Chapter Fifteen
MIA
I woke to the smell of coffee and the uncomfortable realization that I had no idea where my underwear was.
For a few seconds I stayed beneath Wolf’s blanket with my eyes closed, trying to reconstruct the previous night from the evidence immediately available.
His pillow smelled like clean cotton and cigarettes.
His black shirt was twisted around my waist, leaving one bare thigh outside the blanket, and the floor beside the bed was empty except for the folded gray blanket he had slept on.
Wolf was already gone.
The memory returned in pieces after that. Water in my room. His mask coming off in the dark. His hand closing around my wrist when the nightmare pulled him awake. The balcony. The snake tattoo. The way he had looked at me when I used his own words about choice against him.
Nobody.
I had promised him nobody would hear about it, and daylight did not make the promise feel any less serious.
I sat up and checked the clock on his desk.
6:18. Sleeping on concrete clearly had not prevented Wolf from returning to his usual schedule, which felt unnecessarily committed to being difficult.
My wet clothes were gone from the locker door. In their place sat a folded pair of my black cargo pants, a bra, underwear and one of my own charcoal long sleeve shirts inside a clear plastic bag on the desk.
A note in Bear’s block handwriting had been stuck to the top.
DRY ENOUGH. YOUR ROOM STILL ISN’T. ?
I smiled.
The fact that Bear had walked inside Wolf’s room carrying my undergarments while I was dead asleep probably should have embarrassed me. Considering the alternative was walking downstairs in Wolf’s shirt with absolutely nothing underneath it, I decided Bear deserved his own holiday.
I dressed quickly, folded Wolf’s shirt over the back of his chair and hesitated before leaving.
The room looked almost exactly as it had when I came in, except his pillow was slightly dented and my damp underwear had left a faint mark on the metal locker door that would disappear once it dried.
Nothing about the space suggested what had happened in it.
That seemed appropriate for him.
The hallway smelled faintly of wet plaster.
Bear had opened a section of wall beside my room, exposing pipes and dark insulation while an industrial fan pushed air through the doorway.
My mattress had been removed entirely. The bed frame sat bare beneath the dripping sprinkler head, which somebody had wrapped in a towel until the replacement fitting arrived.
Jackal was crouched outside my door in sweatpants and a hoodie, staring into the opening like the wall had personally offended him. He looked over when I stepped out of Wolf’s room. His eyes went from me to the door behind me, then back to my face.
“Well. That’s fucking new.”
“We slept, Jackal.”
“I didn’t ask for the boring version.”
Bear’s voice came from inside the wall. “Leave her alone.”
Jackal leaned closer to the opening. “You aren’t even looking at us.”
“Don’t need to.”
I stepped around Jackal before the conversation gained momentum. “How’s the side?”
He straightened carefully.
“Still healing. Bear remains disappointed.”
“I’m disappointed you keep touching it,” Bear said.
Jackal looked at me. “See what I live with?”
“You got stabbed because you chased a courier through a parking garage. I’m not joining your union.”
“Anti-worker.”
I left Jackal to Bear before the lack of caffeine made me say something worse.
Downstairs, the compound had already forgotten that anyone had slept.
Raven occupied two screens with his curls still damp from the shower, Hawk stood near the kitchen drinking coffee while reading something on a tablet and Viper had taken over one end of the operations table with a dismantled optic in front of him.
Wolf stood beside Raven in black tactical pants and a fitted long-sleeved shirt, mask back in place, hair pulled away from his face with the zig-zag headband.
He looked exactly like Wolf again.
“Morning, Mercer.”
“Morning.”
I went to the coffee pot and picked the biggest mug I could find.
Raven waited until I poured a cup and walked back over before saying, “How’s the temporary housing situation?”
“Dry.”
“High praise.”
I leaned beside him. “What did the account do overnight?”
His expression changed enough that the remaining sleep left my head.
“Quite a bit, actually.”
Wolf stepped closer as Raven opened the transport account we had abandoned around midnight. The reimbursements from Strasbourg were still on one side, but Raven had added a second set of payments beneath them.
“The account holder is another shell,” he said. “I’m sparing you the name because I care about your happiness. What matters is what it pays for.”
“Drivers.”
“Drivers first. Then fuel cards, short-term van rentals and private security. Last night it paid two refrigerated vans for thirty-six hours of standby.”
