Chapter 4
CASSIAN
The rain has turned into a deluge. It hammers against the roof of the armored SUV.
I keep the speedometer locked at eighty.
The roads are slick, the oil and water mixing into a black mirror that reflects the passing streetlights.
I don’t feel the speed. In this vehicle, eighty feels like standing still.
The reinforced chassis absorbs the imperfections of the road, isolating me from the world outside.
The windows are tinted to illegal opacity, turning the city into a smear of charcoal and neon.
I glance in the rearview mirror.
The girl is slumped against the leather of the back seat. Her head lolls to the side, her breathing shallow. She’s been out for twenty minutes—the blood choke was clean, efficient.
Then, she shifts.
It starts with a gasp, sharp and ragged. Her eyes fly open, wide and unseeing for a second as her brain reboots. She tries to sit up, but the seatbelt locks across her chest. She tries to move her hands, but the plastic zip-ties bite into her wrists in front of her.
I watch the panic register in her eyes through the rearview mirror. She thrashes against the restraints, her movements clumsy.
“Where...” The word is a croak, her throat raw. She coughs, struggling for air. “Where am I?”
I don’t answer. I turn the wheel, guiding the massive car onto the highway on-ramp.
She looks at the back of my head, then at the locked doors. She realizes she is trapped.
“Please,” she whispers. The fight drains out of her, replaced by the desperate bargaining of a civilian staring at their own mortality. “My father... he’s a Judge. He’s important. If you want money...”
I don’t flinch. I don’t react.
I have a Judge of my own.
I treat her words like background noise. Everyone has a rich father when they are staring at a gun.
“He will pay you,” she stammers. “Whatever you want. Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone.”
I reach into the passenger seat and pick up her phone. I found it in her pocket earlier.
I hold it up. The screen lights up with a notification. I don’t read it. I don’t care who is calling. To me, it isn’t a communication device; it is a tracking beacon.
“No,” she gasps. “Wait—”
I lower the driver’s side window an inch. The wind is a high-pitched shriek.
“Don’t!” she screams, struggling against the seatbelt. “My father will—”
I squeeze my hand.
The device groans, the glass screen spiderwebbing under the pressure of my grip.
With a sharp crack, the chassis snaps in half, severing the battery connection.
I slide the broken pieces through the gap in the window.
They disappear into the night, scattering against the asphalt at eighty miles an hour.
I seal the window, cutting off the world outside.
“You don’t exist anymore,” I say.
She falls back against the seat, stunned. The finality of the action seems to break her. She turns away, pressing her forehead against the cold glass of the window, watching the city blur into streaks of light.
“Sit back,” I command. “It’s a long drive.”
I return my focus to the road, but my mind begins to disassemble the last twenty minutes, taking apart the encounter like a mechanic stripping an engine.
I replay the moment in the VIP Study. The shattered vase.
The water spreading on the floor. The way she stood there, clutching her chest, staring at the body of Elias Vane.
She was terrified, yes. But her eyes... they were assessing. Calculating.
She looked at me the way I look at targets. She cataloged the gun, the folder, the exit. That is not the behavior of someone who deals with flowers; that is the behavior of someone trained in situational awareness. Or perhaps someone who has seen violence before.
And her clothes. They’re expensive, but casual. Like she rolled out of bed. Who goes to a closed museum in the middle of the night in casual wear?
A florist, she said. I was fixing the flowers.
It’s a good cover story. Plausible, given the white hydrangeas scattered on the floor. But convenient.
Too convenient.
It’s the kind of cover story the Syndicate would cook up because it’s boring. Nobody looks twice at the help. Nobody suspects the gardener, the maid, the florist. They are invisible.
If she is a florist, she has the worst luck in the history of this city.
But if she isn’t...
My paranoia—the instinct that has kept me alive for five years while other Dons ended up in graves or cells—starts to spin a different narrative.
