"He wants to negotiate," Wren said, already pulling up every available channel showing the feed, cross referencing viewer counts that climbed by the thousands with every passing minute. "Which means he wants something specific enough that killing her outright wouldn't get it for him."I watched the screen, forcing myself into the cold, careful register I'd used a hundred times before in rooms full of men who thought they held every advantage, though nothing in my training had prepared me for watching it happen live, broadcast to an entire city, with a woman's life balanced on whatever came out of my mouth next.Sienna stood near the doorway, her hand pressed to her mouth, watching the feed with the particular helplessness of a healer forced to witness harm she had no way to intervene in. Nadia had drifted into the room too, drawn by the tension none of us had managed to hide, and I caught the flicker of recognition on her face as she watched a woman bound and bleeding on a screen, som

We reached the safehouse in nine minutes flat, Cross driving with a controlled fury that matched exactly what I felt watching the minutes tick away on a countdown I no longer fully trusted, and Wren had the second feed already pulled up on her main screen by the time we burst through the door.Sienna met us in the doorway, her face pale, having clearly watched the feed load in the minutes since Wren's call. "It's worse this time," she said, before either of us had even crossed the threshold. "I can see it from here."The image that greeted us was worse than the first broadcast, harsher lighting, a different room entirely, concrete walls and exposed pipes suggesting somewhere far less carefully staged than the loading office we'd just cleared. Marisol knelt in the center of the frame, the same restraints, but a fresh bruise had bloomed dark along one side of her jaw, and her breathing came visibly ragged even through the compressed quality of the stream."She's hurt," Sienna said quiet

Sienna's father lived in a house that had never once, in all the years she'd grown up inside it, felt entirely like home, and standing on the front steps two days after Marisol's rescue, she understood with painful clarity exactly why that particular absence had always sat so heavy in her chest. The house had always been immaculate, every surface polished, every room arranged for the approval of council colleagues rather than the comfort of the family supposedly living inside it, and she remembered now, standing on those familiar steps as an adult rather than a child, how rarely she had ever felt permitted to simply exist within these walls rather than perform for them.She had debated coming at all, arguing with herself the entire drive over, some part of her hoping that enough time had passed since the raid that her father might not yet have heard, another part of her understanding with grim certainty that a man this connected to Draycott's inner circle would have known within hours

Sienna's hand slipped away from mine gently, understanding without needing to be told that whatever moment we'd been standing on the edge of would have to wait, and I turned my full attention toward Wren, the warmth of the last several minutes evaporating instantly under the weight of what she was clearly about to hand me."Show me," I said, already bracing myself, some old instinct warning me that whatever name waited on that screen was about to cost more than the comfortable, careful trust I'd built with my inner circle over the last several years.She set the tablet down on the table, her hands trembling slightly with an adrenaline I recognized from every major breakthrough she'd ever delivered across the years I'd known her, and pulled up a data visualization dense with timestamps and traffic patterns, the same painstaking analysis she'd been building since the decoy operation went wrong."I ran the numbers three times," she said. "I didn't want to bring this to you until I was co

I found out the next morning that Dorian had never intended to wait for my decision at all."He's gone," Cross said, storming into the main room before I'd fully woken, his expression carrying a fury I rarely saw directed at anything other than an active threat. "The holding room's empty, Kade. Restraints cut clean, no sign of forced entry, which means somebody helped him out of that building overnight."I sat up fast, the last of sleep burning away instantly, and pulled on the nearest jacket without bothering to check whether it was even mine, already moving toward the holding room before I'd fully processed what Cross had just told me. The corridor felt different in the gray light of early morning, quieter than it should have been, every closed door suddenly carrying the weight of a question I hadn't thought to ask until this exact moment, who else in this building might have reason to want Dorian free.I was on my feet before he'd finished speaking, the exhaustion of the previous n