Every eye in the room was on him.Andre stood frozen, his borrowed suit suddenly feeling like paper, his pulse roaring in his ears. He had not raised a paddle. He had not spoken a single word to anyone near that platform. He had not even given his real name at the door.The auctioneer stared down at the phone in his hand, his professional smile completely gone."I do not understand," the man said, his voice no longer smooth. "The screen says"He turned the phone around so the crowd could see it.[BUYER IDENTIFIED.][ANDRE REYES.]A wave of murmurs swept the room. Andre heard his borrowed name repeated in a dozen confused voices, felt a hundred eyes searching the crowd for whoever it belonged to.He did not move. He could not move.Beside him, Mara's hand closed hard around his wrist. "Do not react," she breathed. "Whatever happens, do not react."The screen changed again.[PURCHASE AUTHORIZED.][PAYMENT: $0.]The auctioneer's face went pale. "That is not possible. This is a malfunctio

"We are not going up there," Mara said, pulling Andre back into the shadow of a doorway across the street from the shoe repair shop. "Not yet.""They could already be inside.""Then going up will not save anything you left in that room. It will only get you killed alongside it." Mara's eyes stayed fixed on the parked car, its engine idling low, headlights cutting twin beams across the wet pavement. "Watch. Learn what you are dealing with before you walk into it."Andre forced himself to breathe, his back pressed against cold brick, his eyes locked on the narrow staircase leading up to the room he had barely lived in for four days.Two figures climbed out of the car.One was Grant. Andre recognized the broad shoulders immediately, the same man who had grabbed him in the warehouse two nights before. The second man was smaller, quicker, moving with the kind of practiced silence that made Andre's skin crawl.They went up the stairs together without hesitation, without knocking, and Andre

Andre stared at the photograph until the edges blurred in his vision.His father looked younger there than Andre had ever seen him, standing straight and proud beside a woman with pale hair pulled into a tight knot, her hand resting comfortably around a black phone that looked exactly like the one now sitting in Andre's palm."Who is she?" Andre's voice came out rough, barely holding steady.Sara did not answer right away. She reached for the photograph as if to take it back, but Andre closed his hand over it first."Sara. Who is she?""Someone your father should never have gotten close to," Sara said quietly. "That is all you need tonight.""That is not an answer."Beside him, Mara had gone completely still, her eyes locked on the photograph with an expression Andre had never seen on her face before. Not fear exactly. Something closer to recognition, cold and sudden."Mara?" Andre turned toward her. "You know her."Mara's throat moved as she swallowed. "I have seen her before. Once.

The pursuing car slammed against their rear bumper, jolting everyone forward."Hold on," Sara shouted, wrenching the wheel hard to the right. The tires screamed against the wet asphalt as the car fishtailed around a corner, narrowly missing a row of parked delivery trucks.Andre's phone buzzed once against his palm, sharp and insistent.He looked down. The screen was glowing, words appearing fast, faster than he had ever seen before, as if the device understood exactly how little time remained to read them.[THREAT PROXIMITY: CRITICAL.][NEXT TURN: LEFT.][TIMING: THREE SECONDS.]Andre's heart lurched. "Sara. Left turn. Now. Three seconds.""What?""The phone. It is telling me. Left, now!"Sara did not question him. She yanked the wheel hard left a half second before the count reached zero, the car sliding into a narrow side street barely wide enough to fit through. Behind them, the pursuing vehicle overshot the turn entirely, tires screeching as its driver fought to correct course to

The headlights closed in slowly, deliberately, three vehicles spreading into a wide arc across the empty lot, cutting off every gap wide enough for a car to pass through."Inside," Sara said sharply, pulling Andre and Mara back toward the storage unit. "Now.""That is a dead end," Mara snapped. "One door, no windows. If they corner us in there, we have nowhere left to go.""It is better than standing in the open," Sara said, though her voice had lost some of its earlier certainty.Andre's mind raced, his hand still closed tightly around all three phones. Fragment one of seven. A location beneath the very gallery where everything had already gone so catastrophically wrong once before. And now, apparently, the price for that discovery was standing directly in front of them in the shape of three approaching vehicles.The cars stopped in a loose semicircle roughly thirty feet away, engines idling, headlights blinding enough that Andre could not make out how many people waited behind them.