Grace
Vanya sends for me later in the afternoon. I’ve been waiting for this since Viktor said her name in his office. Now that it’s here, my mouth goes dry on the walk.
The guard takes me down to the admin floor, to a room I didn’t know existed.
No sign on the door. Inside, the window is papered over, and the light comes from two lamps.
Every flat surface holds stacks of folders in an order I can tell matters, even though I can’t read it.
A map is pinned to the far wall with nothing marked on it that means anything to me.
The woman at the table doesn’t get up.
I’ve seen her before. Twice, maybe, crossing the yard, always alone. Platinum hair pinned back, lean, neat, no wasted movement. I never knew her name until Viktor said it. Looking at her now, I understand why nobody ever offered it. She feels…lethal.
My wolf, who has been loud for days, goes low and quiet in this room. She does that around exactly one other person, and he’s a bear. Whatever this lean, still woman is, my wolf doesn’t want to test her.
I steady my breathing and take the chair across from her, because the only other option is to stand there being read, and she’s already doing that anyway.
“Grace.” She has a folder open in front of her. My old burner phone sits on top of it in a plastic sleeve, dead and small. Strange to see it. It used to be the heaviest thing I owned. “You know what I have. Records. Numbers. Times. What I don’t have is what the records can’t hold. That’s you.”
“All right.”
“We’re going to walk through what you remember about the woman on this phone. All of it, from the first call. When I ask a question that seems pointless, answer it anyway. The pointless ones are usually mine for a reason.”
So we walk through it.
She takes me back to the beginning, and it’s harder than the briefing room, because Vanya doesn’t want an outline—she wants the detail.
Not “she called at night” but which nights, and what I could hear behind her voice, and whether she started calls the same way each time.
Not “she asked about the mood” but the exact words she used for it.
I find I have them, because being on edge all the time meant noticing everything, and my memory kept it all whether I wanted it or not.
“She never said hello,” I tell her. “She’d start in the middle, like the conversation had been going on without me. ‘Be ready, tomorrow, after dark.’ Or a question, straight in. I used to think she did it to keep me off balance.”
“She did.” Vanya writes something. “Go on.”
“Long silences. If I didn’t fill them, she’d just wait. She could wait longer than anyone I’ve ever known. And she never got angry. Not once, the whole time. Even when I gave her almost nothing, she’d just say, ‘That’s fine, Grace,’ like a teacher marking homework.”
“What did she call your sister?”
The question lands the way those calls used to. “Serenity. Her name. Never anything that made her seem like a captive. Always her name, like they knew each other.”
Vanya’s pen stops for a moment. Then moves again.
“And the proof,” she says. “They gave you proof she was alive. What did it look like?”
“Photos. On the phone.” I nod at the plastic sleeve.
“They’re on there. She could’ve been anywhere.
A bed, a gray wall, out in the sun.” My throat tightens, but I push through it.
“The rest was spoken. She’d drop it in when I started dragging my feet.
‘Serenity’s looking better these days. Healthier.
The people looking after her seem to like her. ’”
“Those words?”
“Those words. I’ve had a lot of nights to think about them.”
“What else? Spoken proof? All of it, even fragments.”
I close my eyes and go back to those moments—the phone pressed against my ear, my hand shaking, trying to sound steady. Remembering brings the fear back, sharp and cold, but I do it anyway because this is the one thing in the world only I can do.
“Once she said Serenity had a good appetite again. Once, that she was sleeping through the night.” I open my eyes. “And once she said the move had done her good. That she’d stopped coughing since they moved her out of the damp.”
Vanya doesn’t move.
Her pen stays where it is. Her eyes lift from the folder and hold on me, and something sharpens behind them.
“Say that again. Exactly.”
“‘The move’s done her good. She’s stopped coughing since we got her out of the damp.’” I watch her write it word for word. “It mattered to me because it meant Serenity had been sick and nobody told me. I never thought about the rest of it.”
“The rest of it is my job.” She pulls a folder from the middle of a stack without hunting for it, opens it, runs a finger down a page I can’t see, and stops.
Whatever is under her finger, she reads it twice.
“That lines up with something Kieran’s people brought in,” she says, mostly to the page.
Then, lower, almost to herself: “And if Nightvale is still inside, I know whose desk it crossed.”
“Whose desk what crossed? Who’s Nightvale? What does Kieran have to do with it?” I think of Iris’s twin, silent and watchful, his expression heavy when he thinks nobody’s looking.
“Not today.” She closes the folder. Whatever door opened, it’s shut again. But I saw it. I sat right here and watched something I said make her think hard, and my sister is closer because my memory held details from a phone call I hated.
I can help. This will help. We’re going to get her.
I keep turning the words over in my head.
“Your sister,” Vanya says. “Same mother? Full sister?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Detail.” She turns a page. “Did the woman ever ask about your family? Your mother, your line, where your people came from?”
“No. She knew about Serenity before I ever said a word. She never asked me anything about family. She only spoke about Serenity. That was her hold on me.”
Vanya looks at me a moment longer than the answer needs. She writes nothing down. That, I notice too.
“Your recall is better than most assets I ran,” she says. It isn’t warm. It’s a measurement, and somehow that makes it worth more. “You were wasted just giving them scraps. You could have had a better role.”
“You say that like you know what it is.”
“I was once the voice on the other end of phones like yours.” She says it the way she’s said everything else—level, no weight added.
“For years. I know how the woman thinks, because I’ve sat where she sits and made people like you fill my silences.
” Her eyes stay on mine, letting me have that, whole.
“That’s why I’m handling this. And it’s why you’re going to trust me when I tell you what comes next. ”
I already know what comes next. I ask anyway, because I have to.
“Is she closer? Do you know where she is?”
“You don’t get to know.”
“Vanya—”
“I can’t tell you what I have, or how much, or how far.
” Plain. No cruelty in it. That makes it hard to fight.
“Not because you’d sell it. Because what you know can be read off you, and people read you now.
You’re the most looked-at woman in this building.
If the wrong person learns what we know about Serenity, we lose our lead.
” She caps her pen. “The fewer people who can point toward her, the safer she stays. You know that better than anyone alive.”
I do know it. It doesn’t stop my nails from digging into my palms under the table.
“I just helped you in here,” I say. “I know I did. And I walk out with nothing?”
“You walk out with this: it mattered. Today we made progress. If it stops mattering, I’ll stop calling for you, and I’m going to keep calling for you.” She straightens the folders, and I understand I’m being dismissed by the way she does it, without a word about it. Then she stops.
“One more thing.” Her eyes move over me once, head to shoulders, not unkind but thorough.
“You came in carrying his scent, and you’ve stopped noticing you carry it.
Whatever’s between you and the bear, it reads from across a room.
” A beat. “That’s not a judgment. I gave up the right to judge anyone’s secrets a long time ago.
It’s a fact, and in this building, facts about you travel.
Decide how much of it you want people to know. ”
My face goes hot. She watches it happen and doesn’t say anything. I just confirmed whatever suspicion she had. She turns back to her work.
Marek is waiting in the corridor. I walk back to the secure wing with him half a step behind me. My heart is still pounding, my thoughts racing. Somewhere out there, my sister is closer than she was this morning, because of what I remembered today.
I need to take the win. But all I can think about right now is that I want Decker. Not for comfort. To tell him. He’s the one person in this building who’d understand what this feels like.
Whatever’s between you and the bear, it reads from across a room.
Decide how much of it you want people to know.
Her words stay with me the whole walk back. Because I have no idea what’s between Decker and me. All I know is that I don’t want to hide it.