Chapter 6 #2
Bayne’s brows lift, amused. “You have that little faith in my men? See, that’s why Freya calls us back. Because you, Blaze, are a pain in the arse.”
“Stand down,” I say to the room. “Blaze. The door is for you.”
Blaze goes still. “Oh,” he says.
In on the plan, Erin grins at me. “You finally shut him up, Lucian.”
“What oh?” I say.
Rafe turns the tablet to face Blaze. He falls to his knees. “I can’t believe it.”
A woman stands beneath the gray Icelandic sky in a colorful patchwork coat that looks more thrift store than couture, her brown hair hanging in a braid over her shoulder. She has one hand on a suitcase, the other planted on her hip.
Cleopatra. Blaze’s wife. She waves at the camera above her head. “Yoohoo! Is one going to let me in? It’s freezing out here, and I have some choice words to deliver.”
Blaze is gone.
Erin and I sit, smiling at one another. We hear the front door open. Wind rushes in. Blaze lets out a kind of cowboy victory yelp.
Then her teacher’s voice cuts through the house.
“Do not sweetheart me, Blaze Bachman. Your phone stopped working, your texts turned into caveman fragments, and then Freya called me to let me know your phone wasn’t working and said everyone here was temporarily alive. Temporarily. Alive.”
Bayne murmurs, “Freya does enjoy theatrics.”
Blaze says something too low to hear.
Cleo snaps, “Don’t you dare kiss me until—”
The sentence ends.
Erin laughs under her breath. “I like her.”
A moment later, Blaze returns with his wife tucked firmly against his side and no apology on his face.
He looks different with her.
Still lethal.
Still insufferable.
But steadier.
Like a match that finally found its hearth.
Cleo scans the room, taking in the maps, the weapons, the faces.
Her gaze lands on Erin first.
“Erin. I would hug you, but my husband has decided I’m luggage.”
“She told the men in New York that if they were coming to replace Bayne’s men, she was coming with them,” Blaze says.
“And because the last two texts you sent me were,” she blushes, “one asking for very inappropriate images of yours truly, and then the last one—you texted—”
Blaze interjects. “Alive, busy, likely murder later, LOVE YOU all caps? Was it that one that did the trick?”
She’s much shorter than he is and she has to tilt her head to stare up at him. “Precisely.”
Then Cleo looks at the screen.
Her smile fades. “This is about the Village.”
Not a question. Blaze’s arm tightens around her. “Yes. Among other, trivial things.”
She knows what the Village means. She knows what loving a Bachman man costs her. Her love for Blaze is written all over the way she stands there: a good girl, a brave girl with a terrified heart, still walking straight into the room with the monsters.
Or, as Erin likes to think of us, monster slayers.
She steps closer.
“What do you need?”
Blaze brings her back, saying, “You need to rest.”
“No.” She looks at the maps. “I need to know what I can do.”
Blaze opens his mouth.
She turns to him. “Give me a moment. Please.”
His mouth closes for the first time since we arrived, happily replaced with a lopsided grin.
Erin murmurs, “I don’t think it works on Lucian.”
Rafe brings us back. “Carlos has gone quiet since the last message.”
“Quiet is not peace,” I say.
“No,” Rafe agrees. “Quiet is an invitation to make the first move.”
Cleo frowns at the screen. “Then don’t chase the noise.”
Every man looks at her.
She stiffens but does not retreat. “I’m not a strategist. I teach kids for a living. But when a child acts out for attention, you don’t chase every little thing. You watch the pattern. Figure out what they want you to do. Then don’t do that very thing.”
Silence.
Blaze looks at her like she hung the moon and loaded it with ammunition all at once. He leans down, scooping her up into his arms. “That’s my girl,” he says, kissing her softly.
Gregory leans in. “She’s right. The first move could be the wrong one.”
Rafe nods slowly. “Carlos wants movement. Panic. Overcorrection. He has attacked Marina, thrown what was to be emotional warfare on Lucian.”
Gregory adds, poetically, “He wants you doubting every beginning before he makes his final move.”
“Your education wasn’t wasted,” I say, trying to think.
Erin studies the map. “So we don’t chase the message.”
“We find where the message came from. Then, attack.”
“Use his own weakness for revenge against him. If he were bulletproof, he would know not to send us messages in the first place”
Gregory grins. “It’s not like the old Bachman days. Everything sent through tech is traceable. We must find the access that made the message possible.”
