BURN WITH ME

Chapter Five — The Space Between Us

I didn't sleep.

That wasn't unusual. I hadn't slept properly in three years. not the deep, surrendered kind of sleep that means you feel safe somewhere. I dozed in increments, one ear always open, body always half-ready to move.

But that night I didn't even try.

I sat on the roof of a building three blocks from Caelum's apartment, far enough to think, close enough that the distance felt like a choice rather than a retreat and I went through the drive.

All of it.

Every file. Every authorization signature. Every internal communication that had been carefully, methodically, criminally buried inside the organization I had given everything to.

It took four hours.

By the time the city started turning grey with early morning I had read my own recruitment file, my mother's termination order, Marcus's final report, and eleven years of case files that told a story so clean and so calculated it almost had to be admired.

My father had built something meticulous.

A machine that identified magical bloodlines, recruited or neutralized them based on their usefulness, and maintained the appearance of legitimate law enforcement while systematically destroying anyone who threatened the upper division's control.

And at the center of that machine, working with flawless loyalty for three years, was me.

I sat with that until the sun came up.

Then I went back.

Caelum opened the door before I knocked.

I chose not to think about what that meant — whether he had heard me on the stairs, or sensed me the way I had always sensed warlock magic, or whether he had simply been awake all night the same way I had.

He looked like he hadn't slept either.

Hair pushed back, jacket gone, just a dark shirt and the kind of tired that lives behind the eyes rather than on the face. He stepped back to let me in without a word and I walked past him into the apartment that still smelled like coffee and old books and something underneath both of those things. something warm and faintly charged, like air before a storm.

Warlock residue, I told myself.

Just magic in the walls.

"You read all of it," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

He moved to the kitchen. Put the coffee maker on. I sat at the table and noticed he had cleared the papers from last night.. organized them into a neat stack off to the side, like he had been preparing the space. Making room.

I didn't know what to do with small gestures like that.

"There are names in there I recognized," I said. "Hunters I've worked with. People I trusted."

"I know." He set a mug in front of me and sat across from me again, same position as last night, same stillness. "How many?"

"Four. Maybe five." I wrapped my hands around the mug. "Hargrove. Solis. The handler they assigned me eight months ago. Chen." I paused. "And my father, obviously."

"Obviously," he said quietly.

I looked up at him.

In the morning light he looked different than he had in the dark, more specific, somehow. The grey eyes were clearer, the line of his jaw sharper. He had a small scar above his left eyebrow that I hadn't noticed before, pale and old, the kind that came from something that happened a long time ago and healed badly.

I realized I was cataloguing him and stopped.

"I need to know your angle," I said. "Before we go any further. You said you want to bring down the upper division. Why? What does a warlock with your resources gain from exposing a hunter organization?"

Something moved behind his eyes.

"My sister," he said.

I went still.

"She was seventeen." His voice was even but underneath it something ancient and unresolved, the kind of grief that has burned so long it no longer needs oxygen. "Three years ago. Northern District. She wasn't political, wasn't connected to anyone. she was just a girl who had her mother's power and the bad luck to be documented in the wrong registry." He paused. "The case was signed off as a rogue termination. Unstable warlock. Unpredictable."

The same words they used for Marcus.

A template. They had a template for it.

"Her name was Seren," he said. "She liked terrible movies and argued with me about everything and she could make plants grow by touching them." A pause so small it was almost nothing. "She was the only person who could make me laugh when I didn't want to."

The apartment was very quiet.

I thought about Marcus, his terrible jokes and the way he always brought two coffees on night jobs even though I never asked, because he had learned exactly how I took it and never made a thing of knowing. The way he could defuse my worst moods with three words and a straight face.

The people they took from us.

The specific, irreplaceable texture of them.

"I'm sorry," I said.

It came out simply. No performance, no professional distance. Just the truth.

He looked at me for a moment like the words had landed somewhere unexpected.

"Thank you," he said. Equally simple.

We sat with that for a moment. two people on opposite sides of a war that neither of us had chosen, with the same losses and the same anger and the same need for something to mean something.

It was the most understood I had felt in three years.

That terrified me slightly.

"So." I straightened. Back to solid ground. "We have the evidence. We need to authenticate it and get it to someone outside the organization who can act on it." I turned the mug in my hands. "I have one contact. Former operative, went independent six years ago, I never fully understood why until last night. She might be willing to help if I approach it right."

"Mara Vane," he said.

I looked at him sharply.

"She's already in contact with me," he said, and the ghost of that almost-smile was back. "Has been for two months. She was waiting to see if I could get to you."

I stared at him.

"Is there anyone in my life," I said carefully, "who has not been playing a longer game than me?"

"Your downstairs neighbor," he said. "The one with the cat. I believe she's genuinely just your neighbor."

I laughed.

It came out before I could stop it short, surprised, rusty from disuse. The sound of it startled me almost as much as it seemed to startle him. He looked at me with an expression I couldn't fully read something open and unguarded that he pulled back quickly, like it had slipped out.

"Sorry," I said automatically.

"Don't apologize for that." His voice was slightly different. Not softer exactly more honest. "I haven't heard you laugh before."

"I don't do it often."

"You should." He said it simply, without decoration, and looked back down at his coffee like the moment hadn't happened.

I felt it settle somewhere in my chest anyway.

Unwanted. Undeniable.

I looked away from him, out the window, at the morning city coming alive in the pale early light. Delivery trucks. A woman walking a dog. The ordinary mechanics of a world that had no idea that everything underneath it was rotten.

"We need a plan," I said. "Mara, the evidence, a way to move it without the organization tracking it back to either of us."

"I have a plan."

I glanced at him. "Of course you do."

"It requires you to do something that's going to be uncomfortable."

"Everything about the last twelve hours has been uncomfortable."

"This is different." He met my eyes. "I need you to go back to the organization. Act normal. One last assignment — whatever they give you. While you're inside I can move the evidence through Mara's network and position it for release." He paused. "It'll take three days. Four at most."

I understood immediately what he wasn't saying.

"You need me to go back to my father," I said.

"Yes."

Look at a man who stole your mother. Who took your memories. Who built you into a weapon and aimed you at people like the woman who made you.

Look at him and smile and perform loyalty.

Three days.

"And if he suspects something?" I asked.

"Then you run." No hesitation. "The moment something feels wrong you leave everything and you run and you contact me." He held my gaze. "I will come and get you, Lena. Wherever you are."

Something about the way he said it flat and certain, not a gesture, not a performance, just a fact he had already decided moved through me in a way I didn't examine too closely.

"You barely know me," I said.

"I know you better than most people you've worked with for years," he said. "I've read every file. I've watched how you think. I know that you take your coffee black, that you always check exits before you sit down anywhere, that you haven't allowed yourself to grieve Marcus properly because if you do you'll have to feel everything else too." He paused. "I know that you're the most capable person I've encountered in three years of doing this. And I know that what was done to you and your mother and Marcus is unforgivable, and that you deserve to be the one to end it."

The morning light came through the window and sat between us on the table.

I didn't say anything for a long moment.

Then: "Three days."

"Three days," he confirmed.

"And then it's over."

"And then it's over."

I stood up. Picked up my jacket from the back of the chair. Checked the drive was secure in my inside pocket.

Stood at the door for a moment.

"Caelum."

He looked up.

"When this is finished," I said carefully, "and we've burned the whole thing down " I paused, not entirely sure where the sentence was going until it got there. "Don't disappear."

The morning light caught his eyes.

"I won't," he said.

I walked out into the city.

Three days.

I could survive three days.

What I wasn't sure I could survive was what came after.