Grace
Kaylin’s got a spoon in one hand and something calling itself oatmeal in front of her when I drop into the seat across from her.
“Tell me you’re not eating that,” I say.
“It’s got protein in it. Allegedly.” She wrinkles her nose at the bowl, then brightens like she’s remembered something better. “I picked the paint, by the way. The one Nadia liked.”
“The gray-green one?”
“Sage. There’s a difference, remember?” She grins around the spoon. “You’re coming Sunday to admire it. I’m making everyone come admire it.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
“You’d better not.” She points the spoon at me. “You’re on the Cascade run today?”
“Back by afternoon.”
“Bring me something that isn’t beige.” She says it like a threat, which for Kaylin, over food, is basically what it is. “I mean it.”
“No promises.”
“You never make any.” She’s already turning back to the bowl. “But that’s okay. I know you’d do anything for me.”
“You’re right,” I tell her, because it’s true.
You don’t go through what we did and come out as bright as Kaylin without being something special.
Most of the ones who got out of those places are broken in more ways than you can count.
Kaylin too, I’m sure. She just hides it well, so people won’t feel sorry for her.
Which is why I feel so terrible about the way I got today’s trip.
I told them I needed the morning without anyone else in the van.
Needed the quiet. Needed to breathe. I let my voice catch just enough on breathe to do the rest of the convincing for me.
Nobody at Aurora questions a woman who came out of a Syndicate facility when she says she needs quiet.
They just nod and wave you through, gentle, like sympathy’s the one thing they’ve got plenty of and they’re glad for the chance to spend it.
I used that. I took the gentlest thing anyone’s given me since I got here and turned it into two empty hours nobody will think to ask about.
You had no choice. It’s for Serenity.
It’s still hard to sit with.
The van’s already prepped when I reach the yard, and I pull out through the gate.
The road down is the same road it always is—trees close on one side, the drop on the other, the engine laboring through the switchbacks.
Out here, with nothing watching, I don’t have to hold the glamour up.
It just sits there, quiet, without me spending anything on it.
That should feel like a rest. Today it doesn’t feel like anything.
In person.
The words have been playing over and over since the call. All this time it’s been a voice on a phone—quietly threatening, but anonymous. Careful distance every time. Now they want to look at my face while they ask for more.
I think of the photo of Serenity in the sun, and the cold in her eyes.
She’s alive because I do what they say. I do what they say because she’s alive. I’ve walked that circle so many times I could do it in the dark.
I press my thumbs into the wheel and make myself breathe and watch the road come at me.
The depot sits at the edge of the town below—a gravel lot and a covered dock.
I back the van in the way I always do. The clerk on shift knows the Aurora order without checking it twice, and doesn’t look at me twice either, which is exactly what I need from him.
His assistant helps shift the pallet. I sign the return sheet, load the empties, and instead of turning the van back up the mountain, I drive into town.
The hardware store sits past the diner, the kind of place that’s held the same stock in the same spots longer than the man behind the counter’s been alive. The bell over the door announces me before I’ve gone two steps in.
He glances up, then back down at whatever he’s tallying. He doesn’t know me. The glamour makes sure of that. But he’s seen the van enough times to nod like I’m a regular, and that’s almost enough to make me feel like one.
“Help you find something?”
“Weatherstripping. And cable ties, the heavy ones.” I make myself smile as I say it, easy, like I’ve got nowhere else to be today.
“Back wall, left side. Foam-backed’s the only kind worth buying, if you want my opinion.”
“I’ll take it.”
I find the roll fast and bring it up with the box of ties.
He rings it without any fuss, and I keep my voice light—agree the mountain’s due an early freeze, laugh at something he says about the road icing over that isn’t really funny.
My voice does what it’s supposed to. My hands stay in my pockets so he won’t see what they’re doing instead. I’m shaking like a leaf.
“Take care now,” he says, sliding my change across.
“You too.”
His name’s stitched on a tag above his pocket, close enough to read. I don’t use it. I take the bag and go, and by the time the bell rings shut behind me, I’m already someone he won’t remember clearly enough to describe.
Outside, the cold’s sharper than it was going in. I set the bag on the passenger seat and don’t get in.
There’s the version of the glamour that runs under everything, all day, without me spending a thought on it—the one that’s kept people’s eyes slipping past me for as long as I can remember. And there’s the other version. The one I have to reach for and hold; the solid one.
I reach for it now, standing there in the cold. I pull it in tight until I’m little more than a vague sensation—a shape nobody’s eyes catch on, a shadow on a street where everyone’s got somewhere else to be.
I cut down the side of the building onto the service road behind the row of stores—empty and gray, exactly where I was told to be.
I wait.
You could still get back in the van. Drive up the mountain. Never send another word.
They’d know inside a day. Serenity would be the one who paid for it. That’s always the end of that thought.
The phone buzzes against my ankle.
They know I’m here. That’s the first thing that lands—standing alone on an empty road with the phone already going off before I’ve done anything anyone could have seen. I dig it out and put it to my ear.
“I’m here,” I say. “Like you told me.”
“We know.” Same voice. Flat, no color in it, the way it’s always been. But there’s something wrong under it, and it takes me a second to place it, because it isn’t a threat this time, and it isn’t a demand, and in all this time the voice has never once been anything else.
There’s no ask.
“I brought—”
“There’s nothing we need.”
“The meeting,” I say. “You told me to come. To go over what I’ve—”
“You’ve done everything we needed you to do, Grace.” A pause. “Truly.”
Truly.
My hand goes tight around the phone. This is wrong. Something’s wrong.
“When do I hear from you?” It comes out thinner than I mean it to.
“You won’t need to.”
The line dies in my ear.
I stand there with the phone still against my face, and I understand, in the flat, ordinary way you understand very bad things, that whatever just happened wasn’t the end of a conversation.
It was the end of me being useful to them.
Serenity.
The voice was the only thread I had to her—thin, ugly, built out of coercion, but a thread. If they’ve cut me loose, I don’t know what that means for her except that it can’t be anything good. I shove the phone into my jeans pocket and try to figure out what comes next.
Shit.
I hear the step.
Not behind me. Ahead, where the service road opens onto the lot.
A man stands there. He isn’t moving fast. He’s just there, filling the gap between the buildings. He knew I’d be standing here. He picked his spot so I couldn’t get past him without going through him. The glamour might mask me to a degree, but it’s not going to help me do that.
I turn.
There’s a second one behind me, where the road meets the street. Same stillness. Same certainty—the kind a man wears when he’s done this before and already knows how it ends.
One ahead. One behind. Nothing between them but wall.
They didn’t come to talk. They came to take me.
Run.
My wolf comes up fast, small and dark, clawing for a way out that isn’t there. She never learned to fight. She only ever learned to disappear, and there’s nowhere left to disappear to.
The man ahead of me takes a step.
If they take me, it ends.
Viktor knows her name. Jericho does too—they told me, back when Aurora took me in, that they’d find her, and they meant it.
It just hasn’t been enough. I was never going to be the one who got her out.
But I’m the only proof she’s still breathing, the only one who’d know if the pictures ever stopped coming.
If I’m gone, there’s no one left to notice when they do.
I was never the brave one. I never launched a rescue. I stayed small and watchful and told myself it was the same thing as keeping her safe.
The man reaches into his jacket, and I open my mouth to say something, anything at all—
And the only thought left in me is that she’ll never know I tried.