Theory One: She’s the lookout. Elias was the bomber; she was the spotter coming in to check the device. That explains the timing and the lack of screaming.
Theory Two: She’s with the Syndicate. Kirill and Volkov’s faction has been probing my borders for months. Maybe they sent her to retrieve Elias’s folder, she saw me, and realized she was burned. The helpless civilian act is the oldest trick in the book.
I reach for the secure phone on the center console. I need to close the loop.
I dial Varro.
He picks up on the first ring.
“Status,” I say.
“Shipment is secure,” he replies. “We’re holding at the port until tomorrow night. What’s the situation?”
“New objective.” I keep my eyes on the road, my peripheral vision locked on the girl in the back. “The museum. Service lane. There’s a civilian vehicle parked near the dumpsters. Silver sedan.”
There’s a rustle of movement on Varro’s end. “You want it moved?”
“I want it gone,” I say. “Torch it. Make it look like a theft gone wrong. I don’t want a trace of that vehicle left in the alley. No loose ends.”
“Copy that. I’ll have the ground team handle it. What about the owner?”
I look in the mirror again. The girl blinks, a slow movement. She heard me order the destruction of her car, but she doesn’t react. She just stares blankly at the back of my seat, seemingly accepting her fate.
“I have the owner.”
“Understood,” he says, his tone shifting from casual to tactical. “Bringing them to the Fortress?”
“Yes. Prepare the holding cell. And Varro?”
“Boss?”
“Keep the team on high alert. The target at the museum wasn’t working alone. He had intel. Detailed schematics. This wasn’t a random act of terror. Someone fed him the layout.”
“You think this girl is the source?”
I grip the steering wheel. My leather gloves are sitting on the center console, drying, so my bare hands tighten against the leather until the steering wheel creaks under the pressure.
“She was there at 2:37 a.m.,” I say quietly. “She walked in right after the kill. Her eyes tracked the gun, the exits, the body. One breath, one calculation. Then she ran. You tell me what that sounds like.”
“A pro.”
“Exactly. Torch the car. I’ll handle the interrogation.”
I hang up and toss the phone onto the passenger seat.
I glance at the folder tucked inside my jacket pocket. The blueprints. The red Xs.
If she knows what is in this folder, she is dangerous. If she knows who sent Elias, she is an asset.
My eyes drift to her reflection again. She’s small. Delicate. Her wet hair clings to her frame. She’s fragile, like a bird with a broken wing. Her hands are bound in her lap—slender fingers, manicured nails.
They don’t seem like hands that have held a gun. They could very well be hands that arrange petals and fuss with floral arrangements.
Don’t be fooled, I tell myself. Spies don’t look like soldiers. They look like victims.
I consider the alternative. The cold, logical solution.
I could pull off right now and drive down a service road near the marshes. Two bullets in her chest would leave this problem in the mud. No witness. No loose ends. The car burns at the museum, and she vanishes into the statistics of a violent city.
It would be safe. It would be smart. It would ensure the Judge is protected.
But the Code stops me.
No innocents.
I don’t kill women unless I know they are combatants. I don’t kill children. It is the only line that separates me from the animals I hunt. If I cross it, I become them. I become the chaos I swore to control.
I don’t know what she is yet. I have suspicions, I have theories, but I don’t have proof.
Until I know for sure, she lives.
“You’re quiet,” I say, testing her.
She flinches. It’s a small movement, a tightening of her shoulders. She turns her head slowly to look at the back of my seat.
“You threw my phone away,” she whispers.
“It was a tracker,” I say. “If you’re innocent, I saved you from being found by the people who sent that bomber. If you’re guilty, I blinded your handlers.”
“I don’t have handlers,” she says. “I have a father.”
“We all have fathers,” I say. “Most of them are disappointed.”
She falls silent. The words seem to hit her harder than the physical threat. She turns away, pressing her forehead against the cold glass of the window.
I drive.
