Chapter 11 Rowan
ROWAN
The corridor outside our room has gone quiet in a way that feels wrong.
Earlier, the corridor had been full of movement.
Boots passed our door often enough that I could almost count the minutes by them.
Men muttered to each other in low bursts, doors opened and closed farther down the hall, and every sound felt rushed. But the pattern has changed.
Now the quiet comes in strange pockets. A door slams somewhere deeper in the warehouse, and then nothing follows it for several seconds.
Voices rise sharply, then vanish. An engine starts outside and keeps running.
Another starts it not long after, the lower note of it vibrating through the concrete floor beneath my feet.
The men who do pass our door move faster than before, and none of them linger.
I sit on the edge of the cot and listen harder.
The room smells like too many things layered on top of each other.
Old concrete, cold dust, antiseptic from the supplies they threw at us after dragging us back here, dried blood, sweat, and the faint metallic scent that still clings to the air after gunfire.
Lila repositions on the opposite cot, and the thin mattress creaks beneath her.
She has one hand pressed carefully against the bandage at her side, not because the wound is bleeding heavily again, but because pain has a way of making people guard themselves without thinking.
The fluorescent light overhead washes the color out of her face, leaving her skin almost gray against the pillow.
The dark crescents beneath her eyes look deeper now than they did an hour ago.
She notices me looking.
“It’s still holding,” she mutters, her voice rough around the edges. “You can stop staring.”
“I’m not staring.”
Lila arches a brow, though the effect is dulled by exhaustion. “You’ve looked at the bandage three times in the last minute.”
I let out a slow breath and rise from the cot. “That’s not staring. That’s checking whether you’re about to pass out.”
“You’d know if I was about to pass out.”
“Would I?”
She opens her mouth like she’s ready to answer, then closes it again and leans her head back against the pillow. A small line appears between her brows as the pain catches up with her. She doesn’t make a sound, but her fingers press more firmly against the bandage before relaxing.
I move toward the door and stop near the wall, close enough to hear the corridor better without making it obvious what I’m doing. The metal frame is colder here. The draft that slips beneath the door lifts the hem of my shirt slightly before disappearing again.
I still haven’t heard Ivan’s voice. He likes the effect of being present.
Even when he isn’t speaking directly to us, the atmosphere changes when he’s nearby.
Guards stand straighter, conversations cut off faster, and the tension outside the room turns more watchful, more alert. I haven’t felt any of that in a while.
Behind me, Lila changes position again, more slowly this time. “You notice it too?”
I glance back at her. “The hallway?”
“And outside.”
I turn my attention back to the door. Another round of footsteps moves quickly past, followed by the squeal of metal wheels rolling over concrete somewhere farther away. Then a voice barks an order I can’t make out, too muffled by distance and walls, but the tone is enough.
“Yes,” I answer. “Something changed.”
Lila drags a hand through the loose strands of hair that have slipped from the mess at the back of her head. “That doesn’t automatically mean anything.”
“No,” I agree, “but it doesn’t feel random either.”
I walk back toward the table and pick up the half-empty bottle of water sitting there. The plastic crackles faintly under my fingers. The water inside is lukewarm and tastes stale, but I drink it anyway.
If they move us now, everything resets. The size of this room.
The distance from the cot to the door. The timing of the guards.
The vent. The sounds of the corridor. The small details I’ve been gathering, the ones that don’t look like much by themselves but start to matter when there’s nothing else to work with.
Lila watches me lower the bottle. “You think they’re getting ready to relocate us.”
I don’t answer right away.
Outside, an engine revs once and then idles again. The noise works its way through the warehouse frame and stays there, a low mechanical pulse beneath everything else.
“Yes,” I tell her finally. “I think they’re preparing vehicles.”
Her expression changes. It isn’t panic, but something close enough that her posture stiffens before she notices it. “Because of the escape attempt?”
“Because of Arkady. Because of whatever Ivan is doing now. Because this place isn’t secure anymore.”
Lila looks toward the door, then toward the vent near the ceiling, then back to me. I can almost see the calculation moving behind her eyes.
