Chapter 30 -Phoenix
A warehouse in Vernon, twelve miles southeast of my office, registered to a shell company that my father's people traced back through four layers of incorporation in under two hours.
The building has been empty for eighteen months on paper.
The utility records tell a different story, power draws consistent with active occupancy, security system pings going back six weeks.
Dominic has been planning this for a long time.
My father calls before I can reach for my keys.
"I have the address," he says. "Don't go anywhere."
"I'm not waiting."
"Phoenix." The way he says my name tells me everything. The discussion is over. Whatever comes next has already been determined. "I have a team assembling. Ex-military, four men, they've done extractions before. They need two hours to brief and equip. Two hours and we go in the right way."
"Jade has been in that warehouse for three hours already."
"And she'll still be there in two more. Dominic needs her alive for the video he's planning. She's safe until he gets what he wants from her."
I think about the bruise forming on her jaw through the phone screen. I think about the word safe and what the reality of it might be, and the thing in my chest that has been burning since this afternoon gets harder to contain.
"Two hours," I say, and hang up.
My father arrives forty minutes later with two men I don't recognize and a bag that gets opened on my kitchen table without ceremony.
Body armor. Weapons. The kind of equipment that doesn't come from conventional sources and doesn't leave paper trails.
He moves through my space with the efficiency of a man who has done this before, which I have always known abstractly and am only now understanding fully.
He looks at me across the island. "You're not going in first."
"Watch me."
"Phoenix." He sets both hands flat on the counter.
He's wearing a dark jacket over a dark shirt and he looks like what he is, a man who has spent years making problems disappear, and tonight that fact is the only thing I have any faith in.
"If you go through that door before my team has secured the perimeter, you will get you and Jade killed. Is that what you want?"
"What I want is to get her out of there."
"Then let the professionals do the first thirty seconds of work and follow when it's clear." He holds my gaze. "Can you do that?"
The answer I want to give him is no. The answer that will actually get Jade out of that building is yes, and we both know it, and after a long moment I nod.
He turns back to the bag. "There's something else we need to discuss."
"Dominic." He lifts a tactical vest from the bag and sets it aside. "When we go in, your instinct is going to be to put him down. I understand that, but I'm telling you to ignore it."
The burning in my chest sharpens. "He has Jade tied to a chair in a warehouse. He killed Torres."
"The recording." My father turns to face me fully.
"We still don't know where all the backups are.
Dominic dies tonight and those files go out to every journalist and outlet he's already lined up.
We've been working on it since the call and we haven't found them all.
" He picks up the tactical vest and holds it out to me.
"We need him alive long enough to find every last copy and destroy it.
After that, Dominic Webb becomes a different kind of problem. "
I hate that my father is right at the moment I least want him to be.
"So we let him walk."
"We let him walk tonight. We find the servers. All of them. And then we deal with Dominic at a time of our choosing rather than his." He holds the vest out. "One problem at a time."
I take it. "And if he goes for Jade while we're in there. If the choice is between letting him walk and keeping her safe?”
My father doesn't answer immediately. He looks at me with those gray eyes that have been reading me since before I had words, and what moves across his face is something I don't see there often.
"Then you do what you have to do," he says quietly. "And we handle the consequences after."
He lays out the plan while the two men spread a blueprint across my table.
The team goes in first, sweeps the perimeter, neutralizes exterior guards.
My father coordinates from outside, running communication between the team and the contacts still tracking Dominic's movements remotely.
I follow the team in once the south entrance is clear, get Jade out, and we're gone before Dominic knows the building has been breached.
"You stay on comms the entire time," my father says. "You wait for my signal. And you do not breach that door until I tell you it's clear."
"Understood."
He looks at me for a moment longer than necessary. "I mean it, Phoenix."
"I know."
The two hours pass slowly. I stand at the window and watch the city and think about Jade on that concrete floor and try not to calculate how many minutes she's been there.
I think about Torres instead, about the text he sent this morning and the response that never came, about his daughter's soccer games and the black lunch bag in the car and the eleven years he spent moving quietly through the edges of my family's life keeping everyone inside it safer than they deserved.
At 9:15 we drive south through the city.
My father takes a separate vehicle, positioning himself two blocks from the warehouse to run comms while the team moves on foot.
Los Angeles at night has a quality of anonymity, the freeway lights strobing overhead, the sprawl extending in every direction without apology.
I drive alone and watch the miles shrink and don't think about anything except the address in my phone and what's waiting at the end of it.
I park where my father told me to park. The team moves ahead, dark clothing against dark streets, the sounds of Vernon at night surrounding everything, distant traffic and the low mechanical hum of an industrial district settling into itself.
The air smells like exhaust and something chemical, a faint sharp bite at the back of the throat.
I check my weapon. The weight of it is familiar in a way that shouldn't be, the same way the tactical vest fits across my chest like something I've worn before, the muscle memory of men my father paid to teach me things I hoped I'd never use.
My earpiece crackles. "Exterior clear. Two guards at the south entrance. Moving to neutralize."
My father's voice follows immediately. "Hold position, Phoenix. Wait for my signal."
I hold position.
A scuffle through the earpiece. Brief and efficient. The sound of something heavy being moved.
"South entrance clear. Stand by."
I stand by.
Then the gunfire starts.
Not from inside the warehouse. From the east side of the building, where the team wasn't, where no one was supposed to be, and the sound of it is wrong, too many weapons, too much of it, and my father's voice comes through the earpiece sharp and clipped saying something about a second team, Dominic's people coming from the other direction, the extraction team taking fire and falling back to cover.
I'm already moving.
"Phoenix." My father's voice. "Phoenix, hold your—"
I pull the earpiece out.