The city gives way to the outskirts. The skyscrapers fade into industrial parks, then into the dark, wooded hills of the private estates. This is the dead zone. The transition between the civilized world and my world. The streetlights disappear, replaced by the encroaching darkness of the forest.
My home, my fortress, sits on twenty acres of cliffs overlooking the ocean. It is isolated, defensible, and totally off the grid. I bought it the year after the coup. I reinforced the walls, installed military-grade surveillance, and hired a private army.
I don’t live in a house; I live in a bunker disguised as a mansion.
I turn onto the private access road. The trees close in around us, a tunnel of black branches whipping in the wind. We pass the first perimeter sensor, a hidden laser grid that scans the vehicle. A green light flashes on my dashboard.
We reach the main gate. It looms out of the darkness, a massive slab of black steel barring the way.
I flash my headlights—two long, one short.
The gate begins to roll back with a heavy mechanical groan.
The girl sits up in the back seat. She swallows hard as she takes in the scale of the compound.
I drive through, the tires crunching on the gravel of the long driveway. The main house looms ahead, a modern monstrosity of glass and concrete, cantilevered over the edge of the cliff. The ocean crashes against the rocks hundreds of feet below, the sound echoing like artillery fire over the storm.
I pull into the underground garage, the door sliding shut behind us, cutting off the rain, the wind, and the rest of the world.
The sudden silence is jarring. The hum of the engine dies as I kill the ignition. The air in here is filtered, dry, and smells of cold concrete and high-octane gasoline.
“We’re here,” I say.
I unbuckle my seatbelt and step out. The garage is brightly lit, harsh fluorescent strips reflecting off the polished floor. I walk around to the back door and yank it open.
The girl shrinks against the far door, pulling her knees to her chest. Her eyes are wide, darting around the garage for an exit.
There are none. Just concrete walls and steel doors.
“Out,” I command.
“Please,” she whispers. “Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone. I swear.”
“Get out of the car.”
She hesitates.
I lose patience. I reach in, grabbing her by the upper arm, and pull her out.
She stumbles, her sneakers catching on the doorframe, and pitches forward.
I catch her.
My arm wraps around her waist, hauling her upright.
For a second, she presses into me. The contact is electric. It shouldn’t be.
She fits against me, her head tucking naturally under my chin. She smells of rain. And beneath that... floral. Sweet. Like crushed petals.
Like the flowers she dropped.
She looks up at me, her breath hitching. Her pupils are blown wide. Fear? Yes. But there is more there, too. A spark of defiance. A refusal to break.
She pushes against my chest with her bound hands.
“Don’t touch me,” she hisses.
The woman is trembling and defenseless, yet she still has the nerve to give me orders.
Not a pro. A pro would be begging or trying to kill me. She’s just... angry.
“If you could walk, I wouldn’t have to,” I say.
I shift my grip, sweeping my arm behind her knees to lift her. She gasps, instinctively looping her bound hands over my neck to keep her balance.
She is lighter than she looks, but there is a tension in her body, a coiled spring of anxiety.
I carry her toward the elevator. Varro meets us there, holding a pre-loaded syringe, standard protocol for high-risk transport to ensure the asset doesn’t wake up screaming in the secure zone.
He jabs the needle into her upper arm. She flinches, releasing a small, pathetic cry, and goes limp in my arms.
I step into the elevator, studying her unconscious face.
I’m hunting for the tell. A crooked nose from a bad break, a scar on the jaw, the hardened lines of a trained operative.
I find none. Instead, I get damp blonde hair clinging to a fragile neck and long, dark lashes resting on skin that looks like it costs thousands of dollars a month to maintain.
Her nose is straight. Her plush lips are parted just enough to let a shallow, drug-heavy breath slip through.
She doesn’t look like a soldier. She looks like an expensive liability who has never had to look over her shoulder.
If she’s a civilian, I ruined her life. If she’s a spy, she’s about to ruin mine.