Chapter 20
TWENTY
Rowan
The call came in on a burner phone Stephen had specifically routed through a server in Reykjavik to strip the geolocation data.
"Mitchell King," Juno said, staring at the caller ID like it was a live grenade. "He wants you."
"Of course he does," Stephen said, not looking up from his laptop. "He smells blood in the water. The King Report isn't journalism, Rowan. It’s a televised gladiator match where the lions are fed Red Bull and the Christians are given microphones that cut out intermittently."
"It's a kill box," Mateo rumbled from the window. He was checking the street again. He had been checking the street every seven minutes for the last twelve hours. "No exits. Hostile terrain. High probability of an ambush."
I looked at the phone vibrating on the table.
Mitchell King. The man who had ended the career of the Home Secretary last year with a single, perfectly timed eyebrow raise. If I went on his show, I wasn't just stepping into the light; I was stepping into the sun.
"We decline," Mateo said. "We hold the perimeter."
"We accept," Juno countered.
The room went still. Mateo turned slowly, his eyes dark.
Juno didn't flinch. He was currently scentless, his blockers cranked high, but his posture was fluid, aggressive. He tapped the screen showing the social media metrics.
"The Anchor Protocol is trending, but the narrative is fraying at the edges," Juno explained, his voice clinical.
"Vance is pushing the 'radical extremist' angle hard.
If Rowan stays silent now, she looks like she's hiding.
She looks guilty. To make the Protocol stick, she can't just be a viral moment. She has to be a leader."
"A leader doesn't walk into a trap," Mateo growled.
"A leader walks into the trap and dismantles the mechanism," Juno said. He looked at me. "Can you handle him, Rowan? Can you sit in the chair and not bleed?"
I looked at the phone. I thought about Illyana, silent in Manchester. I thought about the thousands of messages in my inbox.
"I don't bleed," I said, reaching for the phone. "I negotiate."
I picked up.
The conversation took four minutes. I didn't ask for questions in advance, King wouldn't give them anyway. I asked for structure.
"Live broadcast," I told the producer on the other end.
"No pre-record. No edits. I want a hard out at eighteen minutes.
And my legal counsel, Mr. Ashcroft, will be in the control booth.
If your audio feed to my earpiece cuts out?
He cuts the fiber optic cable to your transmitter.
Yes. That is a threat. No. I am not joking. "
I hung up. My hands were shaking, just a tremor in the pinky finger.
"Eighteen minutes," I said to the room. "Tomorrow night. Prime time."
"It’s a mistake," Mateo said, though he was already moving to the equipment locker, pulling out ballistic gear.
"It’s necessary," Juno said.
But Juno wasn't looking at me. He was looking at his secondary monitor, where a script was running a deep-dive diagnostic on a network anomaly.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Noise," Juno murmured, frowning. "I'm picking up fragments from the intercept again. Meridian Creative."
"The deepfake farm?" Stephen asked, closing his laptop.
"They're moving terabytes of data," Juno said. "Biometric synthesis. Voice mapping. I can't see the output file, just the size of the render. It’s massive."
"Is it a hit piece on me?" I asked.
"The timeline disrupts that theory," Juno noted, tapping his chin. "Deepfakes of this fidelity take weeks to render. You’ve been a target for days. Vance couldn't have spun this up fast enough to counter the interview tomorrow unless he started..."
He trailed off.
"Unless he started before the stadium," Stephen finished.
The silence that followed was heavy. The idea that Vance had a weapon in the chamber that preceded my "accident" with the hot mic was terrifying. It meant the trap was older than we thought.
"We flag it," Juno decided, though I saw the tension tighten the corners of his eyes. "We keep moving. If we stop to chase ghosts, we lose the momentum on the interview."
"Right," I said. "The interview."
We spent the next six hours turning the living room into a studio.
Stephen took the role of Mitchell King. I expected him to be clinical, reading questions off a pad. I didn't expect him to be good.
He sat opposite me, loosening his tie, slouching in his chair with a predatory indolence that perfectly mimicked King’s signature style. He didn't just ask questions; he baited hooks.
"So, Ms. Quill," Stephen drawled, peering over his glasses with a sneer that was uncomfortably accurate. "You claim to speak for the downtrodden masses of the industry. Interesting position for a woman who charges fifteen percent on gross plus VAT. Tell me, is the martyrdom billable?"
I blinked. "That... okay, that was good."
"Don't compliment the enemy," Stephen snapped, staying in character. "Answer the question. Use the aggressive pivot."
"I don't bill for martyrdom, Mitchell," I shot back, finding my rhythm. "I bill for competency. Something your researchers might want to look into."
"Defensive," Stephen-as-King noted, circling something on his pad. "You're angry. The camera hates anger on a Beta female. It reads as hysteria. Try again. Colder."
We went again. And again.
Mateo stood in the corner, playing the role of the hostile studio audience/security threat. Every time I stumbled, he made a sharp, rhythmic noise against the wall, a distraction simulation.
