SHATTERED THRONE

The Number He Gave Away

Wade doesn't know what he's done.

That is the fact Mara keeps returning to, the one fact she cannot afford to feel and cannot afford to stop feeling, because the moment she goes numb is the moment she makes a mistake. So she sits with it. Lets it cut. Wade handed Dorian his phone number across a restaurant table with the open, careless warmth of a man who has never had a reason to be careful, because Mara has spent three months making sure he doesn't have one.

She did that. She built the wall and left him on the other side of it, and now Dorian Voss has his number saved in a device somewhere in that tower of glass and money, and there is nothing clean about what happens next.

"Liora." Mara keeps her voice flat. "How long since Wade left the restaurant?"

"Twenty-two minutes." Liora doesn't look up from her screen. The glow turns her face pale, clinical, and Mara knows she's already running the trace. "He took a cab. I've got the plates. He's heading back to his apartment."

"Does Dorian have someone on him?"

A pause. The kind Mara has learned to read. Not hesitation — calculation.

"Not yet," Liora says. "But the phone number changes that. The moment Dorian runs that number, he gets the address Wade registered it to. His real address, Mara. He's not protected."

Mara closes her eyes for exactly two seconds. Then she opens them.

"Can you intercept the registration data before Dorian's people pull it?"

"Already building the spoof. I can push a ghost address into the carrier database — somewhere in the harbour district, nowhere near Wade's building. But it buys us hours, not days. He'll figure out the redirect eventually."

"Hours is enough." Mara is already moving to the window, not to look out of it but to think beside it, the city lights smearing amber across the glass. "Get it done. And Liora — when it's done, I need you to set up a burner. Something Wade can use. I have to call him."

Liora's hands stop.

"You're going to call him as Mira?"

"I'm going to call him as his sister." The words come out steady, which surprises even Mara. "Not Mira Lane. Not a consultant. He needs to hear something real enough to make him do what I say without asking questions he can't know the answers to yet."

The silence between them is brief and heavy.

"That's a line you can't uncross," Liora says quietly.

"I know."

Harmon is in the kitchen doorway. He has been there long enough to have heard most of it, his arms crossed over his chest, his old detective's face arranged into something that isn't quite disapproval. It's closer to grief, which is worse.

"The boy has his father's instincts," Harmon says. "Trusting. Readable. If Dorian calls him before you do, he'll talk, and he won't know he's talking. That's not weakness — that's what happens to people who haven't been destroyed yet. You can't teach the armour without the wound."

"I'm not going to let him get the wound," Mara says.

"Then call him." Harmon pushes off the doorframe. "But know what you're asking of yourself. You're going to hear his voice, and he's going to hear yours, and neither of you will be allowed to say what that means."

Mara knows. She has known since she saw Wade's face in that surveillance image, bright and unsuspecting across a table from a man who ordered her death. She has known and she has set that knowledge beside the plan and continued moving.

Her phone buzzes.

Caiden.

She answers before the second vibration ends.

"Talk to me."

"Dorian ran the image of Mira Lane through his facial recognition protocol forty minutes ago." Caiden's voice is controlled in the way that means it costs him to keep it that way. "He hasn't pulled a full identity match yet. The alias you built with Harmon is holding, but he's digging. He flagged three separate financial consultancies in the Velthorpe district to cross-reference."

"Does he know about Mira Lane Consulting specifically?"

"Not yet. But he will within twenty-four hours if his analyst continues at this pace." A breath. "There's something else. The meeting with my mother — she confirmed the channel. But she said she won't send the decryption key through any electronic route. Not after what Dorian just flagged. She wants to use the old method."

Mara goes still. "Which method?"

"A drop point. Physical." Caiden's voice drops lower. "She gave me a location. It's the bookshop on Sellen Street — the one that was your mother's, Mara. Before Dorian had it closed."

The world contracts to that single fact.

Her mother's bookshop. The one she remembers in fragments — the smell of dust and old paper, her mother's handwriting on the stock cards, the afternoon light through the front windows that always came in gold. Dorian had it shuttered six months after Celeste Ashlen's car went off the road. A property dispute, the paperwork said. Mara had been seventeen and too broken to question it.

Her name was written on the map before the beginning. Her alias Mira was already there, already waiting. And now Heloise Voss is sending her back to her mother's bookshop with a key that could bring down the man who destroyed every Ashlen there is.

Heloise and Celeste knew each other. Mara has known this for twenty-four hours and still cannot find the outer edge of what it means.

"What time is the drop?" Mara asks.

"Dawn. Six-fifteen." Caiden pauses. "I'll be watching the perimeter. You won't see me, but I'll be there."

"Caiden." She says his name the way she never means to — with something exposed in it, something that she immediately walls back. "If Dorian has anyone watching that location—"

"He doesn't. That property has been dormant for nine years. He's never looked at it twice." Another pause. "He didn't think it mattered to anyone still alive."

Mara ends the call.

Liora sets a burner phone on the table beside her. No words. Just the phone, and the number Wade registered, and the fact of what Mara is about to do.

She picks it up.

She dials.

The line rings twice. Three times. Then Wade's voice — warm, slightly confused, slightly annoyed at an unknown number, exactly the voice she has been protecting without his knowledge for three months — says, "Hello?"

Mara breathes.

"Wade," she says. "Don't say my name. Just listen."

The silence on the other end of the line is complete and total, and in it she hears the exact moment her brother stops breathing.

Because he knows the voice.

He knows it the way the body knows something before the mind catches up, the way you know a smell from childhood before you can name it — and when he finally speaks, his voice is barely a sound at all.

"You're dead," Wade whispers.

"No," Mara says. "But if you don't do exactly what I tell you in the next sixty seconds, the man who tried to make me dead will know where you live."