Chapter 13
1033 Words
Kael
We spread the floor plan across the main table at nine in the morning. Nadia's work was precise. Every room labeled, every entry point marked, guard positions noted with small crosses at regular intervals. She had even indicated the camera angles on the exterior walls. Whatever else she was, she was thorough, and in my world thorough was the difference between coming home and not coming home.
I stood at the head of the table. Riot to my left, Zephyr across from him, Soren at the far end with his laptop open. The floor plan sat between us like a problem we were all agreeing to solve at the same time.
"Secondary property," I said. "Converted warehouse, forty minutes out. Two floors. Petra is here." I tapped the marked room on the second level, east wing. "One way in that makes sense. Ground level service entrance on the north side. Camera blind spot here, between the second and third exterior lights."
Zephyr leaned forward, studying it. "How long is that blind spot?"
"Forty seconds between rotations if Nadia's timing is right."
"And if it's not?"
"Then we're fast."
He nodded slowly. Not nervous. Zephyr rarely looked nervous. He looked like a man doing calculations behind a relaxed face, which was more useful than it appeared.
"Small team," I said. "Me, Zephyr, two outer members I trust. Night entry. We go in, we get the girl, we come out. No engagement unless it's forced on us. This is not a fight. This is a retrieval."
"Perimeter?" Riot asked.
"Two men on the outside holding the exit route. If something goes wrong inside, they don't come in. They keep the way out clear."
Riot looked at the floor plan for a moment. Then he looked at me. "And me?"
"You stay here."
The room waited for the argument. It didn't come. Riot looked back at the floor plan and nodded once, slowly, and I filed that away because three months ago he would have pushed back hard and the fact that he didn't told me something about where his head was right now.
"Soren," I said.
"Remote support," he said, without looking up from his screen. "I'll be on the security system inside forty minutes before you move. Camera feeds, alarm infrastructure, guard communication if they're using standard channels." He paused. "They usually use standard channels."
"Good." I straightened up. "We move tomorrow night. Midnight entry, shift change window. Questions?"
Zephyr raised one finger. "What do we tell Isolde?"
"Everything except the risk variables."
"She'll want the risk variables."
"She'll get them after her sister is safe."
He looked at me for a moment with those sharp eyes of his that always caught more than they let on. Then he nodded and let it go.
The meeting broke up. Soren stayed at the table, already working. Zephyr went to make coffee and I heard him in the kitchen talking to someone, probably Petra, with a low voice and easy tone, the way he talked to people who needed to be kept calm without being managed.
Riot didn't move immediately. He stood at the table looking at the floor plan with his hands at his sides.
"She won't like being left behind," he said.
"I know."
"She'll argue."
"She can argue."
He looked up at me then. Something in his face that was harder to read than usual. "She'll be all right," he said. "While you're out. I'll make sure of it."
I looked at him for a moment. "I know you will."
He left without anything further and I stood alone at the table with Nadia's floor plan and the particular weight of a man holding too many things at once.
I thought about my father. He came to me at moments like this, not as a voice exactly, more as a presence. The memory of how he looked at the end, when two years of Aldric Voss's pressure had taken everything that made him himself. He had sat in his chair in the back room of the club he had built and looked at his hands like they belonged to someone else.
I had promised myself, at nineteen, standing outside that building and understanding that it was over, that I would build something Aldric Voss could not touch. Something with foundations deep enough to hold against whatever he sent at it.
What I hadn't planned for was a woman falling off a road into the middle of it.
Isolde had looked at me differently since Soren's note. I had noticed it the morning after, the specific way she held herself when I was in the room, like she was recalibrating something. Not cold. Not warm. Just different. Measuring the distance between who she had thought I was and who the evidence suggested.
I couldn't close that distance from my side. I had tried, in small ways, and each time I felt the calculation in her eyes and I understood that what she needed wasn't small.
She needed the full version. The real one.
That night I walked to her door.
I stood outside it for a moment and listened to the quiet on the other side. Then I knocked twice.
She opened it almost immediately, like she had been awake and close to the door. She was in the oversized shirt again, hair loose, and she looked at me with those clear steady eyes that reminded me, every single time, of someone who had learned to look at difficult things without blinking.
"Kael," she said.
"I owe you the truth," I said. "About your father. About what I knew and what I didn't do. You deserve to hear it from me directly."
Something moved through her face. She held my gaze for a moment. Then she stepped back from the door and opened it wider, letting me in.
I crossed the threshold.
My phone erupted in my pocket.
I pulled it out. One of my most reliable outer contacts, a man who had never called me without a reason worth answering.
I picked up.
"They moved the girl." His voice was tight and fast. "Tonight, an hour ago. Petra's gone. New location unknown."
- Writer
