Sleep was a luxury for the secure. For me, it was a liability. In the twenty-four hours Victor’s team had to extract Leo, I functioned on pure, distilled adrenaline. I didn’t haunt the opulent guest suite he’d provided; I turned it into a war room. Schematics of the Swiss school were spread across a glass table, cross-referenced with satellite imagery and the school’s own publicly available term schedule. I mapped ingress points, egress routes, and blind spots in their antiquated CCTV system. Every detail was a prayer, every contingency plan a shield for the only piece of my heart that still lived outside my own body.
Victor left me to it, a silent and potent act of trust. He understood this was not business. It was blood.
My focus was absolute, but one small part of my mind was a coiled
