"You're outnumbered," Preston said again, savoring it, "and my men from the front gate are already moving. You can put me down right now if you want, Mercer, but it won't matter. This building has a hundred ways out and you don't know a single one of them."He was wrong about that, though I didn't tell him so, because the only thing that mattered in the next ten seconds was getting Nadia off that bed and moving before his backup arrived and turned a fight I could win into one I couldn't. I kept my body angled between him and the doorway to her room, weight balanced, every muscle coiled for whatever came next, and watched him weigh the same calculation I was, two men who had grown up in the same city and turned into entirely different weapons of it."Cross," I said into the comm, already backing toward the room where my sister sat curled and shaking. "I need an extraction route. Now.""Working on it," Cross answered, tension audible even through the discipline in his voice. "East exit'

"Walk me through it again," I said, pulling a chair beside Wren's desk, the exhaustion of the last several hours pressing down harder now that the immediate danger had passed and left only questions in its place. "Slowly. I need to understand exactly what happened to that message."Wren rubbed at her eyes, the kind of gesture that told me she'd been staring at this same screen for hours without a real break, and pulled up a fresh window before answering, the discipline of someone who refused to let exhaustion get in the way of precision. "Give me a second. I want to be exact about this, not just fast."Wren pulled the log back up, tracing the timeline with one finger against the screen the way she did when she needed to think out loud as much as explain. "At eleven fifty two, twenty minutes after you crossed into the restricted wing, a device on our internal network sent an encrypted burst transmission. Short message, heavily compressed, addressed to a number registered through three

Daniel's contact never picked up that night, or the next morning, and by the time the second day passed without word, none of us needed to say out loud what that silence most likely meant. Daniel had spent the hours since retreating into a grim, watchful quiet, cycling through old contact protocols and dead drop procedures with the same restless energy Wren usually reserved for a broken lead, refusing to let himself simply wait for confirmation that would only ever make things worse."I can't reach anyone else in that office without going through him," Daniel said, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with his wound and everything to do with watching four years of careful, patient work collapse into uncertainty in a single unanswered phone call. "If I contact someone new, someone who doesn't already vouch for my credibility, I risk exposing everything before we're ready. But if I don't, and he's already been compromised, we're operating blind against people who might already know

Sienna found me in the kitchen three mornings after the recording, coffee in hand, exhaustion carved into the same lines around her eyes that I'd grown used to seeing there, and something in her expression told me she'd come looking for me specifically rather than wandering in by accident. In the days since her arrival, she'd folded herself into the rhythm of the safehouse with a quiet efficiency that surprised even Wren, spending most of her hours in the small room with Nadia rather than anywhere near the operational side of things, patient in a way none of the rest of us had quite managed to be."She said something to me last night," Sienna said, keeping her voice low despite the empty room around us. "A few words, nothing coherent yet, but it's the first time she's spoken since the raid. I didn't want to push her, and I didn't want to tell you until I was sure it wasn't just fragments of a nightmare."My chest tightened instantly. "What did she say.""She was talking in her sleep a

The decoy went live three days later, a fabricated operation targeting a warehouse Wren had invented from nothing, complete with falsified surveillance photos and a manufactured timeline that only Priya, Dorian, and Elias each received in slightly different, individually traceable versions."If this works," Wren said, watching the operation's fake timeline count down on her main screen, "we'll know within hours which version of the information reached Draycott's people first."I hated every part of it, the careful manipulation of people who might be entirely innocent, the cold necessity of treating loyalty itself as a variable to be tested rather than trusted, but I understood Wren's logic too well to argue against it. A traitor left unidentified would keep costing us more than any single betrayed trust could.Priya, Dorian, and Elias each carried on with their normal duties across the following two days, none of them aware they'd been handed a different fragment of the same fabricate