Chapter 21
Decker
She’s still on the cot when I start lacing my boots, and I feel her come awake behind me.
“You’re dressed,” she says.
“I’m going down the mountain.” No point circling it. “To Viktor.”
The blanket goes still. When I turn, she’s sitting up, and her face has gone cold.
“Viktor thinks I’m the mole.”
“He does.”
“And you’re going to walk into his building after days of hiding me from him.” Her voice stays even. Her hands don’t. They’ve closed in the blanket, knuckles pale. “He could hold you. He could put a tracker on your truck and follow you back here.”
“He’ll do the right thing.”
I have to believe that.
“Decker—” She stops there. I watch her wrestle with the next part. Don’t go is sitting right there, and she won’t let it out. She’s spent months not asking anyone for anything. She’s not going to start by asking me to stay. “Why him? You said there were people outside Aurora.”
“There are. They’re slow. And getting him on our side gives us more to work with.” I cross to the cot and crouch so we’re level. “Viktor has the reach, and he has a reason to listen. Somebody used his organization to frame you. That makes it his problem too. I can work with that.”
“And if he doesn’t listen?”
“He’ll listen.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know him.” I hold her eyes. “He’s hard, but he’s fair. If I put the truth in front of him, he’ll weigh it. That’s more than we’ll get anywhere else.”
She looks at me a long moment. Whatever she’s searching for, she must find enough of it, because her shoulders come down half an inch.
“Then tell me what you need,” she says.
“Your sister. The system they ran. Everything. Again.”
She nods, then goes through it, because we both know where it’s headed now. The drop point behind the hardware store. The photographs. The recording of Serenity’s voice. A woman on the phone, always the same one, never a name. The details she gave them.
“And the phone,” she says. “You’re taking it to him.”
“I am.”
“Everything on that phone makes me look guilty.”
“Everything on that phone makes you look like what you are. A woman they squeezed. He needs to see the difference between that and what’s in his file.”
Her jaw works. Then she catches my hand before I can stand, presses it flat against her cheek, and lets it go.
“Come back,” she says.
“That’s the plan.”
The boulder fights me on the way out. The burns across my back haven’t finished closing, and they pull the whole time I’m putting my shoulder into the stone. I seal her in, check that it’s firmly wedged, and start down.
The truck is where I left it, and I hit the road deep in thought. I spend the entire drive lining up what I’m going to say. And the bear spends it with his head turned backward, keeping count of every mile I put between her and us.
She’s safe. Hidden. Behind rock that nothing can move. He doesn’t care.
He doesn’t care as the mountain fades into the distance, and he cares even less as the gates to Aurora’s outpost loom ahead. The guards wave me through security without question, and I get the sense I’ve been expected.
Viktor is at his office window when I come in. He doesn’t turn right away. When he does, he crosses to the desk, picks something up, and sets it down in front of me.
A phone in a clear evidence bag. Cheap. Older model.
“Before you say whatever you drove down here to say,” he says, “look at that.”
“Where’d it come from?”
“An anonymous tip. Came into the intake line a day after you went dark. Said we’d missed something in her cubicle.
Zoe ran it down; she’s been handling that side of the case.
It was under the floor, wrapped in plastic, charger and all.
” He sits. “The outgoing traffic goes back months. Routes. Rotations. Names.” He lets a beat pass.
“There’s a thread covering the night Samien Khalef died. ”
I go quiet.
Tabitha said his name to me at that first meeting when Grace’s name came up. We buried him. I didn’t know I’d end up standing in the middle of it.
“So understand what you walked into,” Viktor says. “I’m not sitting on a leak anymore. I’m sitting on the woman who fed one of my people to the Syndicate. And you’ve had her hidden for days.”
I reach into my jacket, take out her burner, and set it on the desk beside the bag.
Viktor looks at it. “What is that?”
“Her phone. The real one. I took it off her after I pulled her out of an ambush. She’s carried it every day since they first made contact.
” I slide it toward him. “Open it. Incoming calls from one number. Outgoing, almost nothing—and what’s there wouldn’t get a supply run moved. Corridor talk. Half of it wrong.”
“And?”
“And now explain why the woman owns both. She keeps the harmless phone in her boot, on her person, around the clock. The one that damns her—the one with a dead man’s details on it—she leaves in the room she sleeps in, waiting for a tip to point you at it.
