Encore

Chapter 15: Encore

The detective’s office smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet. Julian sat across from a metal desk, a stack of bank statements in front of him, Diaz standing by the door like furniture.

“Take your time,” Detective Ruiz said. “We need you to flag anything familiar. Names, addresses, anything that pings.”

Julian scanned the pages. Transfers into an account under Brenda’s real name — not Hayes, something else, something ordinary — going back eight months. Most were small. One wasn’t.

Fifteen thousand dollars, wired six months ago, from an account holder listed only as a shell company: Lang Holdings LLC.

Julian’s stomach turned over. “I don’t know this.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’ve never heard of it.” He looked up. “Should I have?”

Ruiz slid another page across the desk — property records tied to the same shell company. A warehouse on the east side of the city. Leased two weeks ago.

“We pulled financials on everyone connected to Ms. Hayes once we knew she didn’t act alone,” Ruiz said. “This account funded her rent, her fake credentials, and this lease. We don’t know who’s behind Lang Holdings yet. We’re working on it. But somebody paid to keep her close to you long after the letter was supposed to be over.”

Julian’s hands went cold around the papers. Whatever he’d started with one bad decision, someone else had picked up and kept running with it, and he had no idea who, or why, or how long they’d been watching.

He thought about the phone in his pocket. He thought about the four unanswered rings, twice now, and the fact that the only person who would have already been three steps ahead of this sat somewhere across the city, not picking up.

He didn’t call a third time. He just sat there, staring at the warehouse address, feeling the floor tilt slightly under him.

---

Kael found out about the warehouse from Apex’s monitoring system, not from Julian.

An automated flag came through his old case file — technically closed, technically not his problem anymore — noting new financial activity tied to the Hayes investigation. He wasn’t supposed to have access anymore. He pulled it up anyway.

He read the lease agreement twice. Then he looked at the surveillance photo attached to the file, pulled from a traffic camera two blocks from the warehouse.

A man, mid-fifties, silver hair, getting into a black town car.

Kael didn’t recognize the face. He recognized the car. It was registered to Marcus’s talent agency.

He was moving before he’d fully decided to. He grabbed his keys, called the one number he still had saved under a name instead of a case file, and for the first time in six days, let it ring through instead of sending it to voicemail in his head before it even connected.

Julian picked up on the first ring.

“Kael?”

The sound of his voice — raw, hopeful, barely holding together — hit Kael harder than he expected.

“Don’t go home tonight.” Kael was already in his car, engine running. “Where are you right now?”

“The precinct. Kael, what’s—”

“I’ll explain in the car. I’m five minutes out. Do not let Diaz take you back to the penthouse.”

“Kael, you quit. You don’t have to—”

“I’m not doing this as your bodyguard.” His voice was rough, urgent, nothing measured about it. “I’m doing it because someone paid to keep a woman close enough to kill you, and I think I know whose car was outside that warehouse two nights ago.”

Silence on the line. Then, quiet: “Whose.”

“I’ll tell you when I see your face. Five minutes.”

---

He made it in four.

Julian was standing outside the precinct when the car pulled up, Diaz a step behind him, confused and half a second from objecting. Kael didn’t wait for an invitation. He got out, crossed the sidewalk, and put himself directly between Julian and the street.

Up close, Julian looked thinner than six days should have made him. His eyes were red at the edges. The sight of him made something in Kael’s chest twist hard — anger, relief, and something deeper he still didn’t trust himself to name.

“Get in the car,” Kael said. “Now.”

“Kael—”

“Now, Julian.”

Julian got in. Kael slid behind the wheel, checked the mirrors twice out of habit, and pulled away from the curb. The silence between them was thick, charged with everything that still hadn’t been said.

“Whose car,” Julian said again, quieter now.

“Marcus’s agency.” Kael kept his eyes on the road. “The warehouse lease was funded by a shell company. A man matching your manager’s build was photographed near it two nights ago, getting into a car registered to the agency.”

Julian’s face went white. “Marcus wouldn’t.”

“Marcus has ten percent of everything you make. What happens to that ten percent if you’re scared, dependent, and easy to control? What happens if the story about the fake threat comes out and he’s the one who quietly makes sure it never does — for a price?”

Julian didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Kael watched the pieces land on his face one at a time — shock, then recognition, then a quiet, sick kind of understanding.

“He knew,” Julian said slowly. “He’s known this whole time. He kept telling me to bury the story instead of telling the truth.”

“I think he’s been managing this since before you ever hired Brenda,” Kael said. “I think your fake threat gave him the perfect cover to run a real one.”

They didn’t make it back to the penthouse. Kael’s phone buzzed with a location alert from the Apex system he still technically had access to for another eleven hours — Marcus’s car, parked outside the warehouse again, right now.

Kael looked at Julian. “Stay in the car.”

“No.”

“Julian—”

“You don’t get to walk out on me and then tell me to stay in the car while you go do something dangerous.” Julian’s voice cracked, but it didn’t waver. The raw honesty in it made Kael’s grip tighten on the wheel. “I’m done being protected from the truth. I want to see this end.”

Kael held his gaze a long moment. The six days of silence sat between them, heavy and unfinished. Then he nodded once, and didn’t argue.