Chapter Seven
MIA
My shoulder had improved enough by morning that I could move it without seeing stars, which was fortunate because Bear had decided the joint belonged to him until further notice.
I discovered that when I reached for the coffee mugs and his hand appeared above mine, taking one down before I could stretch high enough to irritate the front of my shoulder.
He set it on the counter and went back to the eggs without ceremony. “You can be annoyed or you can heal. Pick whichever one doesn’t make my job harder.”
“I was reaching for a mug, not attempting a cartwheel.”
“You were reaching over your head after I told you not to.”
“Barely.”
Bear glanced at me with the same patient expression he had used while checking my shoulder the night before. “That word is doing a lot of work for you this morning.”
I took the mug. “You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m enjoying not having to explain to an actual doctor why an intelligence officer turned a mild strain into something stupid because she needed caffeine.”
Bear had a talent for making medical instructions sound like ordinary household maintenance, which made arguing with him feel childish even when I wanted to do it on principle.
I poured coffee one-handed and sat at the long table while Bear finished breakfast. Raven was already at his workstation with the party package open across two screens.
Hawk and Viper had come downstairs dressed for the yard, and Jackal sat near the end of the table with one ankle hooked beneath his chair instead of propped on somebody else’s furniture.
The position alone made him not look like himself.
He had been quieter since the confrontation, though silence was probably beyond Jackal’s physical capabilities.
The jokes still surfaced, only later than usual, and they disappeared as soon as the room stopped giving him somewhere easy to hide behind them.
Every so often his attention drifted toward my wrists before returning to whatever he was doing, and each time he made a point of saying nothing about the fading pink bands there.
The side door opened while Bear was setting plates down.
Wolf came inside with a folder tucked beneath one arm and cigarette smoke faintly caught in the black fabric of his shirt. He took in the room, found Raven first and me second, pausing only long enough for both of us to know it had happened.
I had spent part of the night telling myself the webbing would become ordinary gear again once I saw it in daylight, but the small metal clip at his belt shifted when he removed the folder from beneath his arm.
Click.
My fingers tightened around the coffee mug before I could stop them. Wolf’s eyes dropped to my hand.
Nothing changed in his posture, but he reached down a moment later and moved the folded webbing from the front of his belt to the rear attachment point, where it sat beyond my line of sight when he faced the room.
Jackal walked in from the equipment room with his MP7 case in one hand and stopped beside Wolf. “East structure still?”
“East first,” Wolf said. “Then the wooded lane.”
“Live movement or markers?”
“Markers until Hawk is set.”
Jackal nodded once. “Got it.”
He turned toward the equipment room before Wolf had fully shifted his attention away, leaving none of the usual extra commentary behind.
Three days earlier, he would have found a reason to irritate Wolf before he made it ten feet.
Wolf would have shut him down and the rest of the room would have treated the exchange like background noise.
Watching both men refuse that familiar rhythm made the guilt in my chest harder to dismiss, even though the choices that had caused the fracture were not mine.
Wolf looked toward Hawk and Viper. “Ten minutes.”
The twins stood and Jackal followed them without another word.
Bear gave Wolf a plate. Wolf took it, then nodded toward Raven’s screens. “Party.”
“We’re stripping it now,” Raven said. “I’ll pull you when there is something worth interrupting training for.”
Wolf accepted that without asking for the unfinished version. His eyes passed over me once more before he followed the others toward the yard.
The door closed behind him and I stared at it for a second too long.
Raven whispered, “Don’t.”
I looked over. “Don’t what?”
“Make yourself responsible for the temperature of every room in this building.”
“I wasn’t.”
He raised one eyebrow.
I took a drink of coffee and waited for him to return to the screen but he didn’t.
“Fine,” I said, turning back toward him. “It feels like I walked into something that worked before me and managed to put a crack through the middle of it in less than a week.”
Raven leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “It looks to me like Wolf put the webbing on you and Jackal reacted to it. Neither of those decisions belonged to you.”
“They barely speak now.”
“They have had worse fights than the one you saw.”