” I sit back. “You’ve run agents your whole life. Does that sound right?”
He doesn’t answer.
“There’s more. The traffic on the phone you found needed access.
Restricted wing. Comms. And I know your logs put her in the restricted wing—six nights, doors her credential was never cut for.
So pull the credential itself. It’s menial.
It doesn’t open those doors, and it never has.
Someone wrote those entries in for her. Run the door controllers against the badge log and the counts won’t match—the hardware never moved her through.
I shadowed her a week. She never went near the sites she’s accused of. ”
“Unless she knew you were watching.”
“Nobody knows when I’m watching. That’s the one thing I’d put my name on.”
Except her, in the yard. But I’m not delving into that now.
Viktor picks up the bagged phone and turns it over once. “You’re telling me the tip is a plant.”
“I’m telling you it’s too clean. It landed right after she vanished, told you exactly where to dig, and what came up answered every question you had. Real cases don’t close themselves like that. Somebody closed this one for you.”
“Or she got sloppy at the end. Careful people do.”
“Careful people don’t keep the murder evidence at home and carry the clean phone in their boot.
That’s backward.” I lean forward. “And here’s what finishes it.
The Syndicate sent two men to erase her in daylight, with a backup team on wheels behind them.
I was right there. They called her a liability.
Now hold that against your phone. The agent who owns that traffic—someone inside your restricted wing, someone who could hand them Samien—is worth more than fifty field men.
You don’t cut an asset like that in an alley.
You pull them out and keep them producing.
You cut couriers.” I let it land. “They cut her.”
Viktor is quiet a long moment.
“Then what was she?”
“I don’t know yet. What I do have is that they didn’t recruit a professional; they found someone they could squeeze.”
“But she did the drops. That’s not nothing.” He’s frowning. I can see the wheels turning.
“She’s no operative, Viktor. Couple months after Grace landed here, someone made contact. Used her sister as leverage.”
“Serenity,” he says, things falling into place.
“Exactly,” I say. “They fed Grace details. Proof of life: a photograph, her sister’s handwriting, later a recording.
The deal was simple. She passes what she hears, the sister stays breathing.
What she passed was useless scraps. She’s no operative, but she knew enough to do as little harm as she could.
She ran that alone, for months, because the one time she trusted people to find her sister, nothing came of it. ”
“We were looking.”
“I know. She didn’t. All she had was a voice on a phone holding her sister over her head.” I keep my eyes on his. “She’s guilty of the drops, Viktor. She’ll answer for that, and she knows it. But she’s not your mole, and she didn’t kill Samien.”
He stands. Walks to the window. I wait while he stands there.
“You want me to bring her into protection while we work it,” he says. “That’s where this goes.”
“No. That’s where it doesn’t go. We did protection already. I drove Rafael to his protected room myself. You told me on the phone you knew that was a mistake. I’m holding you to it.”
His shoulders shift. Not much. On Viktor, it’s a lot.
“How were you so sure?” he says, still facing the glass. “From the first call, you read like a man defending her. What did you see that my people didn’t?”
“I…” I stop, because I don’t have an answer for him. Not one that fits anything he’d expect from me. “I just knew,” I say eventually.
He looks at me for a moment, then decides not to push.
“The fact remains that she still managed to gather the intel she sent to them. Got past people who should have seen her.”
“It’s her magic. A glamour. It slides attention off her—eyes, cameras, memory.
People look straight at her and don’t see her.
That’s how she picked up scraps unseen—the gossip and old news she actually passed.
It’s not how anyone pulls comms traffic and rotation tables.
That took clearance she’s never had, and whoever owns that phone does. ” I pause.
Viktor turns around slowly.
“A glamour.”
“Runs in her blood. The line’s called Sangrey. Her sister’s magic sits closer to the surface—harder to hide. That’s why the Syndicate took the sister first. It’s also how she got out.”
He comes back to the desk, but he doesn’t sit. Something is moving behind his face, and I wait for it.
“You were at the meeting when the Nocturne contingent came,” he says. “The trade Ysabelle Faine described. Rare blood. Shifters, witches, humans with something unusual in their veins. No pattern anyone could hold, she said.”
“The pattern is market value.”
“The pattern is market value.” He says it back. “Faine’s suspicions are sound. The Syndicate isn’t just experimenting on magic-bloods. They’re supplying the blood trade.”