Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 10

"You're not going alone." Wren said it the moment I lowered the phone, no room for argument in her voice. "I don't care how many childhood memories he pulled out to convince you. That could have come from anywhere, a diary, an old letter, someone inside your mother's old circle who knew you well enough to reconstruct a story that specific."

"I know how it looks."

"Do you?" She stepped closer, and for the first time since I'd known her, real fear showed plainly on her face instead of the careful control she wore like a second skin. "Kade, everything about tonight has the shape of a trap. An unknown number that shouldn't exist finding you within hours of learning your uncle's name is connected to that lighthouse fire. A meeting demanded alone, at midnight, in an abandoned industrial district with no witnesses and no way for us to reach you if it goes wrong. This is exactly how I would set a trap if I were trying to remove you permanently."

She wasn't wrong, and the worst part was I'd thought through every one of those same points myself in the seconds after the call ended.

"But if it's real," I said, "if my uncle has actually spent ten years building a case against Draycott, if he has evidence that could end this without a single shot fired, walking away from that could cost us everything. I need to know."

Cross, who'd been silent through the entire exchange, finally spoke. "There's a way to have both. You go, because you're right, we can't afford to walk away from a real lead. But you don't go unprotected, and you don't go without a way out if it turns bad."

"He said alone."

"He also spent ten years hiding from a family powerful enough to kill his own sister and bury the truth for a decade," Cross said. "A man that careful understands operational security. If he's genuine, he'll understand backup watching from a distance isn't the same as bringing an army. If he's not genuine, then the backup is the only reason you walk out of that warehouse alive."

It was the right call, and I knew it, even through the tangle of hope and dread twisting in my chest at the thought of seeing my uncle's face again after ten years of believing him lost to grief.

"Fine," I said. "Cross, you're on the perimeter, far enough back that nobody spots you unless something goes wrong. Wren, I want every exit from that warehouse mapped before I set foot near it, and I want a way to signal you both if I need it."

"And if it is a trap," Wren said quietly, "and Draycott's people are the ones waiting in there instead of your uncle?"

"Then we finally find out how much of a war he's willing to start over a boy he thinks he already buried."

The next day crawled by in the particular slow agony of waiting for something you can't control, Wren mapping every angle of the warehouse from satellite imagery and old utility records, Cross running silent reconnaissance on the district itself, and me pacing the safehouse trying not to think too hard about the last time I'd heard my uncle's voice, laughing at our kitchen table, before the whole world came apart.

I tried to work through it logically, the way I'd trained myself to approach every decision that mattered. If Daniel was genuine, then a decade of silence had cost my sister years of suffering that might have been shortened had he simply reached out sooner, and that thought alone left a bitter taste I couldn't shake no matter how many times I reminded myself that fear does strange, cowardly things to good people. If he was not genuine, then someone had studied my family closely enough to reconstruct a private memory with painful precision, which meant the danger circling us went deeper than a single traitor inside Meridian. Neither possibility let me rest, and by the time the sun dropped behind the harbor, I had stopped pretending sleep was an option and simply sat with the weight of it instead.

By eleven that night, we were in position. Cross tucked into the shadow of a loading crane two hundred meters from the warehouse, Wren parked three streets over with every camera feed she could hijack pulled up across her monitors, and me walking the last stretch alone toward warehouse fourteen on Ferris Lane, every sense sharpened, every year of training I'd built into myself since I was fourteen years old humming just beneath the surface.

The warehouse door stood half open, a single light burning somewhere deep inside.

"I'm here," I said quietly into the earpiece. "Going in."

"Copy," Wren answered, tension threading through the single word. "Cameras show one heat signature inside, matches a single adult male, no weapons visible on thermal. Doesn't mean there's nothing hidden, but it's just him as far as I can tell."

I stepped through the door.

The warehouse was mostly empty, stripped down to bare concrete and rusted shelving, the kind of place that had clearly sat abandoned for years before someone started using it again recently. A single work light hung from a cord near the back, illuminating a figure sitting at a folding table, hunched over what looked like a stack of files.

He looked up as I approached, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all.

Ten years had aged him more than they should have, deep lines around eyes that used to crinkle easily with laughter, grey threading through hair that used to be dark, the particular hollowness of a man who'd spent a decade running scared. But it was him. Unmistakably, impossibly, my uncle Daniel, alive and sitting in front of me for the first time since I was fourteen years old.

For a moment I was fourteen again, standing in a kitchen doorway listening to this man laugh at something my mother said, and it took real effort to fold that boy back down beneath the version of myself the last decade had forged. Daniel looked smaller than memory had kept him, shoulders curved inward like a man who had spent years trying to take up less space in the world, easier to miss, harder to find.

"You came," he said, voice rough with something that might have been relief or might have been grief for a decade lost between us.

"I came." I didn't move closer, kept the distance between us deliberate, every instinct still braced for betrayal even as some smaller, younger part of me wanted nothing more than to close that gap. "You said you had proof. Show me."

He nodded slowly, reaching for the stack of files in front of him, and then his eyes flicked past my shoulder, toward the warehouse door, and every ounce of relief drained instantly from his face.

"Kade," he said, voice suddenly urgent, already rising from the table. "You need to leave. Right now. They followed you."

I turned, and through the half open door behind me, headlights swept across the gravel lot outside, three vehicles, moving fast, converging on the warehouse from every direction at once.