BURN WITH ME

Chapter Two — The Enemy Beside Me

I had been trained for every scenario.

Hostile warlock. Cornered warlock. Warlock with backup. Warlock with a weapon.

Nobody had trained me for a warlock who whispered "they're not here for me" like he was trying to save my life.

The darkness was total. Not natural dark the kind you adjust to, the kind your eyes slowly learn. This was pressed dark. Deliberate. Like someone had reached into the building and scooped out every scrap of light.

Warlock-made.

His warlock-made.

"What did you just say?" I kept my voice flat, controlled, back still against the wall.

"Outside." His voice was closer than I expected two feet, maybe less, somewhere to my left. Still calm. Still unhurried. Like a man narrating a nature documentary about his own potential death. "Four of them. East side. They've been waiting since before you arrived."

"You're lying."

"I'm not."

"That's exactly what someone lying would say."

A pause. Then, quietly: "Fair point."

I pressed my fingers against the binding cuffs in my hand and thought fast. If he was telling the truth, someone had followed me here. If he was lying, this was a trap designed to make me hesitate.

Either way, standing still was going to get me killed.

"Lights," I said.

"If I bring them back they'll know exactly where we are."

"I know exactly where you are right now and my cuffs are already raised."

Another pause. Shorter this time.

"You're not going to bind me," he said.

"Try me."

"If you bind me we both die in this building." His voice shifted still low, but something underneath it now, something weighted. Not fear. Certainty. "Those four outside aren't hunters, Lena. They're cleaners."

The word landed cold in my chest.

Cleaners. Internal division. Off-book operatives used when the organization needed something or someone to disappear without paperwork.

I had heard rumors. Never confirmed. Never asked.

Don't ask questions you don't want answered. that was another rule I lived by.

"You don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Room 7. Crest District safehouse. The night Marcus Vell died." His voice was very quiet now. "You were supposed to be on that job with him. Someone pulled you off the roster six hours before. You never found out why."

My jaw locked.

I had spent three years not thinking about that. Three years convincing myself it was coincidence, rotation, standard scheduling. Three years choosing the easier answer because the harder one meant everything I had built my life on was a lie.

"Who are you?" I said. Different question this time. Not his name. Not his threat level.

Who are you.

"Someone who has been trying to get that file to you for eight months," he said. "Every time I found a way in, they moved you. New assignment. New city. New handler." A beat. "You're very well managed, Lena. Have you ever noticed that?"

I had noticed.

I had told myself it was because I was good at my job.

The building groaned a sound that had nothing to do with the structure. Pressure. Someone testing the wards on the ground floor entrance.

They were coming in.

"Decision time," Caelum said. Somewhere in the dark he had moved slightly behind me now, which should have made every nerve in my body scream. Somehow it didn't. "You can bind me right now. Take maybe four minutes to secure me properly. By which point they'll be on the second floor and we'll have nowhere to go." A pause. "Or you can trust me for the next fifteen minutes and we walk out of here. After that, if you still want to bind me, I'll put my hands out myself."

"You'd let me bind you."

"If it means you hear what I have to tell you first yes."

The pressure on the ground floor intensified. Two sets of footsteps now. Moving fast, trained, tactical spacing.

Cleaners moved like that.

Hunters moved like that.

I moved like that.

"Fifteen minutes," I said. The words tasted like swallowed glass. "You run, I chase you. You cast at me, I drop you. We're clear?"

"Perfectly."

"And I'm keeping the cuffs in my hand the entire time."

"I'd expect nothing less."

I felt more than saw him move a warmth, a displacement of air, and then his hand closed around my wrist in the dark. Not grabbing. Guiding. Fingers just firm enough to steer without restraining, like he understood exactly where my line was.

Like he had studied exactly where my line was.

*Eight months,* he'd said.

Something about that made my chest do something I didn't have a name for. I filed it away to be furious about later.

"There's a service exit," he murmured, close to my ear. "Sub-basement. They won't have covered it — it's not on any current building schematic."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I pulled the schematic from your organization's database three weeks ago and cross-referenced it with the city's original 1987 blueprint." A pause. "I've been planning this meeting for a long time."

We moved into the dark together the hunter and the warlock while the footsteps of the people sent to erase us both grew louder on the stairs below.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, beneath the training and the rules and the carefully constructed armor of three years alone, something I had buried a long time ago whispered:

You already know he's telling the truth.

I hated that it was right.

We came out in the alley behind the building cold air, distant sirens, the smell of rain on concrete.

I dropped his wrist the second we cleared the exit.

He let me. Didn't comment.

We stood there for a moment in the narrow alley, backs against opposite walls, breathing. The sounds from inside had stopped. Either they hadn't found the sub-basement or they'd decided to regroup.

We had maybe six minutes before they circled the block.

I looked at him properly for the first time with actual light the distant amber of a streetlamp catching the edges of his face. He looked exactly like a man who had just walked out of a building full of assassins without breaking a sweat. Jacket dark, jaw set, eyes already scanning the alley with the kind of practiced assessment that told me he had done this before.

Many times before.

"The file," I said. "Where is it?"

He reached into his jacket slowly, watching my hands and produced a small drive. Black, unmarked, no bigger than my thumb.

"Everything is on here," he said. "Chain of command. Authorization signatures. The name of the person who pulled you from the roster the night Marcus died." His eyes met mine. "And why."

I stared at the drive.

Three years. Seventeen warlocks. A list folded behind my jacket lining.

All of it built on something I had never let myself question.

I took the drive.

Our fingers didn't touch. I was careful about that.

"The name," I said. "Tell me the name. Right now. Not from the drive from you."

He held my gaze for a long moment.

"Director Harlan Voss," he said quietly.

The alley went very still.

Harlan Voss.

My father.