Decker #2
Talon’s hand finds the back of Lila’s chair, grinning at the twins.
Iris says, “Congratulations,” and Torbjorn lifts his water glass an inch in a gesture that’s half a toast and half a man not knowing what else to do with his hands.
The sound that goes around the table is low and warm, the kind a room makes before it remembers what it was discussing.
Caleb looks like he’s relieved that it’s finally not a secret he has to keep anymore.
“Okay then,” says Viktor. “So we can assume that’s unrelated.”
“Perhaps,” Lila says. “But it’s definitely something we should be aware of. With the phoenix carrying a child connected to the Heartstone line, we should expect the unexpected.”
“So situation-normal, then.” Iris grins.
Lila rolls her eyes. “Pretty much.”
Ysabelle has watched the entire exchange and kept her face neutral.
Whatever the Nocturne Court makes of a restless artifact surfacing in the same season as a trade in blood and magic, she keeps it to herself.
The Heartstone isn’t the Court’s business, and she doesn’t spend words on what isn’t hers.
“Well, now that we’ve put that worry to rest, let’s get back to the matter at hand.” He turns back to Ysabelle. “You say there’s a trade. Do you think there’s a pipeline?”
She nods.
“Show me the corridors.”
Ysabelle slides a page down. “Three active. The northern line runs people up through the Idaho panhandle into Canada. The southern runs through Arizona to a coastal handoff we haven’t placed. The third we’ve only seen twice: east, fast, no pattern we can hold yet.”
Caleb turns the page toward himself. “Timing?”
“The northern moves on a ten-day cycle. The southern’s irregular; they wait for volume, then move a lot at once.”
“Then the southern’s the one with the buyer driving it,” Talon says. “Ten days is a supply chain. Waiting for volume is an order being filled.”
“That’s our read too,” Crowe says.
It’s the first he’s spoken. Ysabelle doesn’t look at him; she lets it stand, which tells me he’s here for exactly this—the operational layer, not the politics.
“How do we take a corridor without warning the others?” Iris asks. “Hit the northern and the southern goes dark inside a day?”
“You don’t hit a corridor,” Crowe says. “You hit a handoff. The people moving the cargo don’t know who they’re handing to.
That’s how the Court would build it, and whoever built this learned from people who think the way we do.
Take a handoff clean, and you walk it forward to the buyer without anyone upstream knowing the line went quiet. ”
“That needs eyes on a handoff before we move,” I say. “Live. Long enough to map who comes and goes. Move early, and you get a van full of frightened people and no thread to pull.”
Ysabelle looks at me properly for the first time. “The tracker.”
I dip my head in confirmation.
“Then you’ll want the southern,” she says. “It sits long enough between moves to watch.”
The side door opens partway.
Zoe. She has a slim folder, and her eyes go to Viktor, then catch on the four strangers at the table—a small recalibration, there and gone.
“The Cascade depot revisions,” she says, coming in along the wall to set the folder at his elbow. “You wanted them tonight.” She doesn’t straighten away from the table. Her eyes have gone to the page in front of Caleb—the corridor map, upside down to her—and stayed. “That’s the Idaho line.”
“You know it?” Viktor says.
“I keyed the depot transfers that run parallel to it. Same panhandle road for forty miles. What’s it doing?”
“Trade-line,” says Viktor, not giving more.
She turns the page a few degrees toward herself without being asked, reads it. “If the trade’s moving through there, it’s threading between our supply runs. That’s not luck—whoever set it picked a corridor that already had legitimate traffic to hide inside.”
“That’s worth having,” Viktor says.
“I can pull the parallel timings.” She takes the empty chair at Caleb’s end as she says it, drawing the page closer, already working—folded into the meeting now as though a seat had always been waiting. Nobody questions it. What she’s offering is useful.
The conversation moves on around her. Ysabelle comes back to the buyers—to the type of individual who might create a market.
“We can’t tell you what it feeds,” she says. “Only that it appears to be specific. The victims we’ve discovered have been…unique.”
“Unique in what way?” asks Iris.
“In a multitude of ways,” says Ysabelle. “Humans with rare blood types. Shifters. Magic-bloods. Witches.” She splays her hands. “It’s impossible to determine who the targets are. Which has made it impossible to determine how to protect them.”
Viktor’s brow is furrowed. “I can see why you need help with this. It’s big.”
“So we can rely on our assistance?” Ysabelle asks.
“Absolutely,” Caleb responds before Viktor can. The other man doesn’t object.
“It’s why the Collective exists, Lady Faine,” he says.
“We are grateful.” Ysabelle stands. The room stands. I stay seated.
“We’ll need to gather again once we’ve pulled more information,” Viktor says.
He walks the Nocturne delegation toward the far door, the last of it finishing in the corridor, past my hearing.
Leora Sky pauses at the threshold long enough to say something low to Caleb that puts a line between his brows, then she’s gone too.
I stay in my chair.
The room clears. The corridor maps are still on the table, ink lines running across territory.
I think about a system designed to sell living creatures for their blood, and a person in this outpost who belongs to that system.
I come up with an image, and the face attached to it doesn’t have sky-blue eyes and features like a porcelain doll.
There’s no way she’d have a hand in that.
“Fuck it,” I mutter as I stand. I’m letting my feelings get involved, and that’s something I’ve never allowed myself to do.
The case got larger tonight. Whatever’s being fed out there is bigger than the job I’m working. But if I get it wrong, I could be damning every life being fed into that pipeline.
If it’s her, she needs to answer for it.
And I don’t know why, but I pray that it isn’t.