Chapter 8 #2
“I’m counting on it,” I say.
I open the door, step out into the hallway, and pull the massive slab shut. The magnetic locks engage with a solid, final clank.
I stand there for a moment in the silence.
My hand is throbbing. The bandage is already soaked through, the blood dark and sticky against my skin.
She thinks I’m the monster.
She doesn’t know I’m just the weapon.
I walk away from the door, needing to make a call. Not to the Judge. Not yet.
I need to call Varro. We need to double the perimeter patrols. We need to prepare for a siege.
Because she was right about one thing. William Hale will come.
And when he does, he won’t be coming to negotiate. He’ll be coming to bury me.
I touch the gun under my arm.
Good hunting, I think.
I head for the stairs. The war has begun.
I bypass the office and head straight for the Operations Room in the basement.
The house is built on a cliff, but its heart is buried deep in the granite. The elevator descends smoothly, the numbers ticking down. G. B1. B2.
The doors slide open to a blast-proof bunker humming with the sound of cooling fans.
Varro is sitting at the main console. A wall of monitors glows in front of him, showing thermal feeds of the perimeter, the access road, and the airspace above the estate.
He spins in his chair when I walk in. His eyes drop to my palm. “Trouble?” he asks, nodding at the bloody silk.
“Civilian resistance,” I say tightly.
He raises an eyebrow. “She cut you?”
“I crushed a glass.”
“Ah.” He turns back to the screens. “That’s worse. Self-inflicted usually means the intel was bad.”
“The intel was catastrophic.”
I walk over to the communications array. It’s a separate rack of servers, isolated from the internet, encrypted with military-grade algorithms. In the center sits the dedicated receiver for the Bluebird line.
“Any traffic?” I ask.
“Dead air,” he says. “I’ve been monitoring the police scanners, the federal bands, even the encrypted channels used by the Syndicate. Nothing.”
“No chatter about a missing person?”
“Not a whisper. No 911 calls from the museum. No flurry of activity at the precinct. It’s like she evaporated.”
I stare at the silent receiver.
It’s only been eight hours. He might not even know she’s missing yet. Or, he already knows, and he’s containing the blast radius.
“Boss,” Varro says, his voice dropping. “Who is she?”
I look at him. He has been with me for years. He stood back-to-back with me in the trenches of the coup.
But this...
This secret could get us all killed.
If I tell him she’s the Judge’s daughter, he will do the math. He will realize that the man holding my leash is now our biggest liability. He might advocate for killing her to erase the link. He is pragmatic. He survives.
But I need him to know. I can’t fight a war with a blind lieutenant.
“Her name is Iris Hale,” I say.
He goes still. His fingers stop typing. He stares at the screen for a long beat, processing.
“Hale,” he repeats. “Relation?”
“Daughter.”
He lets out a low whistle. He spins his chair around to face me, his expression grim.
“If the Judge ordered a hit on a building where his daughter was working...” He trails off, doing the mental calculus. “Then either he didn’t know, or he didn’t care.”
“Or there was never a bomb,” I finish.
He looks at me sharply. “The blueprints?”
“I haven’t decoded them yet. But the targets were structural. It feels like demolition, not terrorism.”
“Does he know we have her?”
“He knows exactly who has her,” I say. “I was the only operative in that building.”
He rubs his jaw, the stubble rasping against his palm. “When he moves on us...”
“He burns the whole operation,” I finish. “He sends a kill squad to get his daughter back and silence me.”
“So what’s the play?” he asks. “We can’t release her. She saw your face.”
“We keep her.”
“For how long?”
“Until I find out what was in that folder,” I say. “Whatever is in those blueprints, whatever intel Elias had... It’s worth more than his daughter’s life.”
“So we’re holding the bag,” he says.
“We’re holding the leverage,” I correct him. “As long as she is alive, the Judge has to hesitate. If she dies, he has nothing to lose.”
He nods slowly, understanding the reality. We are rogue agents now.
“I want the fence doubled,” I command. “Drone patrols every fifteen minutes. Sensors on maximum sensitivity. If a squirrel crosses the fence line, I want to know about it.”
“Done.”
“And Varro?”
“Yeah?”
“Nobody crosses the threshold of the Guest Suite but me. Slide the food through the chain. No talking. She’s quarantined.”
“Understood.” He pauses. “And the hand?”
I look down at the bloody silk sticking to the wound. “I’ll handle it.”
I turn to leave.
“Cassian,” Varro calls out.
I stop.
“She’s innocent, isn’t she?”
It’s the question that has been haunting me since I saw her eyes in the museum.
“Yes,” I say. “She is.”
“That makes it harder,” he says quietly.
“I know.”
I walk into the elevator. The doors slide shut, sealing me in the steel box.
I lean my head back against the metal wall and close my eyes.
It makes it impossible.
But as the elevator rises, carrying me back up toward the storm and the girl in the gilded cage, I realize I’m not hungry anymore.
I’m angry.
And the Judge is going to learn what that costs.