Chapter 33 #2
Pride has no place inside the fear cutting through me, but it comes anyway. Even now, she refuses to improve his lie.
The stalker lifts the phone from its stand, turning it back toward himself. "You took ten minutes that belonged to me. Come alone if you want to discuss returning them."
The video ends.
My hand remains on the command table. Beneath my palm, metal vibrates from the generators outside.
I've spent weeks calling Nora mine, wrapping our child into the same claim. The word let me avoid separating love from possession, as though loving her excused every choice I made to keep her.
Only Nora's survival matters now. Every claim I ever made on her becomes worthless beside one more breath in her body.
She may leave me afterward, take our child, and use every protection promised in the contract. I'll guard the life she chooses without entering it if that is what survival costs, loving both of them from whatever distance she requires.
"Play the sound again," the proposed bride says through the secure call.
Her image occupies a side monitor. Since joining the call, she has listened without interrupting.
Mikhail isolates the carousel audio. The music repeats through the command speakers, thin with age. Five clear notes rise, followed by the damaged sixth.
The proposed bride closes her eyes. "He collected recordings from several old attractions our family once financed," she says. "That tune belongs to one carousel. The final pipe cracked during a winter closure, and the owners never repaired it."
"Where?"
"An abandoned indoor park beyond the northern freight canal.
He visited it as a child and kept trying to buy the carousel after the property failed.
" She sends a location file. "The building has been closed for nine years.
" She explains that the carousel was made for the park rather than purchased from a traveling fair.
Its mechanical organ uses a private arrangement commissioned by her grandfather, and the damaged final pipe gives the recording an error no other surviving machine shares.
Mikhail compares the call against the old family recording. Beneath the tune, the live feed carries the carousel drive, generator vibration, and the uneven breath of the damaged pipe. The machine itself is turning near the phone. This is not a recording played from another room.
"My relative used to play that recording at family dinners," she says. "He called the park the last place that belonged to him before adults began assigning him work. We assumed he wanted the carousel as a trophy."
"He wanted a room where the past still obeyed him."
The proposed bride presses her lips together. "Yes."
The coordinates open on our map.
Thirty-eight miles north, the park occupies a broad industrial parcel between a frozen canal and an inactive rail spur. One main road climbs toward it through wooded hills. Two service routes approach from the east, both unmaintained.
Archived property images show a broad windowless building beneath a curved metal roof, with a hotel wing attached to one side and a loading court behind the attractions.
The stalker's live screens cover the main doors, stable interior corridors, and the open floor around the carousel.
No image reveals what lies under the older service levels.
Mikhail places teams around the map without sending movement orders yet. A large approach would show on roadside cameras long before it reached the park. A scattered approach risks arriving too slowly if the stalker moves Nora again.
Mikhail sends the location to the nearest teams. "Snow has closed the eastern service routes. The main road is still passable below the ridge."
Above it, wind readings turn red.
The safest air approach is impossible. Every cleared aircraft remains grounded beneath the latest freezing band, and the park roof and live camera grid prevent a blind descent even if a pilot could reach it.
"He wants you alone," the proposed bride says. "He also wants to watch you try not to be."
The alliance that should have made her an ally never existed. She helps me after I humiliated her father, refused her hand, and married the woman her relative now holds.
"Send every park record you have," I tell her.
"Already moving."
Irina places the forged approval packet beside the command keyboard.
While the location teams prepare, she has continued comparing the exact port copy against our archived codes.
"The cargo reference in this packet didn't exist on the night of the restaurant shooting," she says.
"It uses a revision introduced eleven days later. "
Mikhail pulls the internal release record. The date agrees.
The proposed bride transfers another port-clearing file. It traces the broker's dormant vendor guarantee to the same payment channel used for restaurant access. A second record connects that vendor to the contractor who opened the sabotaged aircraft panel.
The vendor sent money to the restaurant manager, renewed a security approval unused for months and hired the aircraft contractor through a different subsidiary. Separate names cover each act. The guarantee account under them belongs to the broker who confronted me at the terminal.
This evidence traces a continuous path from the restaurant to the fleet. It gives Anton no alibi for the later packet.
The evidence separates the old attack from the new forged packet. Someone built the patriarch's proof after the shooting, using information exported from inside my system.
"Can you trace the export?" I ask Irina.
"The packet moved through a terminal workstation under a shared service session. I need the device record to identify who opened it."
Her husband waits inside that terminal.
"Get it."
We have an incomplete case against Anton, though we know where Nora is.
Vehicles leave the estate in staggered groups so no single movement alarm sees an approaching force. Perimeter teams head toward every road leaving the park, while a smaller entry unit prepares for the camera grid and incendiary threat.
I change into dry clothes inside the command vehicle. Smoke has worked into my skin, remaining beneath soap and cold water. My shoulder holster settles against a clean black sweater. Spare magazines disappear into my coat.
No convoy can approach without filling those cameras.
Poverty taught me to build the power that would prevent this exact choice. Tonight I enter with only four people and nothing large enough to hide behind.
On the main screen, the route under the ridge changes from yellow to red. A plow reports ice across the upper turn, with heavy snow erasing its last pass.
The park is finally ours on the screen while the storm closes the only stable road leading to it.