SOPHIE ALVAREZ'S POV
The silence of Izzy Rinaldi's loft was a living thing heavy, pressurized, and thick with the scent of expensive bourbon and the looming threat of total self-destruction. As a crime analyst, I lived in the world of the if-then statement. If a suspect moves a certain amount of capital, then they are planning an exit. If a Captain like Nate Cole starts skipping his psych evaluations, then he has found a new god to serve.
But sitting here, on the edge of a black marble island that cost more than my annual salary, I couldn't find the logic, and my brain was a frantic processor trying to compute a zero-day exploit that had just hit my own heart.
Izzy stood between my knees, her presence a silent, suffocating command. She wasn't just Adrian's right-hand, and she had been watching me watch them. She knew that every time I pulled a file on Nate, I wasn't just looking for clues, I was looking for a way out of the suffocating beige walls of the CSI.
