The morning light bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the safe house like a slow confession, reluctant, and cold.
I hadn't slept. Not truly. I had drifted in and out of something that looked like sleep but felt more like drowning in slow motion, my hands pressed flat against my stomach the entire night, as though I could shield the two lives inside me from a world that had already decided to use them as weapons.
Lucian sat at the reinforced steel table across the room, a tactical map spread before him, three phones lined up like sentries at his elbow. He hadn't slept either. I could tell by the rigid set of his shoulders and the way his jaw worked silently, grinding through thoughts he hadn't yet decided to share with me.
The safe house was somewhere in the industrial sprawl so
