Hayley did not walk away.She stood on the sidewalk with the traffic moving behind her and the afternoon sun cutting between the buildings, and she watched Daniel Rowe's back as he tried to disappear into the crowd like a man who had practiced vanishing so many times it had become a reflex instead of a decision."You don't get to tell me to leave and then run." Hayley caught up with him in four steps and grabbed his arm. Her voice was low enough to stay between them but sharp enough to make the woman walking past glance sideways. "You disappeared for months. No call. No message. Nothing. I spent weeks wondering whether you were dead, and now you show up on a street corner looking like you haven't slept in a month and tell me to pretend I never saw you?"Daniel pulled his arm free. His eyes moved across the street, scanning every parked car, every window, every person standing still for too long. The fear in his body was not the kind that came from nervousness. It was the kind that had

The plaster dust was still settling when Logan crouched beside the bullet hole in the wall. He pressed two fingers against the edge of the impact and studied the angle the way a surgeon studies an incision before deciding whether to cut deeper."Whoever took that shot had a clear line." Logan straightened up and looked toward the rooftop across the street. "From that position, at that distance, a trained shooter doesn't miss. Not by that much. Not unless missing was the entire point."Daniel was still sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and his hands pressed flat against his knees. His breathing had not returned to normal. Every inhale came in short, shallow pulls, like a man trying to drink air through a straw that was already cracked."This isn't the first time." Daniel's voice was thin and broken. "They've done this before. Three times in the last four months. Once outside my apartment. Once at a gas station on the highway. Once through the window of a motel room I

The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water. Logan knew it. He had seen it surface weeks ago during the investigation surrounding Vivian and Celeste. A security company that had appeared on the edges of transactions, authorization contracts, and background operations that nobody was supposed to trace. A company that had officially dissolved years ago but whose fingerprints kept showing up in places that should have been clean.Hayley saw the change in his face. She stepped closer."You've heard that name before." It was not a question."It came up during the investigation into the contract that connected to Celeste." Logan's eyes moved between Hayley and Daniel. The separate threads he had been pulling for weeks were no longer separate. They were tangling together, weaving into a shape that was larger and older and more deliberate than anything he had expected. "The same company. The same network. Different years. Different targets. But the same people standing b