CUFFED TO THE ENEMY

Neutral Ground

Chapter 5



The Rusty Anchor sat exactly on the line between Ashport's two worlds—close enough to the docks that Wraiths patches drank there without trouble, close enough to downtown that off-duty cops did too, an unspoken truce held together by nothing but a bartender named Duffy who'd once told Nora's father, apparently, that he didn't care whose side anybody was on as long as they paid their tab.

Nora hadn't known that until Kane told her, in a text that arrived twenty minutes after she left Vince's house, three words long:

Anchor. Now. Alone.

She should have ignored it.

She told herself that twice on the drive over, gripping the wheel the way she had since the anonymous message, checking her mirrors at every light.

But some calculation she didn't fully trust herself to examine too closely had already decided that whatever was coming for her in this city, she'd rather face it with more information than less, and Kane Ryder currently had more of it than anyone else she knew.

The Anchor's parking lot was half gravel, half memory of asphalt, and Nora sat in her car a moment longer than she needed to, running through every version of tonight that ended badly.

A cop walking into a known Wraiths hangout, alone, off the clock, with no backup and no report filed—if Doyle ever found out, it would be exactly the kind of story he could use to end her career without ever having to explain what he was actually protecting.

She got out anyway.

Some risks, she was starting to understand, only got more dangerous the longer you waited to take them.

He was already at a corner booth when she walked in, a beer he wasn't drinking sweating a ring onto the table, watching the door in a way that told her he'd clocked every person in the bar before she'd even parked.

"You look like someone's following you," he said before she'd even sat down.

"Maybe someone is."

She slid into the booth across from him and set her phone on the table, screen up, the anonymous message still glowing at the top of the thread.

"I went to see Vince Calloway."

Something shifted in Kane's face—not surprise, more like a piece sliding into a place he'd been holding open for it.

"My father's old friend. Didn't figure you'd find him this fast."

"You knew about him."

"I knew he existed. Never met him. Your father kept him at arm's length from anything club-adjacent, which, in hindsight, was probably the smartest thing he ever did."

Kane read the message on her screen twice, his jaw setting harder with each pass.

"Someone sent you this after you left his house."

"You think it's Doyle."

"I think Doyle's not smart enough to write something that carefully."

Kane turned the phone slightly, angling it toward the window light, like the words themselves might give something up if he looked at them from a different direction.

"This isn't a threat. Read it again."

Someone who's been waiting eight years.

"That's not a warning, Bennett. That's somebody trying to tell you they're on your side without saying it outright, because they don't trust you not to get them killed the same way your father did."

Nora sat with that, hating how much sense it made, hating more that Kane's read on it had come faster than her own.

"So we've got a friendly ghost and a captain who threatens me without technically threatening me, and a torn-up note that might name a killer if I could just find the other half."

"Welcome to eight years of my life."

There was no triumph in the way he said it—just the flat exhaustion of a man finally getting to say something out loud to someone who wouldn't dismiss it.

"I've had pieces of this puzzle since I was twenty-one years old and just watched my father bury a friend he couldn't save. You want to know what kept me going? Knowing that eventually, somebody with a badge that actually meant something would want the truth as bad as I did."

"And you think that's me."

"I think you drove straight from a concussion to a dead man's old partner's living room instead of going home to sleep, so yeah."

Something in his voice went quieter, less like a man making a case and more like a man admitting something he hadn't planned to.

"I think it's you."

Duffy appeared at the edge of the booth before either of them could say more, setting down a second beer neither of them had ordered, glancing between them with the particular discretion of a man who'd spent thirty years learning exactly which conversations not to overhear.

"On the house," he said, and was gone again before Nora could thank him, back behind the bar as he'd never left it.

"He does that for everyone," Nora asked, "or just Wraiths and the cops dumb enough to sit with them?"

"He did it for your father, back when Daniel used to come in here off the books to talk to guys who'd never have talked to him in uniform."

Kane turned his own untouched beer a slow half-circle on the table, not drinking it, just needing something to do with his hands.

"Your dad was smarter than most cops I ever met. He understood that the badge closed as many doors as it opened, and he was willing to take it off sometimes if it meant getting closer to the truth."

"Nobody in my department talks about him like that. It's always the same three sentences. Good cop, tragic loss, unsolved."

Nora turned her own glass, watching the condensation gather at the base.

"Like he was a headline instead of a person."

"He wasn't a headline. He was a man who sat in this booth more than once, asking questions nobody wanted to answer, because he thought the truth mattered more than his own comfort."

Kane's eyes met hers, steady, unflinching.

"You remind me of him more than you probably want to hear right now."

The bar noise filled the space where neither of them said anything else for a moment—Duffy laughing at something down at the taps, a pool game breaking loudly in the back, the ordinary hum of a city that had no idea how close it was to the truth about one of its own dead cops.

Nora studied Kane across the table—the scar through his eyebrow, the way his hands stayed still even when everything about his voice suggested a man who wanted to move—and understood, with a clarity that scared her more than the anonymous text had, that some part of her had stopped thinking of him as a suspect somewhere around the second page of that folder.

"This is insane," she said, mostly to herself.

"Which part?"

"All of it. Sitting in a bar with the president of a motorcycle club, my captain has an inch-thick file on, trusting him more than I trust my own chain of command."

She shook her head, but there was no real heat in it, just the exhausted honesty of a woman who'd run out of energy to keep pretending.

"Eight days ago, I would have arrested you for jaywalking on principle."

"Eight days ago, I would've let you."

A ghost of a smile, there and gone, the first one she'd seen on him that reached all the way to his eyes.

"Things change fast when somebody's trying to bury the same truth you've been trying to dig up."

Her phone buzzed against the table, and both of them went still at the same time—reflexes trained by two very different kinds of danger, arriving at the same instinct.

She turned it over.

Vince Calloway

The screen displayed a single line.

Come back tonight. I found something you need to see before I lose my nerve.

Kane was already sliding out of the booth before she looked up.

"I'm driving."

"You can't be seen anywhere near his house."

"Then I won't be seen."

He dropped bills on the table without counting them, already moving toward the door with the particular urgency of a man who'd waited eight years for exactly this kind of night and wasn't about to let her walk into it alone.

"But I'm not letting you go back there by yourself, Bennett. Not after that text. Not after tonight."

Nora followed him out into the dark, phone still warm in her hand, and told herself the reason her pulse was racing had everything to do with Vince Calloway and nothing at all to do with the man holding the door open for her like it was the most natural thing in the world.