Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 8

The trucks arrived every Tuesday and Friday, always at eleven at night, always unloaded by four men in plain grey uniforms who didn't appear on any staffing document Wren's network could pull, official or otherwise.

We watched three deliveries before I decided I'd seen enough.

"Could be supplies," Cross offered, though I could tell from his tone he didn't believe it either. "Medication, medical equipment. Places like this need more than public records show."

"At eleven at night, unloaded by men who don't officially work there?" Wren shook her head, eyes fixed on the grainy feed from the camera she'd planted in the tree line across from the loading dock a week earlier. "That's not a supply chain. That's a smuggling operation dressed up in a hospital's clothes."

I said nothing, watching the footage loop again, four men moving crates that were too heavy for medical supplies, too carefully guarded for anything legal. Somewhere inside that building, behind the same walls holding my sister, something else was happening, something Draycott needed hidden badly enough to run it through a psychiatric facility instead of his normal shipping channels.

My mother had died investigating weapons moving through Draycott's docks under false manifests. The pattern in front of me now looked uncomfortably familiar.

"They moved the operation," I said slowly, the pieces sliding together with a cold certainty that settled in my chest like the beginning of a fever. "After my mother started asking questions about the shipping logs, they couldn't keep running everything through the harbor. So they built somewhere else to hide it. Somewhere nobody would think to look, because who investigates a hospital for weapons trafficking?"

"That's a hell of a theory," Wren said, though nothing in her voice suggested she thought I was wrong.

"It fits everything Feld told us. It fits the isolation protocol on Nadia's file, the no visitors, no outside contact." My hands had curled into fists without my noticing, and I made myself unclench them, breathe, think instead of feel. "She's not just a witness they're afraid of. She's a witness locked inside the exact building where the crime is still happening. If she ever got out and talked, she wouldn't just be describing what happened to my mother. She'd be describing what's happening right now."

The room went quiet, the weight of it settling over all three of us.

"This changes the timeline," Wren said finally. "If we're right, Draycott isn't just protecting old secrets anymore. He's protecting an active operation. That makes Hallow Ridge more dangerous to hit, but it also means if we expose it, we don't just get justice for your mother. We take down whatever he's running right now."

"It also means my sister is in more danger than we thought," I said. "If they ever suspect she knows more than a traumatized eleven year old should, or if she says one wrong thing to the wrong staff member, they don't need her alive anymore."

Cross straightened from where he'd been leaning against the wall, already shifting into the version of himself that meant we were done planning and starting to move. "Then we don't wait for a perfect plan. We move on getting her out before they decide she's more of a liability than a leverage point."

"Agreed," I said. "But we do it smart. I want to know what's in those crates before we go anywhere near that fence. If it's weapons, I want proof, something that survives even if Draycott's people burn every official record the way they burned that lighthouse."

Wren was already pulling up a new window, cross referencing the truck routes against port authority logs, her fingers moving fast across the keys. "There's a chance," she said slowly, "that if I can get eyes inside that loading dock during a delivery, actual footage of what's in those crates, it would be enough to bring outside law enforcement in on this, people even Draycott can't buy off completely."

"You want to send someone in during a live delivery."

"I want to send myself in," Wren said, and the certainty in her voice told me arguing would waste time we didn't have. "I've done harder infiltration than a loading dock with four untrained guards moving crates. Give me two nights to prep, and I'll have what we need."

I didn't like it. Every instinct built over a decade of watching people I cared about walk into danger screamed against it. But Wren had earned the right to make that call a hundred times over, and I'd learned the hard way that overriding her judgment usually cost more than trusting it.

"Two nights," I agreed. "Cross and I keep working the perimeter, figure out the extraction route for Nadia while you're inside. The moment you have proof, we move on all of it at once, the weapons and the rescue together, before Draycott has time to react to either."

Wren nodded, already turning back to her screens, and Cross moved to check the equipment we'd need, and for a moment I stood alone in the center of the room, thinking about my sister eleven miles away, sitting in a building that had become something far more dangerous than any of us had understood a week ago.

My phone buzzed. An unknown number, which shouldn't have been possible given how carefully Wren guarded every line we used.

I answered anyway, some instinct telling me this mattered.

"Kade Mercer," said a voice I hadn't heard in ten years, warm and familiar in a way that turned my blood to ice. "It's been a long time. I think it's time we talked about your mother, and about what really happened the night she died."

The line went quiet, waiting for my response, and I stood frozen in the center of the safehouse, staring at a phone number that shouldn't exist, listening to the voice of a man everyone in Ironport believed had vanished into grief a decade ago.

My uncle Daniel was alive. And he had just called me by a name I hadn't used since I was fourteen years old.