Page 27 of Shadow Strike
She wiped down the bar for the third time and tried not to do the math.
Her mother moved quietly through the empty room all evening, restocking things that didn’t need restocking, straightening bar stools, her expression carefully neutral in the way it got when she was worried and didn’t want Regan to see it.
At nine-thirty, she’d pressed a kiss to Regan’s temple and said she was going upstairs to lie down.Her hip was bothering her.
Regan let her go.
CB was at the bar.He’d been there since they’d opened, steady as the foundation and the walls, and sometime in the last hour he’d produced a paperback from somewhere and set it on the bar top in front of him.He was reading.Or doing a very convincing impression of it.His eyes moved over the room between paragraphs, often landing on her.
She didn’t call him on it.It was actually a comfort, that particular quality of his attention.The way he could be visibly occupied and completely watchful at the same time.
Don’t get used to it.After they worked out this extortion thing, she’d publish her podcast series on the Outlaws and CB would walk away forever.He’d have every right to.She expected nothing less.
She stood behind the bar for another ten minutes after the Hendersons left, listening to the silence.Then she got her laptop from the office, grabbed a ginger ale, and slid into the back booth.If Ryder Briggs wanted to empty her bar, she could at least use the quiet.
He’d put the word out.She was certain of it.Not a threat.Not a brick through the window.Just a quiet conversation, passed from person to person in the way of small towns, the kind of warning that didn’t leave evidence.You might want to find somewhere else to drink for a while.The kind of pressure that left no fingerprints and no recourse and worked exactly as intended.
She opened her laptop and pulled up the Season Two folder.
The work steadied her.It always had.She’d built the first season of Cold Circuit out of grief and stubbornness, recording in her kitchen at two in the morning, editing until her eyes burned, publishing episodes no one listened to for the first six weeks.The work had kept her upright when nothing else would.It would keep her upright now.
She opened the history file and started reading.
An hour passed.
She lost track of CB at some point while she was deep in her notes on the transition period—the late eighties—when she realized her ginger ale was empty, and her back ached from hunching over the screen.
She slid out of the booth.
CB had set the book down and was doing something with his phone.He glanced up when she came to the well.
She refilled her glass without looking at him.The question had been sitting with her for the last hour, building pressure, and she’d been trying to figure out if it was a good idea to ask it.
It probably wasn’t.
“How much do you know,” she said, “about what Ryder’s been building?”
He set down his phone.
She kept her eyes on her glass, turning it slowly on the bar.Casual was hard for her to pull off.
CB no doubt sensed it.“What do you want to know?”
She looked up then.“I want to know if my research is accurate.”A pause.“All of it.Including the history.”
A crease appeared between his brows.“Show me,” he said.
She hesitated for only a second before she nodded.
He came around the bar and followed her to the booth.She slid in first, pulling the laptop toward her, and he settled in beside her.He filled the space.His shoulder was an inch from hers, and the warmth that came off him was immediate and distracting.
She turned the screen toward him and opened the main folder.
He went quiet and scrolled slowly, reading.She watched his face instead of the screen.
His expression went from neutral and unreadable to not.The crease between his brows deepened.A slight tension took hold around his jaw that she guessed meant he’d found something worth noting.
Stop cataloguing the man and let him read.
