Savage Saints Mc : Claimed By Four Monsters

Chapter 11

Isolde

Kael told me to stay in my room.I lasted four minutes. The door to the side meeting room was closed but not locked, and I opened it and walked in and pulled out a chair and sat down before anyone could form a sentence. Kael was standing at the head of the table. Nadia was seated at the far end, both hands wrapped around a mug like she owned the place and had simply been away from it for a while.

They both looked at me.

"I said stay in your room," Kael said.

"I heard you." I folded my hands on the table. "She has a floor plan of where my sister is being held. I'm not sitting in a room down the hall while someone negotiates with that."

Nadia looked at Kael with an expression that said she found this entirely reasonable. Kael's jaw moved once but he didn't push further. He pulled out the chair to my left and sat down, and the three of us arranged ourselves around the table like something that wasn't quite a meeting and wasn't quite a confrontation.

"You wanted to talk," I said to Nadia. "Talk."

She looked at me the way people looked at something that had surprised them pleasantly. Not warm exactly. More like professionally interested. "You're not what I expected," she said.

"What did you expect?"

"Someone more frightened."

"I'm frightened," I said. "I'm just not going to perform it for you."

Something shifted at the corner of her mouth. She set her mug down and looked at me properly, the way Soren sometimes looked at things, like she was reading a language most people couldn't see.

"I've been watching the Voss family for nine years," she said. "Longer than Kael. Different reasons, different methods, same conclusion. They need to come down and the usual channels won't do it."

"What are your reasons?" I asked.

"Mine." She said it simply, without apology. "Not relevant to you right now."

"Everything is relevant to me right now."

"Fair." She tilted her head. "Let's say I have a personal account to settle with Aldric Voss that predates anything in this room. The details aren't yours yet. But the direction is the same."

I looked at Kael. He was watching Nadia with the flat careful attention he gave to things he didn't fully trust. He hadn't said anything since I sat down. He was letting this play out, which meant he was learning something from watching it.

"You knew my father," I said.

Nadia didn't blink. "I did."

The word landed in my chest the way words did when they confirmed something you already knew but hadn't wanted to be right about. I kept my hands still on the table.

"How?"

"We worked adjacent to each other for about a year before he went to Kael. He was tracking the Voss money. I was tracking something connected to it." She paused. "He was meticulous. Thorough. He cared enormously about doing things correctly."

"But?" I said, because her tone had a but in it.

"Your father was a brave man," she said, "and a very stupid one."

The air in the room changed. I heard Kael shift beside me.

"Excuse me?" I said quietly.

"He had evidence that could have been delivered more safely. Through better channels, with more protection for himself. He chose the most direct route because he wanted to be certain it was used." She looked at me without flinching. "Brave. And stupid. The two things are not mutually exclusive."

I sat with that for a moment. The anger came, bright and immediate. Then something underneath the anger, something that felt uncomfortably like recognition. Because I knew exactly what she meant. I had known my father. I knew the way he moved through the world, head forward, consequences second.

"What do you want from me?" I asked.

"Your cooperation. On something I will explain at the right time."

"I don't make blind deals."

"You'll make this one," she said. "Because your sister's location is worth more than your comfort level and we both know it."

"Tell me what you want first."

"I can't. Not yet." She leaned forward slightly. "The timing matters. What I need from you depends on how the next phase develops. When the moment comes, you'll understand why I couldn't front-load it."

I looked at her for a long time. I was trying to find the manipulation in it, the angle, the place where her version of helpfulness turned into something else. I couldn't find it cleanly. She wasn't kind but she wasn't cruel either, and somehow that was harder to read than either extreme would have been.

"You're already in a blind deal," she said. Her eyes moved briefly to Kael. "You just didn't negotiate that one."

The silence that followed was a specific kind of quiet.

I turned and looked at Kael. He was looking at the table, jaw tight, one hand flat on the surface. He knew she was right. The whole shape of his arrangement with me, protection in exchange for my cooperation and my silence and my staying inside his walls, had been a blind deal from the first night. He hadn't told me about my father. He hadn't told me what I was worth for his operation. He had kept me in the dark and kept me close and I had let him because Petra and because survival and because some part of me had started trusting him in ways I hadn't approved.

He looked up and met my eyes.

Something moved between us. Not anger. Not warmth. Something more complicated, the specific feeling of two people acknowledging a truth at the same time that neither of them is ready to say out loud.

Nadia watched this with her head tilted slightly to one side. She looked like a scientist who had introduced two chemicals and was now observing the reaction with quiet professional satisfaction.

"Fine," I said, turning back to her. "We'll discuss your terms when you're ready to name them. But if what you ask damages my sister or anyone in this building, the deal is void."

"Understood," Nadia said.

She stood, straightened her jacket, and picked up her bag. Kael walked her to the door. I stayed at the table, listening to their low voices in the hallway, not quite making out the words.

Then Nadia's voice dropped lower. Not a whisper. Just quieter. Meant for Kael, not for rooms.

"She has the same eyes as her father," she said. "Same problem too. She'll burn everything down trying to do the right thing."

Kael said nothing.

I heard the front door close. I heard his footsteps stop outside the meeting room. I sat at the table and stared at the wall and felt him standing on the other side of it.

For the rest of that evening, wherever I went, I felt his eyes following me. Not the calculating surveillance of the first night. Something quieter than that. Something that felt, uncomfortably, like concern..