By the third hour, my brain felt like it had been run through a shredder.
"He’s going to bring up your father," Stephen said suddenly.
I froze. "What?"
"The missing years in your CV," Stephen said, dropping the King persona for a second. "Between university and your first firm. You were caring for him during the hospice phase. You didn't work. King will frame it as a gap in competence. He'll ask if you 'cracked' under the pressure of family duty."
"That’s..." I swallowed hard. "That’s low."
"It’s King," Stephen said. "He’ll go for the throat. Pivot."
"I... I can't pivot that. It’s personal."
"Make it structural," Juno called out from the kitchen, where he was pretending to ignore us while monitoring the Meridian data feed.
"Your father didn't die because of pressure.
He died because the NHS hospice care was underfunded by the same government King supports.
Don't defend your grief, Rowan. Attack the system that made the grief harder. "
I looked at them. The lawyer, the bodyguard, the manipulator. They were taking apart my life and reassembling it into armor.
"Okay," I said, taking a breath. "Go again."
Stephen leaned forward, the sneer returning. "Let's talk about 2015, Rowan. You vanished. A breakdown?"
"A sabbatical," I said, my voice steady. "To study the ultimate efficiency of the healthcare system. Which, incidentally, has better retention rates than your production staff, Mitchell."
Stephen paused. The corner of his mouth twitched. The King persona cracked, just for a second, revealing the man underneath who was desperately proud of me.
"Good," he whispered. Then, louder, "Again. And stop fidgeting with your ring finger. You aren't married to the job."
I laughed. It was a sudden, sharp sound that surprised me. "I'm married to the paperwork, Stephen. You know that."
The laughter did something to the room. It broke the seal on the vacuum we had been living in. Mateo stopped hitting the wall. Juno looked up from his screen. Stephen finally took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, dropping the act entirely.
"We have the pivots," Stephen said, his voice hoarse. "You're ready."
"I'm terrified," I admitted.
"Terror is fuel," Mateo said. "Just don't flood the engine."
By 2:00 AM, the adrenaline had soured into exhaustion, but nobody moved toward the bedrooms. The bedrooms felt too solitary. Too far apart.
We ended up on the living room floor.
It wasn't a decision. It was a gravitational collapse.
I sat with my back against the sofa, knees pulled to my chest. Stephen was lying on the rug next to me, one arm thrown over his eyes to block the ambient city light coming through the window.
Juno was curled in the armchair above us, staring at the ceiling.
Mateo sat against the opposite wall, legs stretched out.
"If this goes wrong tomorrow," I said quietly, addressing the darkness. "If King destroys me...the Protocol still stands, right? You released the data."
"The signal is out," Stephen murmured from the floor. "You can't put the ink back in the pen."
"Vance will try," Mateo said. "He’ll burn the paper."
"He can burn the paper," Juno said, his voice drifting down from the chair like smoke. "But he can't burn the memory. We gave them a story where they win. People don't forget that."
I rested my head on my knees. I looked at the shapes of them in the gloom.
I thought about the "ANCHOR" written in red marker on their wrists. I wondered if they had scrubbed it off yet. I hadn't checked. I didn't want to know.
We were risking everything. Stephen's license. Mateo's standing. Juno's entire network. And for what? A mid-level manager who got caught on a hot mic?
"Why?" I asked. "I know we talked about the strategy. But this... sitting on the floor in the dark waiting for the executioner... this isn't strategy. This is personal."
Nobody answered for a long moment.
"I tried to save someone once with a checkbook," Stephen said, his voice flat. "It didn't work. Law is cleaner when you use it as a sword."
"I got tired of watching," Mateo rumbled.
"I just like the fire," Juno said, though his voice lacked its usual spark. It sounded tired.
I looked at them. The pile of us. A makeshift barricade against a world that wanted to consume us for spare parts.
"I'm glad I met all of you," I said. My voice felt small, but sturdy. "Whatever happens tomorrow. Even if I crash and burn on live TV. I'm glad I had this."
The silence that followed was heavy, but it wasn't empty. It was filled with the things we couldn't say because we didn't have the contracts for them yet.
Nobody had an honest answer that wouldn't break the fragile peace we’d built. To say me too was to admit that this was temporary. To say I love you was to admit that the stakes were fatal.
So nobody said anything.
Stephen’s hand moved on the rug, sliding inches until his pinky finger brushed against my ankle. He didn't grab. He just rested there. Contact.
Mateo closed his eyes, his head tipping back against the wall, trusting the room enough to sleep.
Juno shifted in the chair, dropping a hand down until it dangled near my shoulder.
We fell asleep like that. A pile of people who had spent their lives building fortresses, finally realizing that the only walls that mattered were the ones made of bone and breath.
Tomorrow, we would go to war. But tonight, the floor was hard, the room was dark, and I was exactly where I belonged.