Chapter 13
Thirteen
The Stryker safehouse was beautiful in the way a museum was beautiful — impressive, untouchable, and not meant for someone like her.
Open-concept, all clean lines and natural materials — teak and volcanic stone and white linen, practically a photograph from an architecture magazine. Yet, for some odd reason, it felt warm. Safe.
Grace sat curled on the low-profile couch in the living room, laptop balanced on her knees, the screen’s blue glow competing with the storm-gray light that poured through floor-to-ceiling windows.
Outside, the Pacific churned like something alive and angry. Waves heaved against the rocky shore below the cliffside property, each impact sending a tremor through the glass that she felt more than heard. Rain lashed the windows in sheets, blurring the palm trees into dark, thrashing shapes.
Down the hall, past the dining room and around a corner she couldn’t see, the crack of pool balls punctuated low conversation. Laughter erupted. Astryde’s sharp bark, then Bj?rn’s quieter rumble. Someone had put on music, something with a lazy bass line that threaded under the storm noise.
And there, beneath it all, Magnus’s voice. Low and warm. She couldn’t make out the words, but the cadence was unmistakable. The easy rhythm of a man among people who loved him without conditions.
They’ve stopped watching me.
The realization should have been a relief. After the debrief, after Gunnar’s accusations and Astryde’s ice-cold dismissal and the way every Rebel in the room had looked at her like she was something that needed to be scraped off their boots — silence should have felt like mercy.
It didn’t.
Being accused meant they still considered her worth the effort of confrontation. This — the laughter she wasn’t part of, the warmth spilling from a room she hadn’t been invited into — was something worse.
Erasure.
They’d weighed her and decided she was irrelevant. Neither guilty nor innocent. Just no longer worth the attention. A problem that had been handled. A variable nobody needed to monitor anymore.
Good. That’s what I need them to believe.
But the familiar mantra rang hollow against the sound of Magnus laughing at something one of his brothers said.
Grace pulled her focus back to the laptop and composed a message to one of Lars’s secure channels. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, crafting the perfect response — shaken, defensive, just desperate enough to be believable.
The Rebels don’t trust me anymore. You’ve poisoned them against me. If you want the Aegis Key, you’ll need to give me something to bring them back. Proof Oliver is safe. A photo. Video. Something I can use to convince them I’m not your asset.
She hit send and sat back, letting the performance settle into her bones. Lars would see desperation. Would think he’d successfully isolated her from her only allies. Would believe she was exactly where he wanted her.
He had no idea she was exactly where she wanted to be.
A gust of wind slammed against the windows hard enough to rattle the frames. Grace flinched, then hated herself for it. Down the hall, the pool game continued without a pause. They hadn’t even noticed the storm surge.
She pulled up the data from the Patroclus facility on her laptop, cross-referencing it with Lars’s corporate structure.
The pieces were falling into place. The vault held not just the Aegis Key, but evidence that would destroy Lars’s entire network.
With Magnus softening and his family’s indifference providing perfect cover, she could execute the final phase.
A notification pinged on her screen. Response from Lars’s channel. That was fast.
She opened the message, and her blood turned to ice.
The attachment loaded. A video file timestamped two hours ago. Grace’s finger hovered over the play button, terrified of what she’d see.
Outside, a wave hit the cliff face with enough force to send spray against the lower windows. The glass shuddered. Grace didn’t flinch this time.
She clicked the video.
Oliver appeared on screen, sitting on an expensive leather couch. He wore the same Transformers jacket from three days ago, rumpled but intact. His face was pale but unmarked. No visible injuries. No signs of mistreatment beyond the fear in his eyes.
Relief hit so hard she had to grip the laptop to steady herself. He was alive. He was whole. He was—
Lars walked into frame.
He settled onto the couch beside Oliver with the unhurried ease of a man sitting down in his own living room. Close enough that his shoulder nearly brushed Oliver’s. Not touching. Not quite. But close enough that Oliver went very, very still.
Her stomach dropped.
“Oliver and I have been getting acquainted, Grace.” Lars’s voice was warm, unhurried.
He didn’t look at the camera. He watched Oliver with something that, from the outside, would read as fondness.
“He’s a remarkable boy. Sharp in ways his age rarely is. He reminds me of someone I met a long time ago.”
No.
“With the right environment, he’ll do extraordinary things.”