I stopped with the coffee halfway to my mouth. “Where?”
Raven brought up a map of southwest Germany. A marker sat north of Freiburg and east of the Rhine, less than an hour from Strasbourg by road.
“Old cold-storage facility outside Offenburg,” Raven said. “Used to handle produce distribution. The current lease is held through the same shell that pays the transport account.”
Wolf looked at the payment list. “Why refrigerated vans?”
“Could be legitimate cargo,” Raven said. “Except the facility hasn’t filed commercial refrigeration use in almost two years, and the company on the lease has no registered food contracts.”
I moved closer to the screen. “Anything else?”
Raven opened a purchase history. “Bottled water in bulk. Disposable hygiene supplies. Cheap packaged food. Cleaning chemicals. Enough for far more people than the four employees officially attached to the property.”
The categories were ordinary enough to exist anywhere. Together, beside the driver payments and the standby vans, they made the back of my neck tighten. Bear came downstairs with plaster dust on one shoulder and joined us without asking for an explanation.
Raven moved the map wider.
“German police have already been asked to put eyes on it,” he continued. “No approach yet. Just traffic and exterior observation. Keller is running their side.”
I knew which Keller he meant before Raven opened the secure call. We had worked with Matthias Keller at Haus Eberhardt, close enough that I remembered his instinct to protect the rescued women’s privacy before I remembered any detail of the paperwork he carried.
His face appeared on Raven’s screen now, tired and clean-shaven, with short salt-and-pepper hair combed back from his forehead and faint lines carved around his eyes that made him look older when he wasn’t smiling.
He had a straight nose with a square jaw beginning to soften with age, and the collar of a dark jacket visible at the bottom of the frame.
“Morning,” Keller said in English. “You found another terrible building for me?”
“Potentially,” Raven replied.
“I was hoping for fraud. Fraud has chairs.”
Bear pulled out a seat. “What do you have?”
Keller shifted the camera and brought up still images taken from across a service road.
The property looked larger than the satellite view suggested, a low industrial building with three loading bays and a taller refrigerated section behind it.
Faded blue lettering remained on one wall from whatever company had operated there before.
Two cameras covered the front drive. Another pointed toward a side personnel door.
“Three vans entered between 0420 and 0510,” Keller said. “None left. One small truck arrived after six with food and bottled water. Driver stayed eleven minutes. We have two men outside who do not behave like warehouse staff.”
The next image showed one of them smoking beside a loading bay with a pistol visible beneath his jacket when the wind pulled the fabric open.
Wolf’s eyes hardened. “Any women?”
“No exterior movement. Curtains or coverings on every office window. Thermal from public road is poor because the old insulation is doing its job. But we have heat in sections that should be empty.”
Raven opened the Haus Eberhardt transfer schedule beside Keller’s images. Seventeen women had been moved before our raid. We had spent days trying to follow the routes after that, but several records ended with destination codes that never resolved to actual addresses.
I looked at one of the codes again.
“Wait.”
Raven glanced toward me.
I pulled the cold-storage property record closer and found the old facility designation in the municipal archive.
Building four had been listed as K-4 on historic equipment diagrams, shorthand for the refrigerated section.
The transfer list from Haus Eberhardt carried K4 beside six of the missing women.
My pulse changed.
“Raven. Put the old building plan next to the transfer sheet.”
He did.
K4.
K-4.
The matching code could not prove the destination by itself. The transport account had already given us the same road network, though, and I pointed toward the six entries.
“These women all left Eberhardt in the same block. Their destination is K4. If Cerberus shortened the facility code instead of using an address, this could be where they went.”
Keller leaned toward his camera. “How many?”
“Six on this sheet. Possibly more from other sites.”
Wolf looked toward Raven. “Can you connect the vehicles?”
“Working.”
Keller’s radio sounded offscreen. He turned, listened to someone in German and answered before looking back at us.
“Another van. Same rental group as one from Eberhardt evidence. Plate is different.”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds. The room did not need help understanding what that meant.
Wolf pointed toward the map. “Keep the observation outside the perimeter. Nobody spooks them.”
Keller nodded. “Already told my people.”
“Medical standby?”
“I can stage it once we have authority. Prosecutor will want more than suspicious groceries and one rental company.”