Page 56 of Mayhem

“Any names?”

“Nothing useful. One guy used Mitchell. Another never gave me one. There was a woman in Tacoma who pretended she was looking for somebody else until she realized I wasn’t stupid enough to believe her.” Echo flipped her notebook closed, giving up on pretending she was still working. “If you’re asking whether I can hand you a neat list, no. If I had that, I would’ve handled it already.”

Ronan pulled the county access request closer and tapped one of the dates. “This was filed almost three weeks after the first confirmed search. Whoever was behind it kept spending money after losing you.”

Echo’s expression did not change, but she looked at the screen longer this time. “That tracks.”

“With what?”

“With them being annoying.”

I ignored the phrasing and watched her instead. She was not withholding out of fear. If anything, she seemed irritated that the subject required enough attention to pull her away from classwork. That made the missing motive more important, not less.

“You never figured out what they wanted from you?”

“I knew why Nichlas had enemies interested in me. That was enough at the time.” She rubbed her thumb across the edge of the notebook, then stopped. “After I got hurt, staying alive mattered more than interviewing the people following me.”

Ronan leaned back and let the silence sit rather than pushing her. It was the right choice. Echo answered direct questions when she saw a reason for them. Cornering her only made her decide the question itself was the problem.

I opened the oldest payment record again and compared the account structure to the later ones. The names changed, but the spacing between transfers was consistent enough to suggest somebody authorizing work rather than several unrelated people acting independently. It did not tell me who. It did not tell me what they wanted. It only told me the search had organization behind it.

That was enough for now.

“Keep digging,” I told Ronan. “I want the people behind the payments, not just the contractors. Start with whoever owned the accounts before the shell companies were dissolved and work backward from there.”

He nodded and pulled the laptop toward himself long enough to copy the account numbers into his own notes. “I can also check whether any of these names touched Quorum-adjacent businesses, but I’m not assuming they did until something actually connects.”

“Good.”

Echo looked between us. “You’re very serious about this for people who met me five minutes ago.”

“You’ve been here longer than five minutes,” Malakai said, still reading over one of the old address records on my second screen. “And somebody spending that much money to find you matters if you’re operating here now.”

Echo did not answer immediately. She looked at him, then at me, and something in her face suggested she understood the distinction even if she had no intention of rewarding it with gratitude.

I closed Ronan’s file and moved it into the same private folder as the Primrose material. The two investigations stayed separate for the moment. One concerned the history somebody had buried around Echo’s family. The other concerned the people who had once spent months trying to locate her. I did not have enough to connect them, and I was not interested in manufacturing a pattern just because both were inconvenient.

Ronan stood and took the copy of the payment list with him, already scanning it again as he headed for the door. Malakai remained beside Echo long enough to pull her charger farther from the edge of the table when she nearly caught the cord with her sleeve. Echo noticed, frowned at him, and moved it back an inch as though that somehow restored control over the situation.

I watched the exchange, then turned back to the Primrose file.

Runo’s name sat in the center of the screen beside a history that should have been easier to verify. Somewhere behind those missing years was the reason Echo had grown up knowing how to move through rooms like ours without needing instruction. Somewhere behind Ronan’s payment trail was the reason strangers had kept spending money to find her long after she disappeared, and I needed the next name.

malakai

Echo had the guy pinned verbally before I reached them, which meant I should have kept walking. She stood in the hall outside the lower seminar rooms with her arms folded, expression flat, while a junior I vaguely recognized from one of the Mercer collections tried to convince her that whatever authority she thought she had disappeared the second Ronan stopped standing beside her.

He was doing badly.

“I already told you I don’t answer to you,” he said, keeping his voice low enough that the handful of students farther down the hall would have to work to hear him. “You came along on one collection because Ronan brought you. That doesn’t make you part of anything.”

Echo shifted her weight onto one boot and looked him over with enough boredom to make the color climb his neck. “Then you’ve spent an impressive amount of time explaining that to someone who doesn’t matter. You should probably go before you embarrass yourself any further.”

There was no edge in her voice yet. I knew the difference now. When Echo was actually angry, the extra movement disappeared and her attention narrowed until whatever had pissed her off became the only thing in the room. This was irritation, nothing more, and the man in front of her had no idea how lucky that made him.

I stopped several yards away and watched him make the mistake anyway. He stepped closer, trying to recover whatever dignity he thought she had taken from him, while Echo stayed exactly where she was. She had already measured him, already decided how much effort he warranted, and probably knew how she would put him on the floor if he pushed one inch farther.

“You don’t get to walk around here acting like you own people because the Kings let you sit in their lounge,” he said. His hand came up as he spoke, reaching for her upper arm with the irritated entitlement of someone who thought physical contact would force her to stand still long enough to hear the rest.