Page 9 of Damian
I knew I wasn’t being quiet enough. My voice carried. It always did. But letting the words out kept me steady, kept me from drowning in fear.
The floor creaked. I flinched, yanking the recorder close.River leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, a faint grin on his face.
“You always narrate your life, or just when assassins are after you?” he asked.
Heat flooded my cheeks. “I—I wasn’t—”
“Relax,” he said, stepping inside. “Better than snoring. At least your mumbling makes sense.”
I tucked the recorder under the blanket, suddenly shy. “It helps me think. Makes it… less scary.”
For a moment, River’s smile softened. “Don’t lose that. Scary keeps you sharp. Talking keeps you sane. Between the two, you’ll survive.”
I let out a shaky laugh. “You make it sound so simple.”
“Not simple,” he said. “Just true.”
He left me then, quiet as he came, but his words lingered. Maybe I wasn’t just some anxious writer with too many quirks. Maybe this thing I couldn’t stop doing — mumbling plots, recording fragments — was part of how I’d fight back.
I sat up straighter, grabbed the stack of papers Damian had left on the table, and spread them out across my lap. Shipping manifests. Registries. Long lists of numbers that blurred if I stared too long.
But when I whispered through them, narrating like I was drafting a scene, something shifted.
“Shipment A, June fourth. Shipment B, July nineteenth. Both rerouted through the same hub. Not sloppy, not coincidence. A trail disguised as routine.”
The pattern glimmered.
I snapped the recorder off and grabbed my pen, circling the dates, my heart racing. Ruby’s trail wasn’t cold yet.
And for the first time since that phone call, I felt like maybe — just maybe — I could find her.
9
Morgan
The next morning, light cut through the kitchen window in hard, dishonest strips, and the papers looked meaner somehow under it. I made coffee with hands that trembled—not from caffeine, from the small, tidy danger of the lists in front of me. Each line felt like a finger pointing at something I did not yet fully understand.
Cyclone had left me a file in the corner, thick with photocopies and a single photograph folded between pages like a secret. He muttered something about a lead he didn’t trust, but he’d put it on my stack anyway. I told myself it was because he liked my brain. I told myself it because he knew I’d sit with it until the edges stopped jostling.
“You’ll want to see this loud and clear,” I told the empty kitchen, which answered with the hum of the fridge. I didn’t understand how I put together words that others didn’t see, but by moving the words around worked.
I eased the photograph out and smoothed it on the table. It was a grainy snapshot of a loading bay: a white van half-shadowed under a dripping awning, men with their faces blurred, a pallet labeled with a shipping manifest number.The person who had taken it had been careful. Whoever had been in charge of the load hadn’t been.
A notation scrawled on the back, Cyclone’s handwriting:Manifest 77-B—matches three re-routes. Cross with vendor list.
My pulse picked up. I flipped back through the stack—vendor names, shell corporations, signatures that didn’t match their stamps. I ran each name through the spreadsheet Cyclone had left open on his tablet. Each cross-reference was a pin on a map I hadn’t known I could read.
Then a name winked at me like a beacon:Caldwell Logistics Ltd.It showed up on manifest 77-B, and the director’s name—someone called J. Hemsley—kept surfacing in filings tied to marine freight. Not important at first glance. Not until I found the same company name on a customs form tied to a charity shipment from three months ago. I frowned. Charity? That was a classic cover. The good-faith label that let bad things move like they had permission.
My throat tightened. I whispered into the recorder as if the voice could steady the tremor in my chest. “Caldwell Logistics. Charity cover. J. Hemsley. If the charity is the shell, the hub is the heart.”
I heard footsteps and looked up. Damian hovered in the doorway the way a hawk hovers above a field—patient and watchful. His expression had that knife-edge I’d come to know.
“You find something?” he asked.
I laid the photograph and the manifest out between us. “Caldwell Logistics appears on three manifests. One charity shipment, one flagged in shipping irregularities, and that van—” I tapped the grainy door of the van in the photo. “It’s the same registry number tied to local write-offs in two counties.”
He read it the way someone reads the weather—slow, for storms.
