Chapter Fourteen
I DON’T REALIZE I’ve been holding my breath until her last word lands and it feels as if the world around us goes silent.
The tea has gone officially cold, the couch now somehow feels scratchier compared to when we sat down.
I can’t control my emotions. Anger, grief, helpless fury, it all comes and goes across my heart and my face.
I take Surry’s empty cup, set it down, and lift her—an easy scoop, one arm under her knees, one at her back.
She’s light, but the weight of what she said hangs off her like wet wool.
I just sit there with her, letting her collect her thoughts, and deciding on what she wants to say next. But nothing comes. Not yet.
I carry Surry out. The hallway is cool and dim; the old plaster swallows sound. She doesn’t cry—she’s far past tears—but her hands are fisted in my shirt, not tight, just… anchored. Like if she lets go she’ll float away.
“I’m not leaving,” I say, finally. Simple. Not eloquent. The only sentence that matters.
She nods once against my chest.
Time passes in the way it does after a storm: quietly, the world remembering itself.
Richie drifts by the doorway and doesn’t enter, but he taps the frame twice—our version of a salute—before fading back into the murmur of the house.
Somewhere deeper in the Compound, Hazel’s laugh sparks and dies, a bright flare swallowed by distance.
Joshua’s voice rumbles on the back terrace; I hear the thunk of a kettle bell hitting packed earth. The place breathes.
When Surry finally lifts her head, there’s resolve in her eyes that wasn’t there this morning. Not the brittle kind. The forged kind. She slides off my lap, straightens my collar like she’s smoothing the world back into place, and says, “I want a shower.”
“I’ll walk you up.”
“Walk me to the stairs,” she corrects gently. “I can do the rest.”
“Compromise.” I hold out a hand. “I will walk you up the stairs. Then I wait at the top.”
She almost smiles. “Bossy.”
“Accurate.” I wink at her, letting her know I’m serious, but I want to help lighten her mood.
We move. The big house turns golden as the sun angles down; dust motes float like lazy galaxies in the stairwell light. At the landing, she pauses, touch ghosting my jaw, gratitude and heat and something steadier flickering there.
“Thank you,” she says, and disappears down the hall.
I plant myself at the top step, shoulder to the newel post. I’m not guarding the hall to her room–she doesn’t need a sentinel so much as a witness. A few minutes later, Juniper peeks around the corner, sunglasses on indoors like she’s hiding from feelings.
“She okay?” she asks, voice carefully casual.
“She’s showering.”
“Right.” Juniper’s mouth quirks. “You should know Josh asked me to come check on you two, but… also to tell you he and Bridget are putting together dinner ‘for morale.’ His words.” She flexes her pointer and middle fingers in bunny ear quotations when she says for morale.
I smirk at her use of air quotes. “He’s learning.”
“He’s trying.” Her tone softens. “For what it’s worth, she did the hardest part today. It doesn’t fix things, but sometimes saying it out loud makes it smaller.”
“Sometimes,” I say. “Sometimes it makes it real.”
Juniper tips an imaginary hat and slips away. Water stops. Doors open. Footsteps pad. Surry returns in clean clothes—soft black leggings, one of my shirts she definitely stole, damp hair braided down her back. She looks like herself. Not the armor, not the silence—herself.
“Hungry? I guess Bridget and Joshua are making dinner” I tell her.
She hesitates, quirking a brow. Like at the combination of Bridget and Joshua and Dinner all in the same sentence. Then quietly but firmly says, “Only if you sit with me.”
“Non-negotiable.” I grin before grabbing her hand and leading us both toward the stairs.
Downstairs, the house is in that mellow evening swing where everyone is doing something and nothing at once.
Bridget has orchestrated a meal that smells of rosemary, butter, and therapy.
Richie’s cutting bread, he absolutely does not need to be trusted with that knife; Alisha hip-checks him out of the way thankfully.
Joshua pretends not to watch Juniper pretend not to watch him. Normal for them.
We don’t talk strategy at dinner. Bridget wouldn’t allow it.
She believes in “proper meals” the way field medics believe in tourniquets: you stop the bleeding first. Conversation finds air pockets that don’t hurt—Richie’s disastrously short “trucker tan,” Alisha’s claim that she can out-bench Joshua (she can’t, and the bet is set for tomorrow), Hazel’s latest conspiracy about one of the groundskeepers having a secret twin in the village.
Surry listens and eats, small bites, steady.
That’s a victory. I catalog it like numbers on a plan.
