19. Chapter 19
Grace
After three short days of trial prep, we were on a private jet heading for Chicago.
It felt like a sealed room hurtling toward judgment, upholstered in cream leather and quiet wealth, with the clouds below us lit faintly by a dying line of sun.
Engines murmured beneath the floor with disciplined force, so smooth I had to look out the oval window now and then to remind myself we were moving through the sky instead of waiting inside some expensive coffin with better lighting.
I sat beside Maksym.
A table sat between us and Lucia. Upon it sat an open folder, and she wore an expression that suggested mercy was not among the options she’d allow that evening.
Doc occupied the seat beside her, sleeves rolled to his forearms, a tablet placed on the table beneath his enormous hand.
He looked less like a man traveling to a hearing and more like a battlefield surgeon who had already triaged the room and found several people unlikely to survive their own stupidity.
Kazimir sat farther back with Devon. The King of Kings appeared carved from shadow and old law, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, hands relaxed, posture immaculate.
Devon had curled into the seat beside him in a soft sweater dress, thick socks tucked beneath her, pale hair coming loose from whatever halfhearted attempt had been made to contain it.
Her boots were tucked away somewhere near.
Nikolay and Maddie sat together across the aisle, shoulders touching.
Maddie’s hand lay in Nikolay’s, her fingers small against his, nails dark and glossy.
She had dressed in black lace under a fitted leather jacket.
Nikolay looked grave, composed, and deeply tired.
He also looked at her every few minutes as if checking that the universe had not yet attempted to take her again.
Bohdan lounged in the seat behind them, charming in the way only dangerous men could make relaxation seem like a tactical choice. Remy sat near him, heels crossed at the ankle, laptop bag at her feet.
Taras sat at the front of the plane—ever on guard, always the Shadow Hand of the Kozlovs.
No one pretended this was a normal flight.
Lucia lifted a stack of printed records and set them on the table.
The sound of paper against polished wood should not have felt ceremonial.
It did.
“We received confirmation from Doc’s man, Wrecker, before takeoff,” she said.
I leaned forward.
Maksym’s attention sharpened beside me, though he did not move. He had been quiet since we boarded. Not distant. Contained. There was a difference, and I was beginning to learn its edges.
Lucia spread the records with swift precision.
Bank transfers. Property holdings. Corporate registrations.
Escrow statements. Asset purchases. A familiar sickness moved through me, not because of the content itself, but because of the form.
Evil loved paperwork. Evil hid in numbered accounts, limited liability companies, procurement contracts, leases signed by men who would never personally open the doors they paid for.
Doc turned his tablet so I could see the screen.
“Wrecker pulled transfer logs out of three servers and one private ledger,” he said. “Don’t ask me how. He explained it twice, and I understood enough to know the man scares the hell out of computers.”
Despite myself, my mouth moved. “I like him already.”
Doc’s grin was brief. “He’d like you too. And his mate is better than he is.”
Lucia tapped one column with a manicured nail. “These are Phoenix-area real estate acquisitions tied to trusts that were layered through hospitality groups. Most human-facing records stop here.” She moved to the next page. “Wrecker did not stop here.”
“Good for Wrecker,” I said.
Maddie leaned forward slightly from across the aisle. “He’s really good at diggin’ where folks don’t want him.”
Remy’s smile was slow. “My favorite kind of man, professionally speaking.”
Bohdan lifted a hand. “I am wounded.”
“You are a different category of useful,” Remy said.
“I am uncertain whether to feel complimented.”
“You will survive the ambiguity.”
Under other circumstances, I might have laughed. Under these, the humor brushed the surface and sank.
I pulled the closest record toward me.
The names were different. The structure was not.
Layered entities. Related-party loans. Management companies that existed on paper only.
Shells owning shells owning shells, until the person at the center could stand in a room full of victims and claim he had no idea what happened inside properties he technically did not possess.
I had prosecuted men who thought complexity was innocence.
They were usually disappointed.
“These are sloppy,” I said.
Lucia’s eyes lifted. “Sloppy?”
“Not at the first level. At the first level, they look expensive. But deeper down, there’s repetition. Same registered agents. Same transfer timing. Same amounts broken just below reporting thresholds.” I tapped the paper. “That’s arrogance. Not sophistication.”