“If you’re right,” she murmurs, “we don’t have much time.”
She braces one hand against the cot and pushes herself upright, moving carefully enough that even she can’t pretend the pain isn’t there now. Her mouth tightens when she stands, but she stays on her feet and crosses the room in slow, uneven steps until she reaches the table.
“We try before they move us,” she decides.
I study her briefly. “You can barely walk.”
“I can walk enough,” she insists.
“That isn’t the same thing.”
Lila grips the edge of the table with both hands and leans into it, the effort of standing clearly costing her more than she wants me to see. “Then we work with what we have.”
There’s frustration in her voice with guilt and shame underneath it from the knowledge that she helped set all of this in motion, no matter how manipulated she was along the way.
I set the bottle down and wrap my arms around myself. “The vent is too small for you with that injury.”
She follows my glance upward. The metal grate still hangs slightly loose at one corner, crooked enough to make the possibility difficult to ignore and small enough to make it immediately useless.
“Then the door,” she replies.
“With what?”
Her eyes move around the room. Table. Cot frame. Plastic bottle. Nothing here is worth much against armed men.
“We hit the next guard who comes through,” she decides, gripping the edge of the table more firmly.
“If he comes through alone,” I add.
I draw in a slow breath and let it out just as carefully. The room feels colder now, though that may only be my body anticipating what comes next, bracing for the moment.
Outside the door, a burst of footsteps runs past so quickly that the sound overlaps itself. Something heavy is dropped in the corridor with a hard metallic crack. A voice swears. Another answers, lower and tighter.
Lila hears it too. “That doesn’t sound like a normal guard rotation.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I agree.
She studies my face with more focus than before. “You think this could be Ivan?”
I meet her eyes. “I think something’s happening.”
“That’s not the same answer,” she murmurs.
“No,” I admit, “but it’s the only one I have.”
She looks away first, lowering herself onto the edge of the cot again as if standing any longer would force her body to decide for her.
The fluorescent light highlights the edge of her cheekbone and the dampness along her hairline.
Pain is making her breathing shallower, though she’s trying hard not to let it show.
“You still think Kiren will find us,” she murmurs.
I hold her eyes. “I do.”
“How?”
I glance toward the wall, toward the layered noise of engines and metal and distant voices.
“I don’t know how Kiren is getting here,” I tell her quietly. “I don’t know what he’s learned or how much of this he already understands. But Kiren doesn’t stop when things turn bad. He becomes colder. More focused. And once he has enough information, he moves.”
Lila’s fingers tighten briefly around the edge of the mattress. “I’m not sure I can reach that kind of certainty yet.”
The comment draws a tired breath out of me that almost becomes a laugh and dies before it fully forms. “It isn’t certainty.”
“What is it, then?” she asks quietly.
I think about Kiren’s face in my memory, the stillness that always came over him when something mattered enough to narrow his entire focus.
The way he looked at a problem and stripped it down to its bones.
The way he looked at me when there were no guards in the room, no weapons between us, and no reason to hide what was there.
“I know him,” I tell her.
The words feel simpler than the truth but closer to it than anything else I could have offered.
Lila studies me, then gives a small nod, as if that answer makes more sense to her than certainty ever would.
In the next heartbeat, the building shudders. The sound reaches us almost half a second after the vibration does, a deep concussive force that rolls through the warehouse and rattles the vent, the light fixture, the table, everything. Dust trembles loose from the ceiling seam above the door.
Lila jerks upright.
I’m already moving before the second blast hits.
This one is louder, close enough that the fluorescent light pulses hard overhead, and one of the empty bottles on the table rolls off the edge and hits the floor.
Then the entire warehouse erupts. Shouting tears through the corridor. Boots pound past the door in both directions now. Somewhere deeper in the building, a burst of gunfire cracks through the air and echoes off metal with a violence that leaves no room for interpretation.
Lila stares at me, eyes wide now, all the exhaustion gone from her face in one instant and replaced by something hotter and sharper.
“What the hell was that?”
I feel my pulse hammering in my throat, not from fear but from recognition.
“This isn’t relocation,” I breathe.