After, I check my phone. A single ping—Gunnar’s coded check-in: wheels up in thirty, back tomorrow if the trail holds.
He and Corver split leads at dawn; Arnie ran point into the nastier corners of the darknet afterward.
They’re pulling all threads that say Natasha.
We’re down a third of our muscle in exchange for the one person whose messages might unravel the whole thing. Worth it.
I show Joshua the screen. He nods. “War room after the kitchen’s put to bed?”
“Yeah.”
He jerks his chin toward Surry. “She gonna listen in?”
“If she wants.”
“She’ll want.” There’s zero doubt in his voice. “And she’ll catch the details we’ll miss. She’s smart.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
By the time the dishes are stacked and Bridget has chased everyone from her domain with a dish towel and a laugh, the sky is slate and the house is a low thrum of lamps and long shadows.
We take the big round table in the formal dining room—not for ceremony, for surface area.
Maps spread. Laptops open. A legal pad I’ll never admit is mine sits under my hand, pencil ready.
Joshua’s on my right, already booted into our secure line.
Surry curls into the chair to my left, legs tucked under, hair pulled over one shoulder.
She looks small, but she feels enormous in the room.
The encrypted call snaps hot and clear: one tone, then Gunnar’s low burr. “You alive, Slater?”
“Unfortunately,” I say. “You?”
“Equipments live. Leads are mean.” No hello, no wasted breath. “Arnie’s digging on a shell company that paid out to a transport outfit we’ve seen on two Russian manifests. Corv’s ghosting accounts that spin back to a network with three familiar IPs. Kelly isn’t hiding—he’s taunting.”
Joshua leans in. “Natasha?”
“Not yet,” Gunnar says. “But the chatter around her name spikes when we scrape an old Slavic forum tied to Brotherhood business. We’re on it in the morning, hard. For now: you tell me how our girl is.”
I don’t look at Surry when I answer. “She told us everything today. He needs to die, but by my hand, or hers, alone.”
Static hums. Then Gunnar’s voice goes softer, which isn’t a thing he often allows. “Copy. Then we adjust.” The command in his voice renews before he continues. “New plan: we make it cost him in pride before we take his body. Pride is his oxygen.”
“Walk it,” Joshua says.
We sketch. Fast, precise. Corver breaks in once from the background—low and clipped—about an email reroute that bought him an address he shouldn’t have. Arnie’s laugh filters through, dark and pleased: “He bought a yacht through a cousin’s trash company. Of course he did. I can work with trash.”
I give them what we have here—security rotations, staff we trust, staff we question but keep anyway because Bridget swears by them. Surry listens without interruption, then taps the edge of the map.
She leans in like she’s laying out a fact, not a plan. “He won’t bring his own men near my family,” she says. “He’ll hire disposable crews—blokes who burn out fast. Look for tiny rentals, temporary trucks: that’s how he hides.”
The way she says it—clean, unhesitating—makes the entire table pause. She’s not guessing. She knows.
And I realize, not for the first time, that there’s an entire part of Surry O’Brien most people will never see.
I lean back, watching her trace lines on the map like she’s sketching muscle memory. Her finger moves through terrain, ports, supply roads—without hesitation.
“You’ve done this before,” I say quietly. Not a question, a clear observation.
Her eyes flick to mine, and for a breath, I catch a flash of the girl she used to be—before scars and smoke and bastards with too much power. Then the commander returns. “Papa trained us,” she says simply. “Not for fun, not for pride—because we had to know how to survive. His words.”
Her voice goes softer, almost distant. “When other girls were learning piano, Selene and I were learning trade routes. Smuggling lines. Which ports could move goods fast, which ones had customs officers you could buy with a favor or a promise. He called it ‘education.’ Said if the men in our family ever fell, it would be us who rebuilt from the ashes.”
Joshua’s pen stills. Gunnar grunts his approval through the comm. Even Arnie whistles low.
But she’s not done.
“When I married Gavin, he thought it was ornamental,” she continues, gaze steady on the map, continuing to make x’s and o’s.
“He never understood that I’d already been raised in a warzone—one with better manners, sure, but just as bloody underneath.
He’d talk business at dinner like I was furniture, but I was listening.
Every time he mentioned a name, a shipment, a port, I filed it away.
” She taps a point on the map. “That’s how I know this one.
He used to send cargo through here before he laundered the company into one of his Russian fronts.
He thought he was clever. But I know his routes. I know his patterns.”