Rafe’s mouth almost curves. “Exactly.”
Pride moves through me so sharply it nearly hurts.
My brother, my men, my woman, together at the board.
“Well played,” I say.
“Partnership,” Erin counters.
Blaze sighs. “Beautiful. Growth. Love. Emotional evolution. Blah, blah, blah. Can you all afford to miss me for a couple of hours, or what?
He stares down adoringly at the woman in his arms.
We all speak at once. “Go!” “Get out of here!” “See you for dinner.”
He runs from the room, Cleopatra laughing in his arms.
Rafe clicks through the microfilm. Fast. Clean. Blaze isn’t here to say we should torture it out of Isobel, which is a relief. We all know she had no idea what was in that necklace.
“What do we know?” I ask.
“The seal was an old master credential preserved after your father died. Something Marina stole and took with her, then Carlos used dead authority to override the system.”
Click.
“The twelve-second delay was a programmed blind spot. Gates, alarms, and feeds fell out of sync long enough for the wrong people to move through the right doors.”
Click.
“Marina kept copies. Carlos took enough of her records but killed her over something on that microfilm.”
Isobel speaks, and we remember she exists. “And she knew whatever was on that hidden microfilm was important enough that she died keeping it safe.”
Good.
Done.
Click.
Erin adds, “Carlos didn’t choose me by accident. He recognized a wound named Caleb and aimed it.”
I tick off the list. “My father, Marina’s death, revealing that he chose Erin to send, is emotional warfare.”
“As it always is with him,” Isobel agrees.
Rafe turns off the screen. “Now we decide whether to let Carlos believe we are still reacting.”
I feel the answer settle before I speak it.
The boy with the dead parents.
The man from the warehouse.
The king whose Village burned.
The lover who nearly lost Erin because every door in my life has been compromised by ghosts.
All of them go quiet.
The Bachman king remains.
“No more reacting,” I say. “We need to find him. We need to strike his location first. But it has to look like we’re headed in another direction.”
Rafe nods. “We leak a controlled response. Make Carlos think we are moving toward what’s currently being rebuilt in New York, emotionally, not strategically, to protect it. That we are burning everything in our path to get there before he does.”
Gregory adds, “Then we watch which old credential wakes to track us.”
I look at Erin. This is the part where every instinct tells me to remove her from the room, lock her away, and call it devotion. She knows it.
Her chin lifts.
Silent. Defiant. Mine.
She’s not going anywhere. I accept her decision. I hate that I do.
Rafe stands. “Let’s break for a meal. Our minds will be sharper after.”
Isobel disappears, two guards behind her like a veil. I let our secret momentarily disappear with her.
“Your men arrived with Cleopatra.” Bayne checks the time. “My transport leaves in a few hours. I need to gather the men.”
He comes to stand before me.
For a moment, we are brothers.
“You have my number, my favor, and my warning,” he says.
“Which is?”
“Do not let Carlos choose the battlefield in your head before you choose the one beneath your feet.”
I smile.
He turns to Erin. “Keep him angry enough to live and calm enough to think.”
“A delicate balance.” She moves in to hug him, whispering private words of gratitude to him as we look on.
Bayne smiles as she releases him. “Absolutely,” he says to her. Bayne bows slightly. “Until the wedding, then.”
Bootsteps. Low voices. Doors opening. Engines starting beneath the pale sky.
The house feels larger as they leave, but I know our men are moving in.
I stand at the window with Erin beside me as Bayne’s convoy rolls out. He pauses at the lead SUV and lifts a hand in farewell.
Then he is gone, taking his men back to his stormy Scottish islands.
I wrap my arm around her shoulders. “What did you ask him?”
She grins up at me. “I told him if I could ever repay him, let me know how. Then, I asked if he’d be a groomsman at the wedding. I hope you don’t mind me making that decision.”
“I’ll allow it.”
A smile tugs at her mouth. “That sounds like growth.”
Cass is in the hallway, calling us to come eat before she takes it all for herself.
Rafe isn’t fooling me. He’s called a break to get everyone out of the room. He’s onto something.
Somewhere beyond Iceland, beyond Scotland, beyond New York, a line moves in the dark.
A door opens.
A dead credential waits to wake.
Carlos thinks he is calling us back to fire.
Let him.
This time, we are not walking into his story.
We are writing our own around it.