The message arrived three days after the photograph, terse and unmistakably impatient in a way the earlier ones hadn't been.

Three weeks. No results. Explain, or the terms of your contract will be reconsidered.

Ezra read it twice in the privacy of the guest room, the door shut, his phone's screen the only light in the darkened space, and understood precisely what terms reconsidered meant in the particular vocabulary of the people who'd raised him. It wasn't a threat against his payment. It was a threat against considerably more than that.

He typed a careful response, one that gave enough to buy time without revealing how far he'd actually drifted...