Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 15

The delivery contractor uniform fit close enough to pass casual inspection, grey coveralls and a clipboard and the bored posture of a man who'd made this same run a hundred times before. Wren had built the cover in six hours flat, complete with a manifest that would survive a cursory check, though none of us pretended it would survive close scrutiny if anyone bothered to look twice.

"You have maybe fifteen minutes once you're past the loading dock," Wren said in my ear, her voice steady despite the tension I knew she was carrying. "Camera blind spot runs from the east corridor to the server room door, but it's not permanent, it's a gap in the sweep pattern that closes again in quarter hour intervals. Miss that window and you're on every screen in the security office."

"Copy," I said, adjusting the small device tucked into my sleeve, the piece of hardware Wren needed planted near the server room to give her a permanent backdoor into whatever system controlled the third structure's security.

"Cross is on the perimeter if you need extraction," Wren continued. "But if that patrol pattern from last night holds, you need to be in and out clean. No improvising."

"I don't improvise," I said.

"You absolutely improvise," she said, and there was something almost fond underneath the exasperation. "Just not tonight. Please."

I cleared the outer gate without incident, the guard barely glancing at the manifest before waving me through, exactly the kind of bored, routine interaction that told me Draycott's tightened security hadn't reached all the way down to the men working the entrance. I unloaded two crates of medical supplies I had no intention of ever tracking further, then slipped through the service door into the east corridor the moment the camera sweep gave me the gap Wren had promised.

The device took less than ninety seconds to plant, tucked behind a junction box near the server room door. I was turning to leave, already counting the seconds remaining in my window, when a voice behind me cut through the quiet corridor like a blade.

"You're not supposed to be back here."

I turned slowly, keeping my expression arranged into mild confusion, and found Sienna Voss standing in the hallway, badge in hand, eyes narrowed with the sharpness I remembered from our first meeting.

"Delivery route," I said, holding up the clipboard. "Guy at the gate said the east corridor connects back to the loading dock."

"It doesn't." She didn't move, didn't reach for the radio clipped to her hip, just studied me with an intensity that told me she'd already worked out I wasn't who I claimed to be. "And delivery contractors don't crouch behind junction boxes for ninety seconds doing something with their hands, which is exactly what you just did, because I was watching you the whole time through the feed at the nurses station."

My pulse spiked, though I kept my face carefully neutral. "Then why haven't you called it in."

Something flickered across her expression, the same crack in her composure I'd noticed over coffee a week earlier, deeper now. "Because I blocked the hallway camera thirty seconds before you started," she said quietly. "Manually, from my station, which means there's no record of what you just did to that junction box, and no record of this conversation either, unless somebody checks the maintenance log."

The corridor went very still.

"Why would you do that," I asked, genuinely uncertain, every instinct I'd built over a decade trying to read her angle and coming up short.

"Because I've spent six days wondering why a shipping consultant with no accent from anywhere he claims to be from sat down across from me at a coffee shop and asked exactly the right questions to make me trust him." She stepped closer, close enough that I could see the exhaustion carved into the lines around her eyes. "And because two nights ago I watched an unmarked delivery truck unload crates through a door that doesn't appear on any floor plan I've ever been given clearance to see, and I have spent six years telling myself I was imagining how wrong that felt."

"Sienna"

"That's not my real question," she said, cutting through whatever half truth I'd been about to offer. "My real question is who you actually are, and what you actually want with this place, and I need an honest answer before I decide whether to walk you out that gate myself or call security." Her voice had dropped, urgent now, aware of the seconds ticking away on the camera blind spot Wren had given me. "So tell me. Right now. Who are you really."

I looked at her for a long moment, weighing every instinct that had kept me alive for a decade against the growing certainty that the woman in front of me was not a threat at all, but something far more dangerous to the careful walls I'd built around myself.

An ally who deserved the truth.

"Not here," I said finally, and I watched something in her shoulders ease a fraction, not trust exactly, but the willingness to keep listening. "You're right that I'm not who I said I was at the coffee shop. But I'm not your enemy either, and if you give me five minutes somewhere that isn't a hallway, I'll prove it instead of just saying it."

"Five minutes," she said. "And then I decide what happens next, not you."

She led me down to a maintenance landing that smelled of dust and old paint. She folded her arms and waited, something in the set of her jaw telling me she had already decided she would know a lie the moment she heard one.

"My name isn't important yet," I said. "But the reason I'm here is. There's a patient in this facility named Nadia Mercer. She's my sister, held here for six years under a diagnosis that was never real, committed by a man who wanted her silenced rather than treated. I came back to this city to get her out."

Something shifted behind her eyes, quick and sharp, a puzzle she'd been quietly assembling for years suddenly clicking into a shape she hadn't wanted to see. "Mercer," she said slowly. "I know that file. I've read it more times than I should have, because nothing about it ever made sense. No prior diagnosis. No treating physician before intake. A commitment order written to survive a legal challenge rather than to help anyone."

"Because it was," I said. "The trucks you mentioned are connected to the same people who put her here. I don't think this facility only holds patients Draycott wants controlled. I think it's hiding something worse behind that third structure, and my sister has been kept close enough to it that letting her go was never an option."

Sienna was quiet for a long moment. "If any of that is true," she said finally, "then I have spent six years telling myself I was imagining the parts that didn't add up, because it was easier than admitting what that would mean about the place I chose to work."

"You don't have to decide anything tonight," I said. "I only need to know whether you'll stay quiet about what you saw, long enough for me to prove the rest of it to you properly."

She studied me a moment longer, then nodded slowly. "Quiet," she said. "For now. But if I find out you've lied about any part of this, I will make sure security knows exactly what that device was for."

It was more than I'd hoped to walk away with, and far less than I needed, and as I slipped back out through the loading dock with my window nearly closed, I understood that whatever came next in this building would run through a woman I had only just convinced to trust me a fraction of an inch.