Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 2

"You look like a man who's about to get somebody killed," Cross said, the second I dropped into the passenger seat.

"Just drive."

He drove. Cross has never needed more than that from me, not in six years of following me through countries that don't officially exist on maps my old teachers would recognize. He's the only man alive who's seen me at my worst and never once flinched, and I trust that kind of loyalty more than any oath.

Wren was waiting at the safehouse when we pulled in, three monitors already glowing behind her, hair pulled back, the particular focus on her face that means she found something she doesn't like.

"Sit," she said, not looking up. "You need to see this before you do anything else tonight."

I sat.

She turned the center monitor toward me. A photograph filled the screen, grainy, clearly pulled from a security camera feed she had no legal right to access. A young woman, thin, dark curls cut short and uneven, standing in what looked like a courtyard behind chain link fencing.

My chest did something I hadn't let it do in years.

"Nadia," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I meant it to.

"Six weeks old, that photo. Hallow Ridge runs a tight system, cameras everywhere, but nothing my people can't get into given time." Wren's voice gentled, just slightly, an acknowledgment she rarely gives. "She's alive, Kade. She's thin, and the intake notes I pulled are ugly, but she's alive."

I stared at the photograph until the shapes stopped meaning anything, until it was just my sister's face burned into my mind on top of the memory of her at eleven years old, laughing at something I'd long forgotten, before the world split us apart.

"Tell me everything," I said.

Wren pulled up a second file. "Hallow Ridge presents itself as a private psychiatric facility. In practice it's a warehouse for people the Draycotts want controlled. Political rivals who got too loud. Witnesses who saw too much. Family members who became inconvenient. Your sister's intake record lists her as a danger to herself following what it calls a psychotic episode after your mother's death."

"She was eleven."

"I know how old she was, Kade." Wren's jaw tightened. "There's no episode on record. No hospital admission before Hallow Ridge, no treating physician, nothing. Someone manufactured the entire file to justify locking her away, and Victor Draycott's signature is on the commitment order."

Cross, silent until now, spoke from where he leaned against the doorframe. "Why. What's the angle. Draycott doesn't spend money on anything that doesn't protect him."

It was the right question, the one I'd been circling since the cemetery. "Because she knows something," I said slowly, the pieces sliding into place the way they used to when I was still learning to read a battlefield before I could read a room. "Or he thinks she does. My mother found something in his ledgers before she died. If Nadia saw anything, heard anything, even as a child, Draycott couldn't risk her repeating it once she grew old enough for anyone to believe her."

Wren nodded slowly. "That tracks with the isolation protocol on her file. No visitors permitted, ever, in six years. No calls monitored by outside staff. Whatever they're afraid of her saying, they've made sure nobody's around to hear it."

The rage I'd been holding since the graveyard sharpened into something colder, more useful. Rage gets men killed. Focus wins wars.

"I want everything on Hallow Ridge," I said. "Staff rotations, security contracts, who owns the land, who's on the board, every name attached to that building. I want to know it better than the people running it do."

"Already started," Wren said. "But Kade, listen to me. We hit that place wrong, they move her somewhere we can't find, or worse, they decide a dead witness is safer than a living one. We do this careful or we don't do it at all."

"I know how to be careful."

"Do you." She turned to face me fully, and there was no fear in it, only the honesty she's always given me even when I didn't want to hear it. "Because right now you look like a man who wants to walk through that front gate and burn the place to the ground with his bare hands. I need the version of you who built Meridian out of nothing. Not the boy who watched his family torn apart and couldn't do anything about it."

She wasn't wrong, and that was the worst part.

"Give me a plan by morning," I said, standing. "A real one. Something that gets Nadia out without turning this into a war we're not ready to fight yet."

"And if Draycott figures out who's asking questions before we're ready?"

I thought of the blank stone over my mother's grave. Of six years of my sister's life stolen behind a fence, waiting for someone who was too busy building an empire to notice she needed him sooner.

"Then he figures it out," I said. "I'm done being careful about my own name in this city. I'm only being careful about hers."

Wren studied me for a long moment, then nodded once, already turning back to her monitors, fingers moving fast across the keyboard. "There's one more thing," she said, not looking up. "Hallow Ridge has a staff doctor who's been flagged in three separate incident reports for pushing back against facility policy. Refused to authorize a restraint procedure two months ago. Filed a formal complaint about medication protocols that got buried within a week."

"Who."

"Sienna Voss." A photograph replaced Nadia's on the screen, a woman maybe my age, dark hair, tired eyes that still managed to look sharp, defiant. "Her father sits on the same council committee as Victor Draycott. She grew up in that world. And according to every report I've pulled, she's the only person on staff who's asked a single honest question about how your sister is treated."

I looked at the photograph longer than I needed to.

"She's our way in," Wren said. "Or she's a trap built to look like one. I haven't decided which yet."

Neither had I.

But something about the set of that woman's jaw in the photograph, the refusal in it, told me I was about to find out which one it was whether I was ready or not.

Cross straightened from the doorway. "There's a car outside. Been parked across the street since we got here. Not moving."

The room went still.

"Ours?" I asked, though I already knew the answer from the look on his face.

"No," Cross said. "And whoever's inside just got out."