Maksym’s voice came low beside me. “Lucian has always been arrogant.”
“Yes,” I said. “But arrogance leaves fingerprints because it assumes no one cares to look closely.”
The cabin went quiet around that.
I did not look at Maksym. I could feel what the sentence had done to him. Not guilt, exactly. Something colder. Lucian had operated inside territories, councils, old vampire privilege, and all the while men and women had disappeared into houses with clean deeds and dirty rooms.
Lucia opened the laptop on the table.
The screen woke to a frozen image from what appeared to be a security feed. Grainy. Night. A loading bay behind a low building. Timestamp in the corner. A van backed toward a door.
My fingers went still on the paper.
Doc’s expression changed before Lucia pressed play. The humor vanished from him entirely, leaving only a man who knew how to stand near suffering without pretending it was smaller than it was.
“Grace,” Lucia said, and the use of my name rather than my title made me look at her. “You do not have to watch.”
A strange thing happened inside me then.
Fear rose first. Immediate. Animal. It knew before my rational mind did what might be on that screen.
It remembered white walls, polished floors, locked doors.
It remembered Lucian’s chair beside the bed.
It remembered hearing muffled crying once through a vent and spending three days trying to decide whether knowing another captive existed made the world better or worse.
Then the prosecutor rose after it.
Not louder.
Straighter.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
Maksym did not tell me not to. His hand moved beneath the table and rested palm-up beside my thigh.
Available.
I laid one of my palms upon his.
Not because I needed help. But because I was no longer alone.
Lucia pressed play.
The footage flickered once, then moved.
The loading bay door opened from the inside. A man stepped out first, tall and fair-haired, long blond hair tied neatly at the nape of his neck. Even in poor video, even at an angle, I knew him before his face turned.
My body recognized Lucian Devereaux as if terror had its own eyesight.
My jaw set so hard pain sparked near my ear.
He was dressed beautifully, of course. Dark coat.
Gloves. The posture of a man inconvenienced by logistics rather than participating in a crime.
Another elder stood near him, older in bearing, severe in profile, his face partially obscured by poor camera angle and shadow.
They spoke briefly. No sound. That made it worse, somehow.
Their gestures were calm. Discussing weather. Wine. Shipment.
The door behind them opened wider.
Two guards emerged, each holding a human by the arm.
The woman stumbled.
My hands pressed into Maksym’s. Hard. Harder. His fingers closed around mine. Present. Grounding.
The woman on the screen tried to turn her head toward something behind her. A guard shoved her forward. A man followed, thinner than he should have been, shirt hanging from his frame. Another woman. Another man. Four. Six. Eight.
The footage cut.
Another angle. Interior hallway. People being moved in a line. Some walked as if drugged. One struggled until the unnamed elder touched his face. The man went slack at once.
Compulsion.
My stomach turned.
I was not human anymore. My body no longer performed nausea quite the same way, but memory did, and memory had no respect for biology.
The footage cut again.
A transport vehicle. Doors open. Bodies loaded inside like cargo that happened to breathe. Lucian stood to one side, watching. At one point, he smiled at something the other elder said.
That smile.
I had seen that smile from a bed where chains bit my wrists.
Something in my vision narrowed.
Not darkness. Focus.
The video kept playing. More angles. More dates. Different properties. Same structures.
When the footage ended, Lucia did not close the laptop.
The final frame remained on the screen.
Lucian’s profile.
A woman being pushed past him.
His head turned away from her as if she were furniture.
No one spoke.
The plane moved through the dark with expensive serenity.
My throat worked once.
I heard it because the rest of me had gone very still.
Maksym’s hand remained where it was. Still. Present. He would have given me any version of himself I asked for in that moment.
I looked at the frozen image until Lucian became pixels again.
Then I looked at Lucia.
“How many are still in the properties?”
Her eyes changed.
Not surprise. Respect, perhaps. Or something adjacent to it.
“We do not know yet,” she said. “We have identified five active sites and two probable holding locations. Doc’s people and Remy’s wards team will move once the hearing begins.”
“Human numbers?”
“Unknown.”
“How many did the logs suggest?”
Doc answered. “Between twenty and sixty moved through the network in the last eighteen months. Could be more. Some entries were coded.”
The air left me slowly.
Twenty to sixty.
Not statistics. People.