Page 15 of Fatal Pattern

“He’s already gone, King.”

Stryker felt the faintest twitch under his palm before Damien’s grip pulled him clear. A breath. Maybe. Or the body unclenching, as Damien said it was over. He couldn’t tell anymore.

Abandoning the man somehow still felt like desertion. But Stryker couldn’t save him. No one could. He stayed on his knees a beat longer, then rocked back, rose, and crossed the room.

Stryker froze.

The closet wasn’t empty. A girl—tiny, no more than four—was curled into the corner, swallowed by hanging clothes. Her knees vanished beneath stick-thin arms. She rocked, steady as a pendulum, back and forth, back and forth, as if the motion alone kept her anchored.

He sank to both knees again, close but not crowding her. “Hey, sweetheart. You’re safe. Nobody’s going to touch you.”

No flicker in her eyes. No shift in her rhythm. The world beyond her rocking didn’t seem to exist.

Stryker cut a look at Damien. The man stood stone still, saying nothing. The house pressed in with silence, broken only by the fan whirring overhead and the ghostly hiss of air escaping the dead man sprawled on the floor.

5

Blade drilled his focus into the asphalt, but every shift in Tori’s posture registered in his periphery. She remained anchored in the passenger seat, head down, eyes on her computer.

Four hours of near silence. Four hours of tension cracking between them like humidity before a thunderstorm. The only breaks came when his phone rang. Sergeant Acker calling twice about the Florek case, then the lab tech with preliminary blood work results, then Acker again reminding him of the evidence chains that needed documenting. Each call dragged him back into the machinery of the job.

Between calls, Tori’s fingers moved across her laptop keyboard in steady bursts. Click-click-click, pause, click-click-click. She’d claimed she needed to get Sullivan’s statements down before they blurred. Now she typed like the memory might vanish if she stopped.

The brief flashes he caught of her screen between glances at the road showed lines about Sullivan’s tangents, cross-links to fractals, pattern theory, and a bulleted list capped with one phrase that snagged him every time: a second murder book.

The GPS announced they had twelve minutes remaining to Millie Beach. Almost back where they’d started this morning. Back to the parking lot where some psychopath had pressed steel against Tori’s throat. The bandage on her neck caught his eye every time she turned her head.

His phone buzzed against the center console. Acker again. He let it go to voicemail.

Tori shifted, finally lifting her head from the screen. She closed her laptop and sat back. Dark circles rimmed her eyes. She looked like someone had twisted her emotions through a wringer and hung her up to dry.

“You good?” he asked.

She nodded without looking at him. “Yeah.”

The single word carried the weight of everything unsaid. No, she wasn’t good. None of this was good. But she was Tori, and Tori didn’t break down in passenger seats. She processed. She analyzed. She built walls around the damage and kept moving forward.

The familiar outline of Kingdom MMA appeared ahead. Home base. Neutral ground. A place where they could finally hash through what had happened back there without the road noise and phone calls creating distance between them.

The rush of the gym hit the second they stepped inside. Warm air thick with sweat and testosterone. Rubber mats giving underfoot. Runners drumming on treadmills, a steady grind of metal plates, the bag in the corner taking hits in a hard, steady rhythm. The place breathed work.

FDLE Special Agent Corbin King stood behind a bench station, one knee braced on the floor, steady hands spotting a younger kid pushing through his last rep. Sweat darkened his navy FDLE T-shirt, clinging across the defined lines of his shoulders. His eyes caught Blade’s from across the room in one glance.

Corbin tapped the kid’s shoulder, said something quietly, then lowered the bar.

“How’d it go?” Corbin’s tone stayed light, but the pinch in his brows told Blade he already suspected the answer.

Blade hiked a thumb over his shoulder. “Let’s take it upstairs.”

Corbin swiped a towel off a rack and wiped his hands as he turned to the kid. “I’m out. Hit your cooldown and log your weights.”

The younger man nodded, towel swinging as he waved them off.

Blade’s boots clanged on the metal stairs. Tori climbed ahead of him, one hand grazing the rail. Corbin came behind them, his heavier step setting the steel treads rattling with each rise.

At the top, Blade pushed open the thick door marked “Private.” Stryker’s office ran more like the nerve center of a surveillance unit than a gym. Three desks, each lined with curved monitors glowing in soft blues and whites. Screens streamed footage from the weight stations, the front lot, even the alley cameras Jett had installed for “situational awareness.”

“What’s that smell, chica? Did you burn the coffee again?” Tori hoisted herself up on the table beneath the wide one-way glass overlooking the gym floor and sat cross-legged.