34. Zane
ZANE
The building is industrial, three stories, a warehouse converted for storage somewhere on the outskirts of a city I have never had reason to visit before tonight. Our intelligence puts Lena on the second floor.
Our intelligence is right about that and wrong about everything else: the number of men inside, the layout of the stairwell, and the fact that someone on their side has a radio we didn’t account for.
The first thirty seconds go the way we planned them. The next four minutes do not.
I’m inside the building when the alarm goes up somewhere below us, shouting in a language I don’t need translated to understand, and the careful, surgical extraction we built over six hours becomes something rougher and considerably less certain.
Roman’s team moves fast.
I move faster, because somewhere past the second door on the right is a woman who has done nothing to deserve any part of what’s happening to her tonight, and every second past the alarm is a second I can’t get back if this goes wrong.
We find her in a locked room, no restraints, which tells me they were keeping her as leverage rather than treating her as a threat.
She’s pale, frightened, a bruise forming along one cheekbone where someone grabbed her harder than they should have, but she’s upright, alert, already moving toward me before I’ve fully cleared the doorway.
“Are you Zane?” she asks, which is not what I expect a frightened woman to ask first.
“Yes.”
“Took you long enough.” Her voice shakes but doesn’t break. “Get me out of here so I can tell her I finally met you.”
We move.
The stairwell down is worse than the one up. Two of Roman’s men take fire near the exit, neither seriously, but enough that we lose four minutes pressed against a wall I would rather not have needed.
I keep my body between Lena and the door the entire time, and when we finally clear the building into the cold night air, my hands are not as steady as I would like them to be.
She doesn’t ask what almost happened. I don’t tell her.
The drive back takes longer than the flight that follows it, every minute stretching with the tension of an operation that succeeded but cost more than it should have.
Two of my men are being treated for injuries that will heal. Lena sits beside me in the car, quiet, her hand occasionally going to the bruise on her cheek like she’s confirming it’s still there.
“They asked me questions,” she says, somewhere over the Atlantic, the cabin dimming around us. “About your operations. Routes, structures, things I don’t know anything about because Celine has never told me any of it.”
“You gave them nothing.”
“I had nothing to give.” She looks at me. “Is that why they took me? Because I was supposed to know something?”
“They believed you might.”
“I’m just her sister.”
“You’re the person she loves most in the world,” I say. “That made you valuable to them whether you knew anything or not.”
She’s quiet for a long time after that, looking out at the dark, and I think about the Marchetti faction’s calculation, the cold efficiency of choosing the softest target available rather than the strongest, and something in my chest hardens into a decision I haven’t fully spoken out loud yet, not even to Roman.
This ends. Completely. Soon.
The penthouse is lit when we arrive, every light on, which tells me Celine has not slept since we left.
The elevator doors open onto the foyer, and she’s already there, already moving before either of us has fully stepped through, and Lena breaks away from my side the moment she sees her sister’s face.
I step back.
I do this without deciding to; my body simply understands, before my mind catches up, that this reunion does not include me, that whatever happens in the next several minutes belongs entirely to two women who have spent their whole lives being everything to each other, long before I existed in either of their stories.
Celine pulls Lena into her arms. Lena starts crying the moment contact is made, the controlled composure she held together for the entire flight finally breaking apart now that she’s somewhere safe enough to let it.
Celine holds her, one hand cradling the back of her sister’s head, murmuring something too quiet for me to hear, and I stand near the elevator with Roman beside me, both of us giving them the room the moment requires.
I watch Celine’s face over Lena’s shoulder.
She finds my eyes across the foyer.
Neither of us says anything.
I don’t need her to.
Whatever passed between us in my office five nights ago, whatever sits unresolved in that locked drawer where the file still waits, none of it matters in this moment, not because it’s been settled but because some things are simply too large to address while a frightened woman is still crying in her sister’s arms.
I see something in Celine’s expression that isn’t forgiveness and isn’t absolution. It’s an acknowledgment that I did exactly what I told her I would do, that her sister is standing in this room because of decisions I made and executed without hesitation.
She doesn’t cross the room to me, and I don’t expect her to.
We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, the weight of the night sitting between us in a silence that says more than either of us would manage with words right now, and then she turns back to Lena, guiding her sister toward the couch, toward water, toward whatever small, ordinary comforts a person needs after the worst night of their life.
Roman touches my shoulder once. “Med team is on standby if she needs them.”
“Have them check her cheek,” I say. “And get the men who were hit proper treatment tonight, not tomorrow.”
“Already arranged.”
I look once more across the room, Celine kneeling in front of Lena now, smoothing her sister’s hair back from her face, the two of them framed by the city lights through the window behind them.
I go to my office. There is still work to finish tonight, calls to make, and the beginning of what comes next for the people who did this.
But for a few minutes, I just stand in the doorway and watch the two of them, safe, together, and let myself feel the relief without examining yet what it costs me that I still don’t know how to fix the rest of it.