Page 5

Grave is crouching at eye level a few feet away, his gaze moving across me the way hands move over a wound. There is a bruise forming on his jaw that he has not noticed yet. Maybe from earlier tonight, maybe from something last week that he also did not mention.

That is the thing about Grave. He will absorb damage quietly and leave me to find out through someone else, through some distant relative's offhand comment dropped into a phone call, the way I found out about the trafficking bust.

He never called me.

Grave was in the middle of a war and I was three states away reading about it sideways.

"You didn't tell me," I say, before he can start.

He blinks. "Leah—"

"You were hurt. I heard you were hurt. And you didn't say anything." I keep my voice flat because if I let it move it will go somewhere neither of us wants it to go, not here, not in front of a bar full of men cleaning glass off the floor.

Grave's jaw tightens, but he doesn’t deny it.

That has always been the pattern between us — he withholds, I find out anyway, and neither of us can quite bridge the distance that habit has created over the years.

"I was handling it," he says.

"I know you were, that's not the point."

He exhales through his nose, slow and deliberate. "You shouldn't be here."

"And yet."

He reaches forward and grips my arm briefly, and then his eyes shift, and I feel the shift before I track what caused it. He is looking past me. I follow it.

Hansen has straightened and stepped back. He is watching Grave with an expression that gives away almost nothing. Almost.

"She was in the bar when they hit," Hansen says. His voice has changed. It was lower when he was speaking to me a few minutes ago, quieter, moving differently through the air between us. Now it sounds measured and executive, delivering information without inflection. "She was covered."

Grave looks at him for a long moment. "I can see that." He pauses. "Thank you."

I watch this exchange happen in about four seconds and understand everything I need to from it.

Hierarchy. Power. The specific calibration of two men who are accustomed to controlling their respective spaces and are currently deciding how much overlap they will acknowledge.

My brother does not look at Hansen the way he looks at other men in this room.

He is the center of this. Every decision in this room traces back through him, and he was sitting at the end of a bar talking to me like he had nothing better to do, and the warmth in my skin where his arm pressed against the cabinet behind me has not fully dissipated yet.

I am not entirely comfortable with that.

Grave stands and the decision is already made in his posture before he voices it. "You're coming upstairs."

It is not worth arguing here. I know that. And honestly, looking at what is left of the front of this bar, I am not inclined to stay.

The staircase at the back of the bar is wide and utilitarian, and when we come through the door at the top I stop moving for a half-second because the scale of it is not what I expected.

The space above is enormous. The floors are concrete, stained dark from years of use. Long tables hold equipment I make a deliberate choice not to examine too closely. Overhead, the lighting is harsh and functional.

Men are already moving through the space with a speed and coordination that would look like chaos to someone who did not understand the underlying structure.

There is anger in the room and there is focus, and somehow both are running at the same time without canceling each other out.

An orange cat picks its way between boots near the center of the floor, indifferent to all of it. Someone calls his name, Bullet, without looking down, and the cat changes direction toward the voice without any particular urgency.

My instincts switch on before I make any conscious decision to let them. The man near the wall with his arm held at an angle that suggests a cracked rib, breathing shallowly to manage it. The younger one by the door with a cut above his eyebrow that has already been wiped once and is pulling back open at the edge. Grave's jaw, which is going to bruise spectacularly by morning and which he has not acknowledged once.