Back to Zero
The travel from Public Coffee Shop & Boardwalk to Motel Room & Security Office Desk consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The motel room smelled of bleach and mildew and the particular staleness that came from a thousand strangers passing through. Killian had chosen this one because the neon sign out front flickered a dull orange—just enough light to see by, not enough to read the cracked letters spelling out “Vacancy.” He’d paid cash for a week.
Max sat cross-legged on the far bed, knees drawn up to his chin, the threadbare comforter pooled around him like a nest. He hadn’t spoken since the parking lot. Six hours of silence, punctuated only by the hum of highway traffic and the occasional slam of a neighboring door. Killian had learned to read his son’s silences—there were types. The defiant silence, the tired silence, the one that meant he was building something in his head with LEGOs. This one was different. This one had weight. It pressed against the walls.
“You need to eat something.” Killian held up a paper-wrapped burger from the gas station down the road. “Plain, no pickles. The way you like.”
Max didn’t move. His eyes stayed fixed on the window, where the rain had begun to streak down the glass in uneven ribbons.
Killian set the burger on the nightstand between the beds. He knew better than to push. Isabella had always been the one who could coax Max out of his shell, who knew exactly which joke to tell or which silly face to make. Killian had other tools. Logic. Patience. The quiet calculus of a man who had spent his career reading threats in empty rooms.
He picked up his phone. No messages. No missed calls from numbers he didn’t recognize. That was either good news or the kind of bad news that hadn’t arrived yet.
The burner phone he’d bought in a different state, with cash, from a bodega whose security camera had been painted over years ago. He dialed the number from memory.
Flynn picked up on the second ring. “This line is three degrees from hot. You’ve got ninety seconds.”
“I need a pulse check.”
“Your pulse should be flatlined if you’ve got any sense. Victor put a bounty on you an hour ago. Half a million, no questions, proof of delivery.”
Killian closed his eyes. He’d expected it. Hoped for a delay, maybe a week while the old man sorted through his grief and rage, but Victor Blackthorn had never been a man who waited. He struck. That was his grammar.
“What’s the charge?”
“Theft of proprietary data. The Razorback prototype. Victor says you walked out with the schematics and the research notes.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
“I know that. You know that. The guys with guns who want half a million dollars don’t care about that. The bounty note says you’re armed and dangerous. Recommends lethal force.”
Killian’s gaze drifted to Max. His son’s shoulders were still, his breathing shallow. He was listening. Killian could tell by the way his head tilted, just slightly, toward the sound of his father’s voice.
“I need work,” Killian said. “Legitimate, low-profile. Something that doesn’t require a background check.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. I can’t keep burning cash. I have to stay visible enough to eat but invisible enough to survive. I need a cover that puts me in front of a computer terminal with access to the city surveillance grid.”
Silence on the line. Flynn was weighing something. Killian could hear it in the pause, the way his breathing shifted.
“There’s a security firm in the Meridian Building. Night shift, data analysis. They’re always hiring because nobody keeps the job more than three months. The pay is garbage. The manager’s name is Kovac. He’s lazy and he won’t check references if you tell him you’re ex-military and you’ll work weekends.”
“Send me the address.”
“Killian. Listen to me. Victor isn’t just hunting you for the data. He wants you to suffer. The bounty is a message. The real play is Isabella.”
Killian’s hand tightened on the phone. “What do you mean?”
“Reid visited her cell this morning. Standard interrogation protocol, on record, but the guard who logged it is one of mine. He said Reid asked her one question, over and over. ‘Where is the boy?’ She didn’t answer. He left. But he’ll be back.”
The room felt smaller. The walls closing in by millimeters. Killian looked at Max again, at the dark hair that matched Isabella’s, at the shape of his jaw that was already starting to mirror his own.
“I’m going to need more than the Meridian Building,” Killian said.
“I figured. I’ve got something else. But you’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
“Selene wants to meet. She says it’s urgent. She wouldn’t tell me more over the phone, but she’s scared. And Selene doesn’t get scared.”
Killian’s jaw worked. Selene. Isabella’s best friend since college, the one who had held her hair back at parties and helped plan the baby shower. She was a civilian. Soft hands, soft heart, no concept of operational security. Getting her involved was a risk. But Isabella trusted her with everything, and Isabella had never been wrong about people.
“Where and when?”
“Twenty-four-hour diner on Madrone. Tomorrow, 2 AM. Corner booth, back door. She’ll be wearing a red scarf.”
“You’ll be there?”
“I’ll be watching from the kitchen. If it goes sideways, I’ll make sure you have an exit.”
Killian ended the call. The rain had picked up, drumming against the roof in a steady rhythm that sounded almost like a heartbeat. He sat down on the edge of Max’s bed, careful not to jostle him.
“I need to go out tonight,” he said quietly. “There’s a woman coming to help us. She was your mother’s friend. Do you remember Selene?”
Max didn’t answer. But his fingers, small and pale, uncurled from where they had been pressed against his knees. He reached out and took the burger from the nightstand. He didn’t unwrap it. Just held it, like a talisman.
Killian let himself breathe.
