19. Enley
Enley
I’m currently crouched behind a small utility shed about two hundred yards east of the facility, knees in the stiff, frost-covered grass.
The blue light from the screen makes my hands look weird in the dark, almost like they don’t belong to me.
The antenna’s clamped to the roof of the shed so I’ve got a clear shot to the facility’s security network and the encrypted channel linking me to all nine operators.
Render and I met up with the brAVO operators and Knight, and now they’re all on their way into the facility.
It’s freezing out here and dead silent. I can even hear the soft drone of the ventilation system from this far away.
Two hundred yards of empty ground sit between me and the chain-link fence.
Past that are the two buildings above ground, the covered walkway connecting them, and the underground levels where the six people I’ve been fighting for these past eight days are still locked in cells, with no idea we’re about to open the doors.
I key the radio. “Overwatch is live. All channels green.”
Knight’s voice comes back first. “brAVO in position. We’ll be at the fence line in ninety seconds.”
Diaz replies, “Eastern structure on approach. Two minutes to entry.”
Then Render says, “Stairwell’s clear. Holding for the mark.”
His voice in my ear is calm and professional. Controlled. You'd never guess it's the same voice that whispered my name against my neck just a couple of hours ago.
That version of him is gone for now, tucked safely behind the man who knows how to stay focused when lives are on the line. The man who crossed a storage unit in two strides and kissed me like he couldn't leave without doing it has given way to the operator.
I'm doing the same thing.
The woman sitting behind this terminal is the one who broke into security systems, unraveled an entire criminal network, and refused to quit no matter how impossible it looked. Not the woman who grabbed a man by the front of his shirt and kissed him back without a second thought.
Though I’m wearing his hoodie beneath my tactical jacket.
It still smells like him, and somehow that thought settles some part of me deep down to my core. Makes me feel brave.
One fifty-five. Five minutes left.
I run the system one final time. Everything comes back clean.
It’s staged and waiting for my command. When Render reaches the corridor on the second underground level and the lock that should open for him, I’ll send the signal through the facility’s own network.
The lock will open. The alarm won’t sound.
Six minutes of silence while the team pulls six people out.
That’s the plan.
One fifty-eight. Two minutes.
I open the evidence system. The complete Goldenbell financial map is ready—every account, every transaction, every connection from the public face of the company to Serafina’s private fortune.
It’s set to go out the moment Render’s signal registers inside the building.
Federal agencies, regulatory bodies, and Rowan, the journalist, will all receive it at the same time.
One fifty-nine. One minute.
My heart races hard enough that any security system would flag it as unusual. My hands stay steady. My breathing stays controlled. The screen in front of me is a silent constellation of green lights and waiting triggers. Everything’s in position. Everything’s ready.
“Mark,” Knight says.
Two o’clock.
The breach begins.
I hear it through the radio before I hear it through the air.
The sharp metallic snap of Knight’s bolt cutters on the fence, followed by the soft whisper of chain-link peeling back.
brAVO moves through the gap in pairs, boots soft on the frozen ground.
Diaz and her team approach the eastern building from the north side, staying inside the camera blind spot Knight mapped earlier.
“Fence is clear,” Knight reports. “Perimeter secure. Two external guards neutralized. Non-lethal.”
Diaz: “Eastern structure entered. Ground floor clear. Stairwell access in sight.”
Render: “Moving to stairwell.”
His signal crosses into the building’s range. The evidence system registers the trigger.
I send the package.
The complete financial map begins streaming to six recipients at once. It moves through the hidden layers we built and out into the open where people with the authority to act will find it waiting in their inboxes.
Goldenbell has maybe twelve hours before the freeze orders hit.
“Evidence deployed,” I report. “Delivery confirmed on all six channels.”
Render: “Copy. Entering stairwell. Descending to the first underground level.”
I watch the indicators on my screen. Nine green dots, each one a person moving through a building in the dark. Knight on the perimeter. brAVO securing the upper levels. Diaz holding the stairwell. Render going down.
Everything is working. The plan’s holding. The six-minute window is open and the team is moving through it with the kind of precision that comes from either long experience or careful training.
Then the facility’s security network does something I don’t expect.
It doesn't sound the alarm. It doesn't lock the system down. It simply asks an outside server one question: Is this supposed to be here? It wasn’t in any of the systems before.
The query goes out. A response comes back in a little over a second. That response carries an authorization code I’ve never seen before. And the code triggers a secondary security layer across the entire facility at the same time.
Oh shit.
Every lock in the building resets.
Doors that were open close. Doors that were closed lock.
The readers on the lower corridors cycle from standby to active, and when they come back online the authorized fingerprints they’ve been programmed to accept have been completely replaced.
Updated. Changed to a new set my system doesn’t recognize.
The key I made no longer fits the lock.
“Render,” I say into the radio. My voice stays steady because it has to. “The security network just cycled. All the fingerprint profiles have been refreshed. The system I built is no longer viable.”
Silence on his end for two seconds, and then he says. “I’m on the first underground level. The general holding area is right ahead. The door is locked. I think I can open it manually.”
“Do it. But the second-level corridor, Poe’s corridor—the fingerprint lock has been updated. I can’t open it remotely.”
“How long to rebuild with the new profiles?”
I look at the data on my screen. The new fingerprints are locked behind a type of encryption I’ve never seen before. It’s not standard. It’s not anything I encountered in Goldenbell’s network. It’s custom. Recent. Built specifically to stop the kind of approach I used.
