Jude counted his own heartbeat while Nathaniel tore him apart in front of the whole table, and it never went past sixty."Pass the wine, would you? Oh wait, I forgot. You probably don't know what a good vintage even tastes like." Nathaniel's laugh cut across the dining room, and three other people laughed with him, forks pausing mid-air like it was the funniest thing anyone had said all year. Jude reached for the bottle and poured it into his brother-in-law's glass without spilling a drop, without his hand so much as trembling, and set it back down exactly where it had been."There you go," Jude said."See, this is what I love about him." Margaret's voice came from the head of the table, dry as paper. "Always so useful. Elena, you really did find yourself a helpful little assistant, didn't you?"Elena's jaw tightened beside him. Under the table her hand found his knee and pressed down, a silent apology she'd been giving him for three years now. He didn't need it. He'd stopped needing

Margaret laughed at something before Rourke even finished the sentence, and Jude had never once heard her laugh like that at anything he'd said in three years of marriage."Damon, you're terrible." She swatted his arm with her napkin, delighted, the diamonds on her wrist catching the chandelier light. "Everyone, this is Damon Rourke. I'm sure most of you know the name already."Everyone did. Jude watched the table rearrange itself the second Rourke walked in, the way a room full of people always shifted around money the way plants shifted toward light. Nathaniel stood up too fast to shake his hand, nearly knocking his chair backward, and Jude filed that away without moving a single muscle in his face. A man that nervous around a guest wasn't nervous about manners.Rourke moved around the table greeting people by name he shouldn't have known yet, complimenting a dress, remembering somebody's daughter's recital, the kind of charm that felt effortless because it had clearly been rehearse

Ledger had been in the apartment for eleven minutes before he touched anything, because the first thing you learned in this business was that rushing was how careful men got caught.He stood just inside the doorway with his gloved hands loose at his sides, reading the room the way another man might read a page. A pot lid, sitting slightly off from where the scuff marks in the floor wax told him it usually sat. A drinking glass balanced on a door handle with a precision that took years to make instinctive. A window latch checked and rechecked so many times the paint had worn thin around the metal. Nobody built habits like this by accident. Nobody built habits like this unless something had taught them, violently, that the alternative was dying in their sleep.He'd read the file three times on the flight over and none of it had prepared him for how clean the place actually was. No photographs on open display, only a handful tucked inside drawers where a casual visitor would never think

The lie came out of him so smooth and easy that Jude hated himself a little for how natural it felt."Work phone," he said, turning the burner face-down on the counter like it was nothing, like his pulse hadn't just spiked harder than it had in three years. "Company's making couriers carry two now. Something about liability if a package goes missing."Elena set her bag down by the door, not even really looking at him yet, still shrugging out of her jacket. "That's new. Since when.""Since this week, apparently." He crossed the kitchen and kissed her temple, casual, unhurried, every motion calibrated to look like a man who had absolutely nothing to hide. "You know how corporate gets when someone above them panics about a lawsuit.""Sounds exhausting." She let it go that easily, the way she let almost everything go when it came to him, because three years of marriage had taught her that Jude Marsh was steady and boring and safe, a man whose biggest secret was probably which snacks he hi

Cutter. Jude sat alone in the dark kitchen long after Nathaniel had gone home and Elena had finally drifted back to sleep, turning that one name over and over like a stone he couldn't put down.He knew exactly one man who went by that nickname, and the last time Jude had seen him, they'd both been standing in a warehouse outside a port city that didn't matter anymore, watching two bodies cool on concrete while a job neither of them had asked to finish went sideways in the worst possible way. Cutter worked collections back then too, except the collections weren't money. They were debts of a different kind, the kind The Circle called in when an operative owed them something and the organization decided the time had finally come to collect.Seven years. Jude had assumed a man in that line of work either ended up dead or promoted, and apparently Cutter had landed somewhere in between, freelancing his particular talents to whoever paid enough to keep him comfortable. That kind of talent di