—
The Meridian Building’s security office was a windowless room on the ground floor, lit by fluorescent tubes that buzzed with a frequency that felt like a headache waiting to happen. Killian sat in front of a bank of monitors, his badge reading “J. Mercer” clipped to his collar. The uniform was cheap polyester that smelled like the dry cleaner’s missed a spot.
He’d been on shift for three hours. The job was exactly what Flynn had promised: mind-numbing, low-risk, a rotation of graveyard footage from parking garages and loading docks. But it gave him something valuable. Access.
The city’s traffic camera network fed into a secondary terminal in the corner, unofficially patched in by the previous analyst who had wanted to watch sports games during his shift. Killian had already used it to map Blackthorn Industries’ known properties, their security patrol routes, the blind spots in the perimeter of the estate. Information was a kind of currency, and he was building a war chest.
At 1:47 AM, he logged out, told the incoming shift manager he had a stomach bug, and walked out into the rain.
The diner on Madrone was the kind of place that never closed and never changed. Fluorescent lights, cracked vinyl booths, a jukebox that played the same twelve songs from 1987. The air smelled of coffee and bacon grease and the particular melancholy of people who ate alone at odd hours.
Selene was already there. Red scarf wrapped around her neck, hands wrapped around a mug of tea that she wasn’t drinking. She looked thinner than he remembered. The shadows under her eyes told a story of sleepless nights.
She saw him and her shoulders dropped with relief. “Killian. God, I was so scared you wouldn’t come.”
He slid into the booth across from her, keeping his back to the door. The diner had three other customers: a truck driver reading a newspaper, a couple arguing in low voices about money, and an old man asleep with his head on the counter. Flynn would be in the kitchen. Killian had spotted his silhouette through the service window when he walked in.
“What do you have?” Killian asked.
Selene reached into her purse. Her hand was trembling. She pulled out a small memory stick, no bigger than her thumb, and slid it across the table. Then she placed a folded piece of fabric beside it. Blue, soft, worn at the edges.
Max’s blanket. The one Isabella had bought when she was six months pregnant, the one Max had refused to sleep without until he was four. He still kept it under his pillow.
“She gave it to me the day before they arrested her,” Selene said, her voice breaking. “She said if anything happened, I had to get it to you. She made me promise. I hid it in my apartment. I was so afraid they’d search me.”
Killian picked up the blanket. It smelled like home. Like Isabella’s perfume, and baby shampoo, and the particular warmth of a life that had been taken from him.
“What’s on the stick?”
Selene’s eyes met she. They were wet, but her voice was steady. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. She said you’d understand when you saw it. She said it was the only thing that could end this.”
Killian pocketed the memory stick and the blanket. His mind was already running through possibilities: financial records, encrypted communications, a digital trail that led to something Victor had buried. Isabella had been the company’s chief legal counsel before everything fell apart. She had access to everything.
He reached across the table and placed his hand over Selene’s. “You shouldn’t have come. If they find out you helped me—”
“I don’t care.” Selene’s chin lifted. “Isabella is my best friend. I would burn this whole city down for her. And Max . . .” She shook her head. “He’s six years old, Killian. He shouldn’t have to live in a motel room with men hunting his father.”
Killian’s throat tightened. He didn’t deserve her loyalty. He didn’t deserve any of this. But he had it, and he would use it, and he would find a way to make it right.
He stood. The truck driver had folded his newspaper and was watching them. The couple had stopped arguing. The old man was still asleep.
Time to move.
“Thank you, Selene. Get home safe. Don’t call me. I’ll call you.”
He turned and walked toward the back exit, past the bathrooms and the payphone that hadn’t worked in a decade. Flynn was waiting by the door, his hand resting on the grip of a pistol hidden under his jacket.
“Clean exit,” Flynn said. “Two minutes, then I’m gone too.”
Killian nodded. He stepped out into the alley, rain hitting his face, the memory stick burning a hole in his pocket. He needed a terminal he could trust. Somewhere off-grid, somewhere the Blackthorn network couldn’t sniff.
The motel room was two miles away. Max was alone.
He started walking.
The rain had soaked through his jacket by the time he reached the room. He slid the key card through the lock, the click of the mechanism too loud in the quiet. Inside, Max was asleep, the blanket from the nightstand pulled up to his chin. He had wrapped the burger in a napkin and left it on the dresser, uneaten.
Killian sat at the rickety desk by the window. He pulled out the memory stick and plugged it into his laptop, the one he’d wiped clean of identifying data, the one that would explode if anyone tried to access it without his biometrics.
The folder opened.
Inside were documents. Dozens of them. Contracts, shell company registrations, encrypted correspondence. But one file stood out. A PDF labeled simply: “Fuller.”
Isabella’s father. Maxwell Fuller. Dead seven years ago from an alleged heart attack.
Killian opened the file.
The document was an internal Blackthorn Industries memo, dated three days before Maxwell Fuller’s death. It detailed a plan to eliminate a “liability” who had discovered an illegal weapons contract between Blackthorn and a sanctioned foreign government. The method: a chemical agent that mimicked cardiac arrest. The approval signature: Victor Blackthorn.
Killian stared at the screen.
The rain kept falling.
Selene whispers: “She said if anything happened to her, to give you this. It’s the evidence that proves Victor Blackthorn killed her father, and it’s the only thing he’s afraid of.”