Someone anticipated us. Someone knew what we were going to do and prepared a countermeasure.
The realization lands hard. I trace the verification request back through the network.
The outside server it contacted is registered to Nightwood Capital—the same entity I accessed through Margaux Delacroix’s trust account.
The same account I went through hours ago while Render was unconscious with a fever.
Serafina didn’t just notice my access to her financial network.
She used the pattern of that access to predict how we would attack the facility.
She saw the lock specifications in the data I pulled.
She saw the timing of my work relative to the guard schedules.
And she built a countermeasure that would activate the moment someone tried to use the information I’d gathered.
My choice. My access. My pattern. My fault.
“Enley.” Render’s voice is sharper now. “How long until you can rebuild it?”
“I... I don't know.” I swallow. “The new profiles are locked behind custom encryption. I have to crack that before I can rebuild the system. It could take ten minutes. It could take two hours. I won't know until I can see the whole structure.”
“We don't have two hours. Lockdown's already been triggered. Guards are mobilizing. Knight and brAVO are engaging the perimeter. I need that door open in five minutes, or I'm going through it the hard way. And if I do that, everyone in this building is going to know exactly where I am.”
Panic surges through me.
I force myself to breathe. Shit. Fuck. I can do this. I have to do this.
Five minutes.
Five minutes to crack encryption I've never seen before, rebuild an access profile from scratch with new biometric data, and push it through a security network that's been reinforced to stop exactly this kind of attack.
“I'm working on it,” I say.
“Work faster.”
The edge in his voice slips past the operational calm and lands somewhere deeper.
He's not angry with me. He's angry at the situation.
But the situation exists because of me. Because of a decision I made alone in that storage unit while he was unconscious.
That decision gave the enemy exactly what they needed to turn our entire plan inside out.
I should've seen it.
I should've realized using Margaux's account would leave a trail Serafina could follow.
I was so focused on finishing the financial map, so convinced the evidence justified the risk, that I never stopped to consider the obvious.
That gathering the evidence might destroy the operation it was supposed to protect.
The guilt hits like cold water—fast, sharp, and strong enough to pull me under if I let it.
I don’t let it. I can’t afford to. Render’s underground in a locked-down facility with guards converging on his position, and the only thing standing between him and Poe’s cell is an encrypted lock I have to open from two hundred yards away with a tablet, an antenna, and whatever I still have left in the part of my brain that solves impossible problems under impossible pressure.
I start breaking the encryption.
It’s layered. Three nested shells, each one protecting the next, each one requiring a different approach.
The outer layer is a standard cipher that yields to brute force in about ninety seconds.
The middle layer is more sophisticated. It’s a rotating key that changes every thirty seconds, forcing me to time my work exactly with the cycle.
Gunfire erupts on the radio. Knight’s channel: “brAVO’s engaged on the perimeter. Four guards, armed, coming from the western building. We’re holding but they’re organized.”
Diaz: “Stairwell’s secure but I’ve got movement on the first underground level. Someone’s coming up.”
Render: “I’ve opened the general holding area. Arrow, Gage, Ozzy, and Lark are here. Orchid’s not.”
Lark’s there. Knight’s on the perimeter fighting to keep the exit open, and the woman he loves is one floor below him being unchained by the man I love. The mix of tenderness and violence inside that building is almost impossible to wrap my head around.
“Poe?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. Even though the reason I’m asking is the reason the lock on his corridor is still sealed.
“Second level. Behind the door I can’t open.” His voice is controlled but the edge is sharper now. “Enley. The encryption.”
“I’m through the outer layer. Working on the rotating key. Sixty seconds.”
“You have forty. The guards Sawyer flagged are going to reach the stairwell in under a minute, and when they do the extraction route is compromised.”
Forty seconds. The key changes every thirty. I need to catch it at the exact moment of transition, in the tiny gap between the old key and the new one, when the system is resetting and the shell is briefly vulnerable.
I watch the cycle. Count the interval. Twenty-nine seconds. Thirty. The key rotates. The shell flickers.
I’m through.
The innermost layer is the simplest. I crack it in eight seconds.
The new fingerprint profiles are on my screen. I load them into the rebuilt system. Reconfigure the path. Test the handshake against the updated reader.
“System is rebuilt. Deploying now.”
The signal travels through the facility’s network. Reaches the reader on the second-level corridor. The reader accepts it. The lock opens.
“Door’s open,” Render says. And then he’s moving, his radio carrying the sound of boots on concrete and controlled breathing and the particular acoustic signature of a man heading down an underground corridor toward the last locked door between him and my brother.
I sit behind the shed with the tablet on my knees and the cold night air on my face and the guilt sitting in my chest like something heavy and sharp-edged and permanent.
The system worked. The door opened. The plan—damaged, improvised, held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape—is still moving forward.
But the reason it almost failed is me. The choice I made. The access pattern I created. The gap I opened in our own security that Serafina drove a countermeasure straight through.
When this is over, Render and I are going to have a conversation. But it won’t be the conversation we planned. It’s going to be about the cost of a decision I made alone and the consequences it almost had for everyone.
The radio crackles. More gunfire. Knight’s team engaging. Diaz holding the stairwell.
And underneath it all, steady and clear, Render’s voice: “I’ve got Poe. He’s alive. We’re moving.”
My brother is alive.
The tears I’ve been holding since the container finally come. I let them fall against the tablet screen where everything almost went wrong because of me, and I keep working through them because the extraction isn’t over and the guilt can wait but the radio can’t.
I keep working.