34. Knox
Knox
He opens the door two inches and immediately regrets it.
I can tell from his face.
Marek Sava keeps a low profile for a reason. Third-floor apartment in a building no one notices, no name on the buzzer, no lights left on near the windows, no habits regular enough to map if you’re looking from the outside.
He’s a Saint, like us, but instead of going on missions, he takes care of tech-related stuff, working behind the scenes.
His hand stays on the door, trying to keep the gap narrow. “This is a surprise.”
Havoc puts his palm flat against the door and pushes.
Marek plants his feet for half a second, then Vale shoulders in beside him, and the door gives. Marek stumbles backward into the apartment with a curse, and we follow him in before he can decide whether to shout.
“We’re closed,” he says.
“We need some help,” I tell him.
He looks from me to Vale to Havoc and understands all at once that this is not social.
The apartment is small and careful. Desk against the far wall. Curtains drawn. Three burners on the stove, none used tonight. Router lights blinking under a shelf. Everything arranged for a man who spends a lot of time watching other people’s mistakes and very little time making his own.
“Do you make a habit of breaking into places when you want favors?”
“Only the places of people who might say no,” Havoc says.
Marek glares at him. “Charming.”
“No,” Vale says, voice flat. “Urgent.”
That gets him to really look at us.
He says, more carefully, “What happened?”
I open my mouth. For one second, nothing comes out.
We had cleared the house first. Every room.
Every door. Every blind corner. Havoc took the upper floor with Vale while I hit the downstairs again because I didn’t trust my own eyes anymore.
We checked bathrooms, closets, under beds, behind curtains, window locks, every useless square foot of polished floor and rich silence.
No Lena.
At first I told myself she had moved. That she was in another room and one of us had missed it in the panic.
Then I went back to the bedroom.
The bed was wrong. Not ruined. Not torn apart. Just wrong. One side of the blanket folded back too neatly. The air still carrying that faint chemical sweetness beneath sex and sleep and steam. I could smell it before I wanted to admit what it was.
Chloroform.
Havoc found the hidden seam in the wall paneling beside the built-in wardrobe. Vale forced it open. Behind it, a narrow stairwell dropped into darkness, unfinished wood and concrete, service architecture disguised inside the room like the house had been built for this from the beginning.
On the third step down, there was a bracelet.
Lena’s.
Small. Bent at the clasp where it had caught on something. Still warm from the room above or my imagination, I couldn’t tell which.
That was how they got in. That was how they took her.
Right out of the middle of us.
I picked up that bracelet and knew, with a certainty so complete it felt like being hollowed out, that we had not merely been found. We had been mapped. Studied. Positioned. Someone knew where she would be and how to reach her without waking the rest of us in time.
Someone set us up.
And all I could think, standing there with her bracelet in my hand, was that I had failed her.
I had let myself believe one locked door and one night’s trust could hold against whatever was coming.
I had kissed her and told her I’d keep her safe, and somewhere between that promise and sunrise the floor had opened beneath us.
Marek says, “Knox.”
I blink and the apartment comes back into focus.
Marek is still standing three feet inside his own doorway, looking from one of us to the other like he’s trying to decide whether throwing us back out is worth the attempt.
It isn’t. We all know it. Havoc is already too far in, leaning one shoulder against the wall like he belongs here.
Vale is quiet beside me, bruised face unreadable in the low light.
I can still feel the edge of the empty bed in my hands, the shape of the hidden stairwell, the bright little glint of Lena’s bracelet caught on splintered wood.
Marek says, “You all look terrible.”
“We need help tracking someone,” I say.
That gets his full attention. “Someone,” he repeats. “Who?”
A dozen answers move through my head at once. The girl who has come to mean so much to me, the one person I’ve let in for the first time in my life.
What I say is, “Someone important.”
Marek studies my face for a moment, and something in his own shifts. Not understanding, not yet. Just caution. “I didn’t know you were currently on an active mission.”
I glance at Vale. Then Havoc.
They both catch it. The smallest look. Enough.
The less Marek knows, the better.
Havoc answers for us, easy as ever. “You know how it is. Things get messy.”
Marek doesn’t look convinced. “That’s not an answer.”
“No,” Havoc says. “It’s the one you’re getting.”
Marek’s mouth goes flat. He doesn’t like being handled, but he dislikes uncertainty less than he dislikes the three of us showing up smoke-stained and desperate at his door.
Vale says, quieter, “We don’t need you in the whole thing. We just need eyes.”
Marek exhales through his nose and finally moves toward the desk. “I hate all of you.”
“That makes four of us,” Havoc mutters.
Marek shoots him a look, then pulls out the chair and flips open his laptop. The screen lights up his face in cold blue. “Start talking.”
I step up behind him with Vale and Havoc on either side, all three of us gathering around the desk close enough that the room feels smaller. Marek’s fingers hover over the keys.
“Address,” he says.
I give it to him.
He types it in, expression tightening slightly as the map resolves. “Residential.”
“CCTV footage,” I say. “Anything can help. Street cams, traffic cams, private systems on neighboring houses, delivery cameras, security feeds. We don’t care how small it is. We need movement in and out.”
He starts working. Windows open. A grid of maps, municipal feeds, private networks he definitely should not have access to.
I stand behind his chair with both hands braced on the backrest so hard my knuckles ache.
Havoc leans in on one side, Vale on the other, the three of us bent toward the screen like if we get close enough something useful will appear faster.
Marek is halfway through pulling up the first street feed when the laptop screen cuts to black.
One second there are maps and camera grids and system windows layered over each other, and the next there’s nothing but a dark screen reflecting the four of us in warped outline.
Marek stops typing. “What the hell?”
A shape begins to resolve out of the black.
