Chapter 122: Burn It

Chapter 122: Burn It
Max was already on the call when Lydia opened the office door for Valerie.
He was behind his desk, laptop open, and on the screen was a split feed—four windows, four faces, Sergei in the top left looking like he hadn't slept, and three others that Valerie didn't recognize.
Max had his phone in one hand and was writing something on a notepad with the other, and he didn't look up when Valerie came in, but he also didn't tell her to leave, so she found a chair near the wall and sat down.
Lydia was at the long side table with her own laptop, typing steadily without looking at the screen.
"The whole floor," Max said into the call. "Not just the files. Everything. Furniture, equipment, and the two servers in the back room. If it's in that building, it either leaves with you or it burns. You have fifty minutes."
One of the faces on the screen said something. Max shook his head once.
"I don't care what it costs," he said. "I care that it's done. Fifty minutes."
He ended that thread of the call and went straight to Sergei.
"The car in the garage," he said. "Whose name is it under?"
Sergei told him.
"Pull it," Max said. "Today. And tell Brennan to move the Rotterdam meeting. Not cancel. Move." He looked at something on his notepad. "That's all I need from you right now."
He closed the laptop, leaned back in his chair, and looked at the notepad for a moment; then he looked at Valerie.
"You’re here," she said.
His brow arched. "It's my office," he said.
"I mean, you didn't ask me to leave."
He picked up his coffee, found it had gone cold, and set it back down. "Would you have gone?"
"Probably not," she said.
"That's what I thought."
She looked at the closed laptop, then at Lydia, who was still typing. "That was another property of yours?"
"Yes."
"Damon found it."
"He found it last night," Max said. "We were already moving before he could do anything with the information." He flipped the notepad over on the desk. "It's a city property. We use it for staging, short stays, and the occasional meeting. It's not connected to anything important."
"But he found it," she said. "That means he's looking."
"He's always been looking," Max said. "The difference now is he has more motivation." He stood up and went to the window.
Outside the compound was running its usual midday routine—a guard crossing the far end of the grounds, a car near the inner gate.
"The smaller properties were never meant to last forever. They have a shelf life, and I know it. When one gets burned, we move on."
"How many are there?"
"Enough," he said.
She watched him at the window. He wasn't stressed exactly. He was moving the way she imagined a chess player moved when an opponent made a predictable play. Not surprised. Already three steps ahead and mildly impatient to get there.
"Have you ever watched Damon work?" he said. He turned from the window. "The actual work of his… actual business?"
"No," she said. "We had very separate lives inside that marriage. His work stayed on his side."
"You never wanted to see it?"
"I knew enough about what it was to know I didn't want to see it up close," she said. "So I stayed away from it."
Max looked at her. "You could have just divorced him."
"Excuse me?"
"If you didn't like the work, you didn't like the marriage." He sat back down in his chair. "Didn’t want anything to do with it. You could have left."
"It's not that simple, and you know it."
"Or," he said, "you could have not married him in the first place."
“I already told you…” She stared at him. "You're serious right now."
"I'm just saying you had options."
"I had none— " She stopped. "You know what, you don't get to sit there and tell me about my options. You spent months as my bodyguard, secretly running an operation against my husband, and you want to talk to me about options."
"I'm not judging you," he said. "I married my mother's choices, too."
She opened her mouth and then closed it.
Lydia looked up from her laptop for exactly one second and then looked back down.
"That's not funny," Valerie said.
"It wasn't a joke," he said.
"It sounded like a joke."
"It sounded like a point," he said.
She looked at the ceiling briefly, then back at him. "You are genuinely the most aggravating person I have ever been held against my will by."
"That's a very specific description," he said.
"You used to be cute, Max."
“The bodyguard…was cute.” He smirked. “This is the real me.”
Lydia cleared her throat and kept her eyes on her laptop.
They stayed in the office for another hour, Max working through the fallout from the safe house—two more calls, both short, both ending in instructions rather than discussions—and Valerie sitting in her chair near the wall watching him do it.
It wasn't that different from watching someone very good at their job work through a problem. He moved through it, one thing at a time, and the people on the other end of his calls moved when he told them to, and nothing about his voice or his face changed between the easy decisions and the hard ones.
After the second call, he looked at her across the desk.
"He'll burn through the other properties eventually," he said. "He has enough contacts and enough money to keep pulling threads until he finds them. That's fine. We know that's coming."
"And this place?" she said.
"This place doesn't exist. I already told you that," he said. "Not on paper, not in any system he has access to. Damon could go through every other asset I have, and he'd never get close to this one."
She looked at him. "Nine people."
"Ten now," he said.
She sat with that for a second. The weight of it—being the tenth person—wasn't lost on her, and she could tell from the way he said it that it wasn't lost on him either.
Before she could answer, Max’s phone buzzed on the desk.
He picked it up and read the screen. Whatever was on it was short. He read it once, then again, and he set the phone down slowly.
"What?" she said.
He looked at her and then at Lydia.
"Damon's men picked someone up," he said. "One of ours. Low level, city-side," he said it evenly, but something behind his eyes had gone very still. "He doesn't know much. But he knows enough."
The office was quiet.
Lydia had already closed her laptop.