I glanced toward the yard windows, where Hawk’s blond head disappeared behind the concrete training structure. “Then why did he look like he wanted to tear Wolf apart over my wrists?”
“If Jackal wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”
“You know, though.”
“Some of it.”
“And you’re not going to tell me.”
“No.”
I knew there was nothing defensive in the refusal since he simply turned back to the monitor and opened the valet log from the estate.
“We live on top of each other here,” he said. “There isn’t much privacy left once six people know what you eat and how badly you sleep. Shared showers take care of most of the rest, especially when Jackal keeps stealing shampoo, so the things people choose to keep for themselves matter more.”
I thought about Jackal sitting in the dark with the red ribbon curled inside his hand, humming quietly enough that he had probably believed nobody would hear him.
“Fair.”
Raven glanced over. “You’re admitting something is fair? That sounded painful.”
“You and Wolf spend way too much time together.”
He smiled, and then we went to work.
The party gave us enough raw material to occupy the rest of the morning.
Aster had issued temporary credentials to eighty staff and contractors, while the guest network recorded hundreds of devices during the event.
Valet logs added vehicles belonging to people who never connected a phone, while Luca Bellandi’s social circle dragged us through property firms and private investment vehicles, then into holding companies nested inside ownership chains that seemed designed to exhaust and confuse anyone trying to follow them.
Raven handled the devices and access records while I rebuilt the human side.
Luca’s introductions were crucial because they told us which names existed in the same social space without proving those people worked together.
The useful pattern only emerged once we stopped treating each record as a separate event.
A vendor at the Stuttgart estate had also serviced an Aster event in Lyon.
A chauffeur company used by one of Luca’s guests shared an invoicing address with a transport broker already sitting on the edge of a Cerberus financial chart.
Temporary security badges issued at two different events traced back to the same contractor.
Morgenstern Sicherheitslogistik kept returning no matter which side of the party records we approached.
At Stuttgart it appeared as a subcontracted security provider, a detail too ordinary to mean much on its own.
The same company had also billed for venue protection at the Lyon event, while an executive transport invoice placed one of its drivers near the Prague courier several weeks before he changed hotels.
Raven enlarged the company registry. “Legitimate licensing, Austrian headquarters, offices in Graz and Munich, plus enough real clients that nobody looking at one invoice would care.”
“What about Südweg? The one Kade said.”
He pulled the transport company beside it.
The relationship was less direct than I expected and more useful because of it.
Südweg Transport had moved vehicles for Morgenstern nine times over four months, usually under generic service descriptions that could mean almost anything.
When we laid the routes beside Cerberus reporting, the dates stopped looking generic.
A Südweg truck crossed from Austria into Germany on the same night nineteen-year-old Lenka Horvat disappeared after leaving a club in Salzburg.
Another company vehicle entered France before two Romanian women carrying newly issued travel documents appeared near Mulhouse under names that did not exist six months earlier.
I opened the missing person files and felt the party drain out of the investigation entirely.
“How many?”
Raven began building the overlap instead of answering too quickly.
By lunchtime, we had eleven women whose phone activity or travel records touched routes used by Morgenstern or Südweg after they disappeared.
Four more surfaced through forged identities that failed basic verification.
One passport used a missing woman’s photograph with a birth date six years wrong.
Another identity belonged to a real woman who had been dead for more than a year before someone used her documents to cross into France.
Bear came in from the training yard while Raven was tracing the second passport. Dirt darkened one knee of his trousers and streaked his forearm, evidence that at least part of the morning had involved the ground winning.
He took one look at the screen and stopped thinking about lunch.
“What is that?”
I briefed Bear as he moved closer and read through the names without speaking. Outside, a burst of controlled rifle fire cracked from the wooded lane, followed by silence long enough that I could hear Raven’s keyboard again.
“They still out there?” I asked.
Bear nodded. “Wolf wanted another pass through the north approach. Jackal found a route he didn’t like.”
“Is that why you’re covered in half of Germany?”
“This is the clean version.”