She heard it the way only she could. The careful, pleasant cadence of a man making an offer that wasn’t one. The same cadence he’d used on a hungry, angry fourteen-year-old on the dark web, promising her a future, promising her she was finally seen. The cadence her body had never unlearned.
“Say hello to your mother, Oliver.”
Oliver looked directly at the camera, and Grace saw the moment his brave mask cracked.
“Mom?” His chin wobbled. “The man says you’re coming to get me. Are you coming?”
He paused, his fingers twisting in the hem of his jacket. “I’m being good. I’m being really good. Can you come now? I want d— Magnus. I want to go home.”
Lars’s hand came to rest on Oliver’s knee. Light. Proprietary.
“We’ll see you soon, Grace.”
The video cut off.
Grace’s hands shook. She didn’t notice until her fingernails clicked against the edge of the laptop, a small, rapid sound swallowed by the storm outside.
She pressed them flat against the keys, felt the warm plastic beneath her palms, and breathed through a throat that had closed to the width of a blade of grass.
The careful construction of her plan, the cold logic that had sustained her for eight years, shattered under the simple weight of her son’s fear.
This was real. Not a chess game played across servers and encrypted channels. Oliver was in Lars’s hands. Scared. Alone. Waiting for her to save him.
“I’m coming, baby,” she whispered to the frozen image on the screen.
The storm answered with a low moan of wind, and the pool game down the hall cracked on, oblivious.
Then a floorboard creaked.
Grace spun to find Magnus standing in the archway that separated the living room from the hall. She could still hear the muffled music behind him, the distant voices of his family. He’d left the warmth to come find her.
She straightened instinctively, pulling her shoulders back, assembling the mask. Calm. Controlled. The person who had everything in hand.
Magnus didn’t buy it for a second.
His eyes swept her face. Something shifted in his expression, concern cracking through the careful distance he’d been keeping all afternoon, and then he crossed the room in three strides.
Don’t. The word formed in her head, but didn’t reach her mouth. Don’t look at me like you can see everything I’m trying to hold down.
“What happened?”
She couldn’t speak. Could only angle the laptop screen toward him. Magnus crossed the room and hit play. Oliver’s voice filled the room — small and scared and asking to come home.
The sound Magnus made was barely human.
“When—” His voice cracked. “When was this taken?”
“Two hours ago.” Grace forced the words through a throat that wanted to close. “He’s alive. Unharmed. Lars is keeping him comfortable as long as I cooperate.”
“Comfortable.” Magnus’s hands clenched into fists. “He’s terrified.”
“I know.” Grace pulled up her analysis tools, channeling emotion into action. “But look at the background. This couch, the lighting, the angle of the window behind him, and the scenery through the window. I can use this. I can narrow down his location.”
Outside, the storm shifted. Rain still hammered the glass, but the worst of the wind had dropped to a steady moan.
The waves kept their assault on the cliff below.
She could feel the rhythm of them through the floor, through the couch, through her bones, like a heartbeat that belonged to the ocean instead of a person.
“How long?” The question was sharp.
“To analyze? A few hours.” Grace’s fingers were already moving, pulling frames, analyzing shadows, measuring light angles on her laptop. “We’ll get him back.”
“If everything goes right.”
Grace finally looked at him, saw her own fear reflected in his eyes. The mask cracked, and for one terrible moment, she wasn’t an operative or an asset or a weapon. She was a mother sitting in a dark room with the only other person on the planet who loved her son the way she did.
“There are things I can’t plan for.” Her voice came out quieter than she intended. “Variables I can’t account for. Lars is — he’s adaptive. He’ll change the rules the second he thinks he’s losing.”
Magnus’s jaw tightened. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I have a plan.” She closed the laptop halfway, the screen’s light cutting to a thin blue line between them. “A good one. But there are going to be moments where things don’t look right. Where what I’m doing won’t make sense to you — to any of you.”
“Grace—”
“I need you to trust me.” She held his gaze, and the rawness in her own voice startled her.
This wasn’t performance. This wasn’t the calculated vulnerability she’d perfected over years of running Lars’s gauntlet. This was real, and the fact that it was real terrified her more than anything Lars could do.
“When it counts. When everything in you is screaming that I’ve lost my mind or worse, I need you to trust me.”
Magnus was quiet. The rain filled the silence, and somewhere down the hall, a pool ball dropped into a pocket with a soft thunk.