The nightmare hours rolled over him again until his phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was probably Tuck. He wanted ribs for dinner. Or he needed North to pick up the dry cleaning. Or he’d just ordered new rims for the Beamer and he wanted North to tell him how cool they would look. Or he was telling North he’d be late that night.

But maybe.

North burrowed deeper into the pillow, trying to suffocate the thought. It was just Tuck with another fucking demand, and North could deal with it later. Or maybe never.

But maybe.

North pulled back, punched the pillow, and tried to bury himself again. It was just Tuck.

But maybe.

But maybe.

But maybe it was Shaw.

Groping blindly, North knocked a pile of books, his alarm, the bottle of lube that Tuck had left out as a silent suggestion—more like another demand—and an empty tumbler onto the floor before finding the phone. He dragged it under the covers, blinking against the brilliance of the screen.

It was a text. And it wasn’t from Shaw.

That fact, that single fact, asphyxiated North. His throat locked up. He had been with Shaw almost every day of his life for the last eight years. North could count the number of days he hadn’t seen Shaw, at least in passing, on one hand. And it was over. North had gone and fucked up the single best, most important thing in his life. The fact that it was Shaw, and not Tuck, was only a bitter trace of a thought, barely even worth registering.

After a moment, though, the words swimming in North’s vision came into focus, and he drew a sharp breath.

I want the recordings. Deliver by end of the day, or Matthew Fennley goes back to prison.

The brevity of the message forced North to read it again. And then again. Conclusions tumbled into place.

Someone thought North knew where the recordings were, or perhaps thought he already had the recordings. More importantly, someone wanted the recordings. If what Barr and Reck had told North were true, if Mark Sevcik had been blackmailing important people throughout the city for years, then the recordings were immensely valuable—and it was no surprise that someone else wanted to get their hands on them.

That all made sense. The surprise was that Matty was the object of the threat. North had already suspected that Matty had hired them to find Mark so that he could get possession of the recordings. If that were true, though, the threat didn’t make sense. If North failed to deliver the recordings and Matty didn’t go to prison, it would expose Matty as a fraud. It was too much of a risk, especially when Matty couldn’t possibly believe that North would find this particular threat moving.

All of that was too convoluted, too twisted, and North’s gut told him that something else was happening. Someone was threatening Matty because he believed that North still felt protective of Matty—the way North ordinarily would feel protective of a client. This person didn’t know that North exclusively wanted to see Matty fucked on a broken piece of glass for the next twenty years. And this person didn’t know about the rupture between Shaw and North.