Not a full face. More like a man seated somewhere with no light behind him, only enough illumination to catch the edge of a jaw, the line of a collar, the stillness of someone entirely unbothered by the fact that he has just taken over another man’s computer.
My whole body goes tight.
The voice that comes through the speakers is calm, male, and old enough to sound dangerous for it. “Marek.”
Marek goes white. He’s out of his chair so fast it nearly tips over behind him. “I’m sorry,” he says at once. “I didn’t know this line was being monitored, I wasn’t told, I didn’t mean to overstep.”
Havoc and Vale say nothing.
I can feel both of them go as still as I am.
The figure on the screen shifts slightly. “You have not overstepped,” he says. “Sit down.”
Marek doesn’t sit. He looks like a man trying to decide whether standing is disrespectful or collapsing would be worse.
Havoc says, under his breath, “Well.”
Vale doesn’t answer.
Neither do I.
Because this is not normal, even by our standards.
The figure seems to know exactly what he’s doing to the room by appearing this way. He lets the silence lengthen just enough, then says, “You are wondering whether I am who I claim to be.”
Havoc tilts his head. “And who might that be?”
The man on the screen answers without pause. “Andrew.”
My gaze cuts over him, to the blood-red signet ring on his left hand.
Holy shit. I see Havoc’s face. He’s thinking the same thing I am.
An Apostle. Not a rumor. Not a name routed through orders and older men and chain-of-command distance. An actual Apostle looking back at us through Marek’s stolen signal like he reached down and tore a hole in the whole machine just to get in front of us directly.
Marek recovers first, barely. “I’m sorry,” he says again, quieter this time. “I didn’t realize.”
Andrew inclines his head once, not kindly, not cruelly. Just enough to show he heard him. “You were not meant to,” he says.
Marek looks like he wants to disappear into the wall. Instead he stands there, hands useless at his sides, waiting for instruction like a man who knows better than to speak again unless spoken to.
Andrew’s gaze shifts, and even through the screen I can feel it settle on the three of us.
“Marek,” he says, “leave us alone for a few minutes.”
Marek doesn’t argue. He nods once and backs out of the room so quickly it would almost be funny in any other life.
The door closes.
No one speaks. Not because there are no questions. Because none of us has quite caught up yet.
Havoc is the one who finds his voice first. Of course he is.
“Well,” he says softly. “This is new.”
Andrew ignores that too. “You were right to be cautious,” he says. “The message that reached you after the fire was not from me.”
The room goes colder.
Vale steps closer to the desk. “What?”
“With respect,” Havoc says, and for once even he sounds careful, “that insight would’ve been more useful earlier.”
Vale cuts him a look sharp enough to draw blood. I don’t take my eyes off the screen.
The figure does not react to the tone at all.
“You were sent to the mansion by someone using my name,” he says. “I did not summon you there.”
Every bit of air in the room seems to leave at once.
Vale is the one who says it first. “What?”
The Apostle continues as if the interruption changes nothing.
“I did not send an initiate to the fire scene. I did not authorize contact through that channel. Whatever message reached you was false.”
All of it fake. Fuck.
Havoc lets out a breath that sounds almost like a laugh, except there’s no humor in it. “That’s very bad.”
“Yes,” the Apostle says. “It is.”
My hands are still gripping the back of Marek’s chair. I force them to loosen. “Someone knows enough about the Brotherhood to forge an Apostle’s message.”
“Yes.”
Vale’s face has gone flat in a way I only see when he’s close to real anger. “How?”
“That is one of several questions you do not currently have time to pursue.”
I hate the truth of that. I hate even more that he says it like he has every right to decide what matters most in our lives.
Still, I ask the only thing that matters now.
“Lena.”
The figure inclines his head once. “She is alive.”
I close my eyes for half a second and open them again.
Beside me, I hear Vale’s breath leave him. Havoc says nothing at all.
The Apostle goes on. “She was taken to a holding site used in the past for temporary storage. It’s not an official Brotherhood location now, but it was once known to a very small circle. I’m giving you an address.”
As if on cue, my phone pings with GPS coordinates from an unmarked number.
I read it once. Then again. Then commit it so hard to memory it feels carved in.
Vale says, “Why tell us directly?”
The Apostle is quiet for a moment.
Then: “Because if the false message reached you, your movements are already being studied. Because if someone can imitate an Apostle well enough to manipulate you like this, internal channels are compromised beyond what I’m willing to test. And because if you report what you are about to do through the usual lines, she will be moved before you arrive. ”
Havoc is the first to recover. “So, we trust no one.”
“For now,” the Apostle says, “you trust no one you do not see with your own eyes.”
Havoc steps closer to the desk. “Why should we trust you? We haven’t seen you either.”
It’s a dangerous question. It’s also the right one.
The figure on the screen does not bristle. Does not punish him for it. “I wouldn’t be here helping you out if I was involved.” Then he says the obvious part out loud. “Whether or not this is a trap is for you to decide.”
I ask, “Who took her?”
“If I were certain,” he says, “this conversation would be shorter.”
Vale steps closer to the desk. “Then what do you know?”
“That she’s alive. That she was moved quickly. That the location I’m giving you has been used before to hold people temporarily. And that whoever sent you to the estate was counting on your uncertainty.”
Havoc folds his arms. “That narrows things down to only everyone.”
Andrew doesn’t react to the sarcasm. “You are being watched,” he says. “Whether closely or not, I can’t yet say. But anyone able to use my name convincingly has access to structure, timing, and enough confidence to act on both.”
Havoc looks at the address again. “And you’re sure she’s there.”
“I am sure she was taken there,” Andrew says. “Time determines the rest.”
That’s as far as he’ll go. Now it’s our turn.
I make the decision in that space. I look up at my brothers, my fellow Saints. “Let’s go get our girl.”