NEVA POV
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I stood in the doorway of the back room and looked at Mitch's phone on the table between us — the number, the legal firm, the line connecting it to Edric Castell — and I thought about all the times in this story I'd looked at a new piece of information and felt the ground shift.
This one didn't shift the ground. It made the ground harder. Colder. The specific hardness of someone who'd spent enough time being surprised that surprise had started to feel like information rather than shock.
"Where's Ryke," I said.
"Garage." Mitch was already pulling up a second window on his phone, cross-referencing something. "He went to check the bikes after the drive. I can get him—"
"I'll go."
The garage smelled like oil and cold metal and the particular aliveness of machines that got u
