Page 30 of Born for Starlight

I was beginning to understand how the Drakos family worked. There was aggression and bluster. Jase. There was smooth and sly. Code. Then there was Angelica, part angel and part sin. I couldn’t decide which part I liked best.

She’d made the decision for me. I was going to Brazil. I should have been irritated.

I was. A little. Mostly I was impressed.

If I had to guess, Angelica had sat in that room full of women and let them build the case for her, let them arrive at my name like it was their idea. She probably let the whole thing roll downhill to his wife Kit, then to Code so that when it reached me it would look like logistics instead of a woman asking a man for something. That was good work, very smooth. It was work I recognized.

"You still there?" Code asked.

"Still here."

"So that's a⁠—?"

The office door slammed on Code's end. I heard it clear over the wind.

"Is that him? Put him on speaker. Grainger. Grainger!"

Jase.

"You're on speaker," Code said, sounding like a man who'd already lost control of his own office.

I moved from a jog back to a run. This was going to take a while, and I had the wind for it now. My body had settled into the back half of the run, the part where everything went quiet and steady. Good timing.

"You listen to me." Jase's voice filled my ear. "I don't care how many spooky friends you've got or how many languages you speak. That's my baby sister. She got carried out of a building down there when she was two years old, half-starved, and I was fourteen, and I’ve had thoughts about that building every day of my life since. Every day. You understand me?"

"I hear you."

"She doesn’t understand what she's walking into. She thinks it's a photo op with a checkbook. It’s not. Those people down there, the ones she just poked with a stick on a podcast with now three million downloads, they do not send a strongly worded letter. They send men. They send a car. Or they send a plane with a bad part in it." His voice cracked and kept going. "And she wants to stand in a building just like the one we pulled her out of, in the one country on earth where somebody might already have her name on a list, and everybody keeps telling me I can't stop her."

"You can't," I said.

"I know I can't." A breath. "That's why she needs somebody who knows what the hell they're doing standing between her and all of it. If it's you, then it's you. But if one hair on her head⁠—"

"You'll do something anatomical to me. I remember the roasting-over-a-fire thing from last time."

"I'm not joking, Grainger."

"I know you're not."

He kept going. He told me about the twins, about the flour on the ceiling, about how Amber had asked him last week if Aunt Angie was going to be okay and he'd lied to a nine-year-old for the first time in his life. He told me things a man only says when he's run all the way out of the anger and hit the fear underneath. I let him. I ran, and I breathed, and I let Jase Drakos empty himself into my ear until there was nothing left for him to say.

When he finally stopped, the line went quiet except for the wind.

"Do you feel better?" I asked. "Now that you've got all of that out of your system?"

A long pause.

"Yeah," Jase admitted. "Actually. Yeah."

"Good." I crested the last rise. I saw Jasper Creek below me, it took my breath away. "Now I'll tell you something, and I need you to hear it the way you just made me hear you. I know people in Brazil. Not the kind you find in a phone book. The kind who owe me, or who I own a piece of. They’re spread across three states down there, in places your sister's money is never going to reach on its own."

Silence.

Good, he’s listening.

"I can make calls tonight that get answers no consulate will give her, no NGO, no HSI field office. I can find out who's watching her before she books a flight. That's not a brochure I'm reading you. That's the job I did for years, and I was good at it." I slowed to a walk, hands on my hips, gulping air. "I'm not going to keep her safe by standing next to her looking large. I'm going to keep her safe by knowing what's coming before it gets there. That's what I do."

"Code says you check out. So does Simon." Jase said slowly. "Says you've got references."