Page 47 of Jamie

I made coffee.For everyone, not just Jamie, though I poured his first.

He looked ill, exhausted, slouched in the office chair next to Caleb. I tossed him a protein bar, too. He scowled at me, but the last thing I needed was him passing out on me. I’d aftercare his ass until he accepted it.

He grumbled his thanks, eyes narrowed as if he were suspicious of me being nice, then tore the wrapper with his teeth and devoured it in record time. I’d never seen anyone eat like that.

Sonya caught my eye, cocked an eyebrow, and I gave her a short nod. She slipped out and returned twenty minutes later with a paper bag from the café down the block. Breakfast sandwiches were greasy,hot, and loaded with enough calories to keep Jamie upright.

He didn’t say much, but I caught how his shoulders relaxed a little as he bit into one.

From the corner, I heard him mutter into his phone. “Hey, it’s me. I need a day.” His tone was too formal for Rio. That meant Enzo, maybe Logan. Possibly Robbie, though everyone treated him with the kind of caution usually reserved for explosives.

With good reason.

Robbie had cracked this whole thing open. Half the intel on the wall behind me came from the chaos in that man’s head. We had names, lines, arrows, photographs, account details, human movements—Mitchell’s picture marked with a thick black cross, judged and sentenced already—and above him, two names: Kessler and Lassiter.

Lassiter was dirty. We knew that now. The man had his fingers in too many pies, while pretending to care about justice and law. But Kessler? That was murkier.

To all appearances, Kessler, a billionaire businessman, was clean—no aliases, no shell companies, no obvious leverage points. But Mitchell had named him. And Robbie, when we asked, described a man who fit Kessler to a T, in terms ofheight and the smug way he smiled as if he knew he’d never get caught.

Still, Robbie hadn’t given us anything solid on Kessler.

And then there was Emmerson Dran, regional director of the FBI, who’d been on the payroll at fifty thousand a month, and had somehow kept it hidden. Not to mention his brother Samuel, whom we had data on proving he washed dirty money.

It was like watching mold on a wall, and every one of the past seven days since we’d taken the intel from Robbie and Mitchell’s computer, the network had grown. Every new name pointed us back to the same central sources: Lassiter and Kessler. Everything that hurt stemmed from them. Everything broken could be traced to a decision Lassiter had made, a deal he’d backed, a name he’d erased in court.

We were on the verge of shutting Lassiter down for good. We had enough to burn him in court and ruin him in public.

But Kessler was trickier. He was the kind of man who didn’t need blood on his hands to be the one pulling the strings. Clean. Silent. Dangerous. Too fucking rich to get caught.

I hated not knowing what his game was.

“What are we doing with Lassiter?” Caleb asked on my side.

“What did the club laptop and the memory sticks show?”

I’d been in court the last few days, and I was missing a lot of what they’d discovered, only seeing the headlines and not the meat of it all. Also, there was the small matter of Jamie turning up at my place every evening, and things had slipped. I couldn’t keep this up when people out there needed to be destroyed.

“Evidence that the club’s owner was paying Lassiter, no links to Kessler.”

Fucking Kessler.

“Okay, here’s what we’re doing,” I turned to face the room. Sonya stopped typing, Caleb watched me, but Jamie stared at his lap, and at the remains of the sandwich sitting there. Okay, so he might not have eyes on me, but he was listening. “The only way to crack Kessler is to get intel from Lassiter. So I call him, and we meet.”

Jamie’s chin lifted. Was he worried about that? Or pissed I’d be in the company of someone he wanted to erase? What did I care?

“I’ll tell him we found what he was looking for, in that concerned I’m-working-for-you way, and we see what shakes out.”

“I don’t like that,” Caleb muttered.

Sonya nodded in agreement, and Jamie said nothing. With eyes on him, I called Lassiter, and he answered on the third ring.

“McKendrick?”

“I have some information for you. We need to talk.”

“Talk,” he repeated.

“Just talk. You’re paying me not to judge what my team found.”

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