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“Thank you,” he said. “For telling me about what you go through.”

He held her gaze for one more second. Then he turned and walked out the door.

Chapter 11

“So let me get this straight.” Arlo Diehl leaned back in his chair and crossed one ankle over his knee. “Five years. Five years you’ve been out, doing—what did you call it?”

“Corporate security consulting.”

Ryder’s words came out smooth, as they should. He’d practiced them enough times that they were automatic, which was the point. The less a lie meant to you, the less it cost to sell.

“Corporate security consulting.” He grinned and shook his head. “That’s adorable. You protecting boardrooms, Sutton? Babysitting executives?”

“Something like that.”

Ryder kept his voice easy. Arlo wasn’t digging. He was settling in, enjoying himself, a man who genuinely liked having someone familiar back in his orbit. That made it easier to perform and harder to stomach.

“And now you’re bored.”

“Bored doesn’t begin to cover it.” Ryder leaned back in his seat.

Arlo laughed. Full and easy, the kind of laugh that made you want to lean in. He’d poured Ryder a drink without asking, put a plate of food on the table between them, asked about the drive down like this was a dinner party and not a ranch house in the middle of nowhere.

Generous with his space, generous with his attention. The warmth landed, and Ryder had to remind himself it was a tool.

Ryder took the whiskey but left the food. He’d accepted coffee earlier, black, and left the mug on the counter behind him.

Black was the cover. He’d choked it down with no reaction. Princess.

That morning, he’d been standing in Cassandra’s kitchen with the taste of her mouth still on his. Her hands on his face, her voice cracking on the word safe. Now he was sitting across from a man whose operation moved stolen children, and he was smiling, and the smile felt right on his face, and that was the part that made his stomach turn.

The lodge was bigger than he’d expected. Stone walls, exposed timber beams, the bones of a place somebody had built decades ago for hunting weekends and kept pouring money into since. The furniture was quality: deep leather couches, a pair of heavy armchairs positioned around a stone fireplace, a long dining table under the window with papers stacked on one end. The kitchen opened directly into the common area with no wall between them, just a granite counter and a row of wooden stools.

Coming up the drive, he’d seen an outdoor shooting range along the tree line, berms and steel targets set into a cleared strip of ground. Arlo had walked him through a gym off the back of the lodge on the way in—weight bench, squat rack, Smith machine, matted floor wide enough for sparring. Smart. Men like these needed somewhere to burn it off between jobs.

The whole place was well maintained and completely impersonal, the kind of space that told you everything about what the people here did and nothing about who they were.

Two men sat on the couch, not part of the conversation. One had his boots up on a coffee table and his eyes half-closed. The other was cleaning a handgun with the detached focus of someone who’d done it a thousand times.

Neither of them had introduced themselves when Ryder walked in. Neither of them had been introduced.

Arlo sipped his drink and studied Ryder over the rim. “I’ll be honest with you. When you called, I was surprised. Good surprised. We don’t get a lot of people coming back around, and the ones who do usually need something.”

“I need something. I need work.”

“I know. And I’m glad you called us first.” Arlo leaned forward. “Because the guy I knew could walk into a room and take it apart. And I’d rather have that guy working with us than against us.”

“Well, you’ve got me. Let’s see what you do with me.”

The performance was running clean. His posture, his timing, the way he held his glass. He could feel himself doing it, and the doing barely registered as effort. That should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.

“Okay.” Arlo nodded slowly, turning his glass. “So why now? Why us? You could’ve called two years ago, three years ago. What changed?”

Ryder had rehearsed this. He’d rehearsed it alone in his quarters and again in the car on the way here. The answer had to be simple and close enough to the truth that selling it wouldn’t take any effort.

“The money was good for a while,” he said. “Then it wasn’t. Then the work stopped being interesting, and the money stopped mattering. I woke up six months ago in a hotel room in Dallas and realized I’d been pretending to be someone I’m not for long enough.”

Arlo was quiet for a beat. “Dallas. That where you’ve been based?”