola’s shoulders had pulled in, his fingers tightening on the glass, and Nolan caught it before Ryder did.

He eased back in the booth, gave Kamola an extra inch of space, and when he spoke again, his whole register had changed. Quieter, unhurried, as if the deal could wait and he was just here for the company. Kamola’s shoulders loosened within ten seconds, and the man had no idea it had happened.

Ryder’s hand went still on his glass.

He recognized what that was. The read. The toggle. Feeling someone’s guard shift and reshaping yourself around it before they realized you’d noticed. He’d lived inside that skill for years, and the muscle memory of it sat in a place he didn’t open anymore.

And he definitely didn’t open it now. He stayed on the job.

Kamola was relaxing again. The conversation flowed back toward comfortable, and Nolan guided it there without visible effort. “I’d want exclusivity. If I’m putting this kind of capital behind it, I need to know I’m the only one holding the package.”

Kamola studied him for a long moment. Ryder watched the man’s fingers move on his glass, turning it in a slow quarter rotation. “Nobody else has the full package. I’ve had conversations, but nothing’s closed. You’d be the only one holding the complete architecture.”

A lie. Ryder could hear it in the pacing, the fraction of a second Kamola took before the word nobody. Nolan heard it too, but it didn’t matter.

Truthfulness wasn’t the objective. Proximity was.

“That’s what I needed to hear.” Nolan leaned back. A man who’d made up his mind. “So let’s take a look. Somewhere with fewer ears than this.”

He tilted his head toward the corridor beyond the lobby, already reaching for his jacket.

Ryder left his glass on the bar.

“Moving,” he said, his voice low and even. “Lilah, he’s heading your direction. Ian, east corridor.”

“Got it,” Ian said.

“Copy.” The excitement in Lilah’s voice was evident. Waiting during an op was sometimes the hardest part.

Kamola stood and buttoned his jacket. The bodyguard registered the movement immediately, abandoned his club soda, and fell in a few steps behind his client. All three headed for the archway that led past the lobby to the elevator bank.

Nolan walked half a step ahead of Kamola, still talking, holding his attention with a question about the encryption format that didn’t matter and would never be answered. The bodyguard trailed behind them.

Ryder came off the barstool and crossed the bar floor at an angle that kept him behind the bodyguard’s peripheral vision. He moved through the lobby at an even pace, nothing rushed, nothing that would draw a second glance from the couple at the front desk or the bellhop loading a luggage cart.

In his ear, Nolan’s voice was steady, filling the space with a question about file structure that Kamola answered at length, the man’s pride doing half the work of keeping him distracted.

“Lilah, five seconds,” Ryder said.

“Ready.”

The corridor narrowed past the archway, carpeted and dim, lit by wall sconces that threw warm light across beige wallpaper. Nolan and Kamola were halfway down the hall, the bodyguard trailing three steps behind them. The elevator bank sat dark at the far end.

This was their chance.

Every part of Ryder that had been sitting still at that bar for ninety minutes came alive at once. The waiting was over. This was the part of the job that made sense to him, the part where thought stopped and training took over and everything he carried went quiet.

“Now,” Ryder said.

Lilah moved first. The bodyguard was passing the service doorway when she came through it and caught him low. The man had a foot and eighty pounds on her, but that didn’t even cause her to hesitate. She used his own momentum against him and put him into the floor hard enough that the sound echoed off the corridor walls.

Goddamn. Ryder could appreciate it even as he focused on his own target.

With the bodyguard down, he closed the distance to Kamola in three strides and locked one hand on the back of the man’s neck, the other on his right arm. He drove him face first into the corridor wall, and the impact jarred through both of them.

Behind him, the bodyguard tried to push himself back up. Lilah’s knee landed between his shoulder blades, her hand locked his wrist behind his back, and that was the last move he made.