Page 1

Chapter 1

Brady

There are exactly two people in this world who can ruin my day with a single sentence, and one of them just called me into his office.

"Callahan. Sit."

Alden North doesn't look up from his monitor when I come in, which is how I know this is going to be bad. Alden makes eye contact for the routine stuff. Firm handshake, direct gaze, here's-your-assignment-son. When he's about to hand you something radioactive, he suddenly finds his email fascinating.

I sit. The chair across from his desk is slightly too small for anyone who works here, which I suspect is intentional. Equinox Protective Group hires large, capable people and then makes us perch on furniture like we're visiting the principal.

"Got a threat assessment for you," Alden says. "Routine. Insurance carrier flagged a property up in Woodbridge Falls. Small business, home-based operation. They want an independent evaluation before they'll renew coverage for a public event."

"Why'd they flag it?"

"Partly the business itself. Open flame, hot wax, retail traffic in a wooden structure." He waves a hand. "Partly the neighborhood. There've been fires in the region. Four in the last two months. Brush, an equipment shed, nothing fatal, but the carriers talk to each other, and now everything within thirty miles that involves a match is getting a second look."

Four fires in two months. I file that away in the part of my brain that never stops working, the part that sees burn patterns on the backs of my eyelids when I'm trying to fall asleep.

"So send Reyes," I say. "He's certified for structural. I've got the Halloran follow-up, the marina report⁠—"

"The client requested you."

"The insurance company requested me."

"The property owner's family requested you." Alden finally looks at me, and there's something in his face I don't like. Something that might be sympathy, which is worse than anything else Alden is capable of aiming at a person. "It's Wes Mercer's sister. The candle business. He wants you on it because he trusts you to be thorough and fair, and I quote, 'not let her charm her way out of the citations.'"

The room does a thing. Not a spin, exactly. More like the floor drops half an inch and then pretends it didn't.

Sloane.

I keep my face still. I have a lot of practice keeping my face still. Ten years of practice, actually, starting the summer Wes brought his little sister to a Fourth of July cookout and she argued with me for forty-five minutes about whether s'mores are structurally superior with two marshmallows or one, and I lost the argument, and then I lost several other things I've never bothered itemizing.

"There's a conflict of interest," I say.

Alden raises an eyebrow. "What conflict?"

Great question. Fantastic question. The conflict is that I have spent a decade constructing a careful architecture of distance around Wes Mercer's sister, and it has exactly one load-bearing wall, which is that I never, under any circumstances, get within a hundred yards of her. The conflict is that Wes is the closest thing I have to family and there's an unwritten rule older than fire codes, and I have followed it so well that everyone, including Sloane, thinks I just don't like her.

"I know the family," I say.

"That's not a conflict, that's a reference." Alden slides a folder across the desk. Actual paper, because Alden is seventy percent flannel and thirty percent distrust of the cloud. "Assessment scope, carrier requirements, event details. She's got some kind of autumn launch planned. Big deal for the business, apparently. Fire pits."

"Fire pits."

"Multiple." Is he smiling? There's something happening under the beard. "Enjoy Woodbridge Falls, Callahan. I hear it's beautiful this time of year."

Here's the thing about a two-hour drive north when you don't want to arrive: it gives you a hundred and twenty minutes to rehearse being a professional.

I'm good at professional. Professional is my entire personality, according to Reyes, who once watched me fill out an incident report at my own birthday dinner. I investigate fires for a living. I walk into blackened rooms and read them like other people read the news. Point of origin, burn pattern, spalling on the concrete, the alligator char on what used to be someone's kitchen table. Fire always tells you the truth about what happened. It's people who lie.

So. Facts.

Fact: Wes Mercer has been my best friend since we were nineteen and he pulled me out of a rip current off Cape May, then made fun of me about it for the entire drive home, which is the correct way to save someone's life.

Fact: his sister runs a candle business out of a barn, which from a fire-science perspective is a sentence that should require a permit just to say out loud.

Fact: I haven't been in the same room as Sloane Mercer in two years, and that was a wedding, and I spent it holding a support beam at the far end of a reception tent like it needed me.