Chapter 16
Rook
Icalled them to the table before the hour. We sit without ceremony because a table in this house has always been the simplest way to show control. Chairs placed, positions known, roles unchanged. The rain keeps time on the panes. The city is mute below us, distant.
They arrive like pieces of the machine each with their own temper.
Wraith is the first—silent, solid, the kind of presence that clamps the room’s edges.
Ash drifts in like smoke and electronics, carrying his quiet with an analytics’ weight.
Vale comes in loud, practiced mischief on his face.
Saint arrives last, sleeves rolled, hands with the soft callus of a man who’s both sinner and caretaker.
Ember’s chair is empty at the opposite side of the table. I don’t comment on that. The absence carries enough rumor.
“Report,” I say simply.
Ash is clinical. “I’ve rechecked the feeds tonight. Her actions in the bedroom sequence are inconsistent with simple trauma—there are pauses, measured breath control, a suppression pattern in autonomic response. She can manage her parasympathetic reflexes. That’s training, Rook.”
“Training for who?” Vale asks flatly. “MI5? Her brother’s book club?”
“Field tradecraft,” Ash says. “Ops-level conditioning. Definitely not a bloody amateur, that’s for sure. Possibly run through an institutional handler at some point.”
Wraith shifts, leaning forward until his elbows are flat on the table. “So she’s more than a witness,” he says. “You’re saying maybe even a spy?”
“I’m saying she’s not a bystander,” I correct. “And whether she was planted for the Riders, for someone else, or simply survived a covert life doesn’t change the fact that she’s a variable we need to decide what to do with. A dangerous one.”
Vale snorts. “Dangerous because she looks like she could seduce a nun into sin? Give me a break.”
“You always want to break things first,” I tell him. “That’s why you’re useful and why you’re a problem.”
He bristles but smiles. “I like the sound of that.”
Saint folds his hands together like a prayer he hasn’t yet recanted. “If she has been trained, we must consider the motive. People don’t spend time on assets for sport. There’s an objective. Someone wanted eyes inside our circulation. We need to know which eyes.”
Wraith rubs the back of his neck. “I ran Poplar again. Silence, bloody fools. Men who once worked with Owen close up like scales. Either someone higher is telling them to lie, or Owen was never what we thought he was. Both are bad.” His voice tightens on the final word.
“Who answers to them?” Vale asks. “Who’s above the Syndicate and the docks that makes them hush?”
Ash’s green eyes catch light. “It could be a state player,” he says. “Foreign handlers have ways to move lines. But there’s another vector… Domestic—someone in our own institutions who prefers to watch the house burn from a safe distance.”
Saint’s mouth becomes thin. “Collusion between the state and syndicates is ugly but not uncommon. If someone wants us weakened, they feed us breadcrumbs we can’t build a ladder from.”
“What I asked you to find,” I say, gnashing my teeth together. “Is proof. Not conjecture, not bravado. Proof.” My voice trims the edges off whatever theatrical impulses Vale was nursing.
Wraith’s face hardens. “We trace payments. We check cross-border manifests. We take Saint’s shipping manifests and Ash’s backdoors and work the timeline until it bleeds.”
“That’s a lot of moving parts,” Vale says. “And a lot of time.”
“No,” I say. “It’s what we do.” I let the sentence hang in the air like an executioner’s ax.
Ash taps a key. “There’s one anomaly. The warehouse I pulled feeds from last month—there’s a gap in the metadata. Ten minutes of footage are missing on certain nodes. Not a camera glitch. A deliberate wipe.”
“Who deleted it?” I ask.
Ash’s fingers hover over the keyboard like a man who could answer but chooses his language.
“Unknown. Source obfuscated. The purge appears to have been done from within our network at a time when the node registered admin activity tied to internal credentials. Signature forgery, possibly. Whoever did it covered their tracks.”
Wraith’s jaw works. “That’s not perfect cover. That’s arrogance.”
“Or access,” Saint says. “Someone with keys.”
I stare at each of them in turn. Vale’s face is a mask of impatience, Ash’s expression is undetermined, and Saint looks like a man cataloguing sin for some bleak sermon. Wraith? He fucking looks like a man remembering how to swallow his anger and make it useful.
“Containment,” I say. “We tighten the perimeter, it’s the only way.
No solo walks, no unsupervised calls, no visitors.
Ash, you run a full audit on internal credentials and access logs.
Root out admin-level anomalies. Wraith, shadow her movement.
Not to suffocate—observe. If she reaches for seduction, you pull away before she hands anything she shouldn’t.
Vale—keep him entertained. Don’t give him a reason to go rogue. I don’t want fireworks.”
Vale bark-laughs. “Oh, but fireworks are my specialty.”
“You will curtail them,” I say flatly, wholly unamused by his antics.
“Delightful,” he says, muttering in spanish under his breath.
Saint inclines his head. “I will take the garden watch this afternoon. Conversation can soothe, and I am persuasive in my ways.”
“You’ll be enough of a buffer,” I answer. “But remember… Everything Saint offers is a door. Don’t hand out the fucking keys.”
He smiles in a way that makes me think of confessionals and knives folded in silk. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
I fold my fingers. “We find the drive. She’s got to have it stashed somewhere close. Whoever’s manipulating routes and payments? We find them. If you trace the money, you trace the hand. If we don’t have that by week’s end, we escalate. No more patience.”
Wraith’s voice is slow. “And Ember?”
“She’s contained for now,” I say. “More observations. More checks. And if she’s a weapon, we decide whether to disarm or to use. But we do not—” I look at Vale, “—we do not act on impulse.”
Vale grins, sharp and tired. “Suits me.”
A brittle laugh from Ash. “I’ll run the logs and set tripwires. If anyone touches those nodes again, I’ll know.”
“You won’t tell me the deletion was internal,” I say, watching him for any sign of betrayal.
He meets my gaze head on, voice never once wavering. “If I find a signature, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Good.” I stand. The room tightens as I rise. It always does. Presence becomes order.
Before we break, I let silence sit on the table for a moment longer than necessary. They all feel it—the shape of a house that might burn if you light it wrong.
“Keep this tight,” I say finally. “No loose tongues. No theatrics. We’re not a circus. We are a knife.”
They nod in different ways. Wraith with a grunt, Vale with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, Saint with the tilt of a prayer, Ash with an almost invisible hand movement across the console.
I leave them to their methods.
In the hallway outside my office I pause, fingers on the wood of the banister. Ember’s chair is still empty. My mind returns to the man I ordered to be taken in the night. My thumb presses a groove into the banister until my knuckle hurts.
If she is an operative, if someone planted her to burn me—then I will find them. If she’s a woman who can unmake a life with a look, then I will decide whether to break her or bend her to my cause.
Either way, I have choices now.
And I am not a man who gives away the advantage.