Page 98 of Collateral Damage
I have worked in worse. Mosul in July. Djibouti in August. The Helmand Valley in full kit when the temperature hits a hundred and fifteen, and the air tastes like a cocktail of dust and diesel. Baltimore is nothing compared to that, but the humidity here clings to you like a wet wool blanket.
The conservatory is the worst of it. The jasmine has gone rampant, the walled garden is a wall of green noise from the cicadas, and the cracked pane in the upper corner is letting in stagnant air that feels like a physical weight.
Fixing it is the only way to quiet the itch in my brain.
"You're on a ladder," Ava says from the doorway. “We talked about this.”
I don’t look down. I know exactly how she looks right now: coffee in hand, hair loose, her glasses slightly fogged from the transition into the heat. "I remember," I say.
"Really? Because you seem to have forgotten about the titanium pin in your shoulder."
"Also remember."
"Silas. Please be careful."
"Yes, dear," I say, and I can't help the wink I throw her way.
She sighs, a sound of fond exasperation, and waits for me to climb down. She hands me the coffee and leans against the doorframe, watching the window.
“Silas, I wanted to?—"
My phone vibrates at my hip. I open the feed from Ava’s cameras, the house laid out across my screen. Reese’s vehicle is pulling through the front gate. Verity is in the passenger seat, and Bandit’s tongue is already lolling against the rear window.
"They're early," I say.
Ava’s eyes dart toward the door, then back to me. "Oh, I… I was hoping to…"
I step off the last rung and take her hand. Her skin is warm, but her pulse is fast. “What is it?”
She swallows, offering a smile that’s too brittle to be real. “It can wait.”
In my world, "it can wait" is usually the preface to a disaster you didn't see coming.
I’ve spent twenty years reading the minute shifts in a person’s posture before they pull a trigger or a lead. I know the way skin tightens around the jaw when someone is holding back a hit. Ava isn't a threat, but she’s a variable I can’t solve right now, and the lack of data is gnawing at me.
Her hand is in mine, but she’s not there. She’s somewhere internal, checking a perimeter I can’t see.
When she tugs me toward the front door, I let her lead, but the tactical part of my brain—the part that never actually sleeps—starts running through the possibilities. Is it her mother? Is it a patient? Or is it us?
I push the concern into a compartment for later, but it doesn't stay quiet. It hums under my skin, a low-level vibration that makes the Baltimore humidity feel ten degrees hotter.
Something is coming. And for the first time in a long time, I have no idea if I’m prepared to catch it.
Reese pulls up, and Bandit is out of the truck before the dust settles. He’s a blue-eyed blur of white fur, entirely unsuited for a Maryland summer, and he makes a beeline for the hydrangeas.
Verity comes up the steps first, hair pinned up against the heat, heading straight for Ava. They have that easy, six-month shorthand now—the bond of women who have to navigate the silences of men like us. Reese follows, and we trade a look and a handshake that says everything it needs to.
“You’re early. You check out the office?”
“Had to,” Reese says. “Boss keeps us on a short leash.”
“Funny. Maybe you should apply that to your mutt.”
Bandit finishes his recon of the flowerbeds and nails Ava with unerring accuracy, planting two paws right on her white shirt. She flinches—a sharp, visceral recoil I’ve never seen from her—and steps back into the shade of the porch.
"Bandit," Verity says sharply, but Ava is already turning for the door, her face a shade of pale that has nothing to do with the heat.
"Inside," she says. "It's too hot out here."
