Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 13

We did not sleep.

By the time the sun cleared the harbor fog, the safehouse had become something closer to a war room than a place where people rested, maps spread across every surface, Wren's monitors glowing in a ring around her like she had built herself a cockpit out of stolen footage and hacked schedules. Daniel slept in the next room under sedation, his breathing steady now, and I made myself walk past that door twice an hour just to hear it, proof against the version of the night that could have ended with silence instead.

"Talk to me," I said, dropping into the chair across from Wren. "What do we actually have."

"More than I expected, less than I want." She pulled up the blueprint she'd stitched together from three different sources, none of them official. "Public floor plan for Hallow Ridge shows two wings, admin and residential. But the delivery pattern Cross tracked doesn't service either of those. There's a third structure behind the main building, low profile, no windows visible from the street. I think that's where the trucks actually unload."

"The restricted wing."

"If it exists the way I think it does, yes." She traced a line across the screen with one finger, the tired precision of someone who had stopped counting hours ago. "No public documentation. No permits filed for it that I can find under any name attached to the property. Which means either it predates the current ownership records, or someone made sure it never officially existed at all."

Cross leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, already dressed for another night of reconnaissance he hadn't slept before. "I can get closer tonight. Confirm the structure, get a read on how it's guarded before we commit to anything."

"Do it," I said. "But careful. If Draycott's people made even part of the connection Daniel warned us about, they'll have tightened everything since we hit that loading dock camera last week."

Wren pulled up a second window, cross referencing shift schedules against the two deliveries we'd already logged. "Extraction route for Nadia stays the same regardless of what's in that third building. East wing, staff corridor, the door Sienna would have access to if she decides to help us. I want two contingencies built in case she doesn't, though. I'm not betting my plan on a woman we've spoken to exactly once."

"She'll help," I said, more certainty in it than I fully owned.

"You met her for fifteen minutes over coffee." Wren didn't look up from the screen, but there was an edge under the words, the kind she only let show when she was genuinely worried rather than simply being thorough. "I need you clear headed for this, Kade. Not hopeful. Hopeful gets people killed in a building we don't fully understand yet."

She was right, and I let the silence sit there for a moment rather than argue with her the way the exhausted, grieving part of me wanted to.

"Fine," I said. "Build both versions. The one where she helps, and the one where we go in blind around her."

For the next two hours we worked the plan the way I'd learned to work every operation Meridian had ever run, breaking it into pieces small enough that no single failure could collapse the whole structure. Cross would confirm the restricted wing's layout tonight. I would make contact with Sienna again, this time with more than coffee shop small talk, close enough to learn whether the crack I'd seen in her composure ran as deep as I hoped. Wren would keep pulling threads on the shell companies tied to the third structure, and somewhere underneath all of it, we would keep watching for whoever inside Meridian had fed our location to a hit team in an abandoned warehouse.

That last piece sat heaviest of all, a slow poison none of us said out loud while we worked, because naming it too early risked the traitor hearing their own name spoken in a room they might still somehow be listening to.

"I want cameras on every terminal in this house," I said finally. "Starting now. If someone here is talking to Draycott's people, or to whoever sent that hit team, I want a record of exactly when and how."

Wren's hands stilled on the keyboard, just for a second. "You think it's someone in this room."

"I think I don't know who it is, and until I do, that has to include everyone. Even you. Even me, if there were a way to watch myself." I met her eyes, made sure she understood this wasn't accusation, only the cold arithmetic of a decade spent trusting nobody until they'd earned it twice over. "My mother trusted the wrong person and it cost her everything. I won't make that mistake with my sister's life on the line."

She held my gaze a long moment, then nodded, already reaching for a second laptop to start the install herself rather than delegate it to anyone else in the building. That was Wren's answer, more honest than any words could have been. She understood exactly what I was asking, and she agreed with it enough to do the work with her own hands.

I turned back to the blueprint, tracing the extraction route one more time, memorizing every hallway and door until I could walk it blind if the lights ever failed us mid operation. Somewhere in the middle of that fourth pass, Wren made a sound I hadn't heard from her before, a sharp, involuntary intake of breath that cut through the low hum of the room like a struck bell.

"What," I said, already moving toward her.

"The access logs." She was staring at her main screen, scrolling fast, her expression sliding from confusion into something colder. "The ones I pulled two nights ago, the delivery schedule, the staff roster that doesn't match public records. They're gone, Kade. Not corrupted. Deleted. Cleanly, completely, like they were never there."

"Deleted from where. Your own system?"

"That's what doesn't make sense." She turned the screen toward me, her hands no longer steady on the keys. "This is my private server, Kade. Nobody outside this room has access credentials to touch it. And the deletion timestamp." She stopped, swallowed, forced herself to finish the sentence. "The deletion timestamp is four minutes ago."

The room went very still.

Four minutes ago. While the three of us sat in this exact space, planning an operation to save my sister's life, someone with access to Wren's private server had reached in and erased the evidence out from under us in real time.

Cross straightened from the doorway, his hand already drifting toward the weapon he never went without. "Nobody's touched a keyboard in here except the two of you," he said slowly, working through it the same way I was, the same cold arithmetic settling behind his eyes. "Which means whoever just did this isn't in this room at all."

"Then how," I said, though some small, terrible part of me already understood the shape of the answer waiting underneath the question.

Wren's fingers moved across the keys, fast, desperate now, chasing a signal that was already gone. "Because they don't need to be in the room," she said, her voice gone thin. "They just need access. Which means whoever's doing this either cracked encryption I built myself and have spent years being told was unbreakable, or they already had the keys handed to them by someone who trusted them enough to never think to check."