THE HEIR HE NEVER CLAIMED

They Were Already Inside

Dominic — MMC POV



The thermal imaging covers a twelve-block radius around the Mercer Island district and I have been watching it for four hours.

I have not authorized a move.

I tell myself this is strategic. I tell myself that moving on her location without intelligence on the compound's security architecture would be premature, that I need more information before I can make a responsible operational decision, that this patience is the correct choice.

The bond has been transmitting a steady low signal all evening — not fear, not pain. Something I haven't felt from it in four months. Something that, if I were going to name it, I would call rest.

She is somewhere in that twelve-block grid and she is not afraid right now and I am watching a thermal map at midnight and calling it strategy.

Mace, my lead tracker on the Seattle circuit, radios in at 12:14 a.m.

—Alpha. Visual confirmed on the target. He pauses in the specific way that means the next information is significant. —She's in the Merrow compound, north tower. She's—

Another pause. Longer.

—Sir, she's very pregnant.

The surveillance room goes completely silent.

I count backwards.

Not slowly. The calculation runs in approximately four seconds and arrives at a date in mid-October and that date is six weeks before the Blood Moon Ceremony and I know exactly what happened in mid-October because I have been not-thinking about it since the morning after the ceremony when I stood on the roof of KraneTech tower and told myself that what happened in the east corridor was irrelevant to my decisions.

Seven months.

I count again because the first count cannot be correct.

Seven months.

The room is still silent. Mace has not said anything further. My two surveillance analysts are looking at the floor with the focused attention of men who have decided that the wall is extremely interesting.

—Stand down, I say. —All teams. Nobody moves without my direct order. I want a perimeter hold at current distance, no advancement, no contact attempts.

—Copy, Mace says, and his voice is very carefully neutral.

I end the transmission.

I stand in front of the thermal screen and I look at the twelve-block grid and I look at the cluster of heat signatures in the north tower of the Merrow building, one of which is Mara Voss, seven months along, counting down toward something I spent four months telling myself was not my problem.

The floor-to-ceiling glass on the east wall of the surveillance room is tempered, industrial grade, designed to withstand significant impact. I know this because I specified it during the KraneTech tower renovation four years ago.

It does not withstand my fist.

The sound is cleaner than I expected. A panel separation rather than a shatter — the glass holds in its frame but the frame gives, a precise rectangular gap opening onto forty floors of Seattle night air. My knuckles are bleeding. I register this the way I register the Stage Two pack-channel degradation, the way I register the two hesitation incidents this week from wolves who have served me for a decade: as information, not as something that requires a response right now.

I turn back to the room.

Both analysts are looking at their screens with tremendous professional focus.

The door opens.

Roel enters. His face is the face he uses for information that requires immediate action and cannot wait for the appropriate moment.

—Talk, I say.

—Ashwood's contractors. He moves to the secondary panel and pulls up a transit log. —I've been running their entry signatures since Nevada. I found a Seattle flag.

—When.

—Six hours ago. He turns the screen toward me. A timestamp, a border crossing point, a vehicle registration I don't recognize but that matches the contractor profile from Hawthorne. —They logged entry into King County at 18:40. That's two hours before our trackers even isolated the city as her location.

I look at the timestamp.

—They were already here, I say.

—They were already inside the perimeter. Roel's voice is flat with the specific control of someone delivering something they wish they didn't have to. —Dom. If they logged entry six hours ago and we've only just confirmed the Merrow compound as her location—

—They already know, I say.

He nods once.

Ashwood's contractors are in Seattle. They had her city six hours before my trackers did. They are operating inside the same twelve-block radius I have been watching on a thermal grid for four hours, and Jace Merrow's clean safe house with the good locks and the silent wolves on the door has exactly one problem it doesn't know about yet.

I look at the gap in the glass where the window used to be.

I look at the thermal cluster in the north tower.

—Get me everything we have on Merrow's building security, I say. —Now. And find me a way in that Ashwood doesn't have.