Page 10 of Rebel
The tattoo shop is closed for the night, but my pulse refuses to follow orders. The bar's neon sign bleeds across the window, casting the skull logo across the room like a heartbeat that refuses to flatline.
I should have walked away. I should have let Bones’ cryptic trash rust in the back alley of my mind, with the rest of our bad memories. But I can’t. The name won’t let me sleep. Carter Bishop scratches at my skull until I taste metal, like static riding a live wire.
I pour a shot of whiskey, throw it back, then pull up Divine’s side server. The terminal flickers. My face blinks back at me for a second. Tired eyes, a coworker’s smear of black ink on my wrist, the line between my cheekbone and jaw where I’ve learned to hold my expression in public. Where I’ve trained myself not to flinch.
I type his name like it’s a dare.
Carter Bishop.
Nothing at first, so I dig deeper into encrypted databases, old contract ledgers, even the black-market employer lists Divine keeps “for research.” I move laterally, pinging aliases, reverse-resolving IP hops, following the math of money.
A file pings. A tiny, stubborn heartbeat in the noise.
Ex-Marine. Private security consultant. Specializes in high-risk retrieval operations for high-end clients. No criminal record. No public footprint. That means he’s either a ghost or someone with friends who bury things for a living, or someone who knows how to bury himself.
That should have been the end of it. Then another hit blinks.
Alex’s encrypted contact list. My throat tightens, and my fingers go cold.
A. Slade — last call received six hours before his death, to C. Bishop — outgoing message. No transcript. File sealed.
For a second, I feel the room tilt. The whiskey burns my throat on the exhale.
“Son of a bitch,” I mutter, leaning back, rubbing my temples. Every lead ends in silence. Every file stops where the truth should begin. Whoever built him into a clean man built his silence into a vault.
French’s voice slides from the doorway like she’s been summoned by my curse. “Talking to the dead again, sugar?”
I jump because she’s there, grinning like she knows too many sins and too few consequences. She leans against the frame in those ridiculous diamond-studdedheels she refuses to retire, a glittery apostle of chaos, even though it’s after midnight.
“Thought you were home,” I tell her, trying to make my calm sound casual.
She smirks. “Home’s boring. Besides, your furious typing is my late-night entertainment.” French steps closer, tucking a stray curl behind her ear. “You type angrily. It’s like listening to Morse code for a midlife crisis.”
I crack a smile despite myself. “You’re hilarious.”
“It is if someone makes a ringtone out of it.” She eyes the screen, squints. “Carter Bishop? New toy?”
I hesitate. The folder on my desktop already holds a scrubbed, half-redacted file, a fanged timestamp from Alex’s last day, and the sealed tag that smells of bad paperwork. I close my mouth around the truth.
“Lead on the money trail.” I finally answer.
Her jaw tightens, not in judgment but because she knows me. “You mean the one you’re not telling the rest of us about?”
“French.” The single-word warning is sharp, old-school.
“Rebel.” She folds her arms, the look any sister gives before letting you fall or catching you. “You’ve got that look again. The one that says you’re about to do something either stupid or heroic, and I can’t tell which till someone bleeds.”
She’s not wrong. That look has gotten us out of fires. It’s also started a few.
“I just needto know who he is.”
French studies me like she’s weighing my odds on a bet she doesn’t plan to lose. At last, she exhales. “Ever think maybe you’re digging too deep? Ghosts stay buried for a reason.”
“Yeah, well, some of them steal your name and launder money through it,” I reply. The edge of my voice is thinner than I want.
“That’s a hell of a haunting.” Her tone drops. The levity dies. She leans in close, her curl brushing my cheek. “Listen, if you dig up ghosts, babe, don’t be surprised when they bite.”
Her warning lands harder than I expected. Her hands are splayed across the desk, and suddenly I remember who will hold my hand when the ground gives way. I should tell them all, Allura, Sloane, Calypso, but the ledger in my head has margins and secrets, with a folding line that says, if you tell them and you’re wrong, you burn the whole house down.
