Chapter 12
Irish
Morning came without any of us noticing the exact moment night ended.
By the time weak gray light began pressing against the windows of Maverick's safe flat, the dining table had disappeared beneath maps, printed photographs, coffee cups, discarded takeaway containers, and enough notes to reconstruct Croft House from the foundation upward.
Nobody had slept more than an hour at a time.
Raze had eventually stretched out on the sofa with one boot still on, Storm had claimed an armchair while keeping her laptop balanced across her knees, and Hawkeye had somehow managed to sleep sitting upright against the wall before waking the instant Trigger shifted near the door.
Skye had refused every suggestion that she rest until exhaustion finally won somewhere close to four in the morning, and even then she had only curled into the corner of the second sofa beneath a blanket Maverick found in a cupboard.
I had spent most of the hour she slept pretending I wasn't watching her.
Reconnaissance depended on knowing where everyone in a room was.
That explanation covered the first few glances.
It did considerably less to explain why I noticed the way she tucked one hand beneath her cheek, why her face looked younger when grief wasn't holding every muscle tight, or why the sight of her sleeping somewhere she had chosen to stay settled something restless inside me.
The kiss and the conversation afterward had made sleep even less likely.
Skye had stripped away every easy excuse before I could reach for one, refusing to demand promises or definitions while also refusing to let me pretend what happened had been an accident.
That left me with the far more uncomfortable truth that I'd kissed her because I wanted to and had spent most of the hours since wanting to do it again, which was becoming typical of Skye Fraser.
Very little about the woman respected what I thought was supposed to happen.
Cipher's voice came through the speakers shortly after seven, dragging the room back into focus. "The medical van reached a Covenant-owned property outside Nottingham at five fourteen. No passengers unloaded. Driver stayed eleven minutes, exchanged two sealed cases, then continued south."
Storm rubbed both hands over her face before sitting straighter. "Destination?"
"Still moving."
"Then it wasn't an evacuation vehicle," Trigger said.
"Not last night."
Skye's eyes opened from across the room.
She hadn't moved before the words reached her, but she was awake immediately.
"Isla stayed at Croft."
Cipher looked toward the camera. "As far as the evidence supports."
She pushed the blanket away and stood, hair falling loose around her shoulders as she crossed toward the table. "Then we need to work from that assumption until something contradicts it."
There was no panic this time and no immediate demand that we return to Croft House. She simply came back to the table and went to work, a change I noticed even if I wasn't foolish enough to point it out.
Maverick returned ten minutes later carrying breakfast and information from two people he'd spent years cultivating through perfectly legitimate channels that sounded less legitimate whenever he explained them.
One was a retired planning inspector who still knew half the local council departments.
The other was a contractor who had worked on an adjacent estate before Croft House became a recovery center.
Between them, Maverick had confirmed that the old kitchen garden wall still existed along the western edge of the grounds, though dense landscaping concealed most of it from the road.
More importantly, the laundry entrance Skye had identified had never appeared on the permit removing it from active use.
"It was supposed to be sealed internally," Maverick said, laying an older survey across the table. "But there was no exterior masonry application."
Skye leaned over the drawing. "Then they probably didn't close the opening."
Raze looked from her to the plan. "Because?"
"Because matching historic stone properly is expensive, time-consuming, and unnecessary if you're trying to hide a door behind landscaping.
" She traced the western wall. "If they wanted it invisible from the grounds, they'd keep the existing opening and disguise it.
Timber paneling. False garden storage. Trellis. Something reversible."
Hawkeye set his coffee down. "Camera coverage?"
"That's the other problem," Maverick said. "No current public plans."
"I can solve part of that," Hawkeye answered.
Trigger glanced at him. "How?"
"Last night's camera movement."
The prospect opened his notebook and turned it around.
He had drawn Croft House from memory, then marked every security camera we knew about with arcs showing their approximate fields of view.
Three overlapped near the service entrance.
Two covered the eastern grounds. The western wall had a narrow section where the arcs failed to meet.
Skye leaned closer.
"That's because of the trees."
Hawkeye nodded. "Camera on the northwest corner can't see through the cedar line. West camera has to rotate past the garden to cover the rear drive. Leaves maybe eighteen seconds."
"Twenty-two," Skye said.
Everyone looked at her.
She pointed toward the house plan. "If the camera is mounted where I saw it from inside, it has to clear the projecting bay before it picks up the wall. That's another four seconds."
Hawkeye studied the drawing, then slowly nodded.
"Twenty-two."
Raze looked between them. "This is getting unsettling."
Storm tore open a paper bag containing breakfast sandwiches. "You're only uncomfortable because other people are noticing things faster than you."
"I'm excellent at noticing things."
"You spent six months not realizing Remedy was replacing your coffee with decaf."
Raze froze so completely that the room fell silent around him before he slowly looked toward the space Remedy would have occupied, his expression suggesting he believed betrayal ought to be capable of crossing an ocean.
"That son of a bitch."
Skye laughed.
Not the brief sound she'd made before or the dry amusement she used when somebody annoyed her. A genuine laugh filled the flat, warm enough that for a moment nobody remembered why we were there.
I looked at her.
She caught me.
Her laughter softened, but the smile remained.
Something moved through my chest at the sound, something warmer and considerably more dangerous than attraction, and I turned toward the map before I spent too much time trying to identify it.
"We need exterior confirmation before we build an extraction around a door that may not exist."
Trigger nodded. "Daylight reconnaissance."
"Not at Croft," I said. "Too much heat after last night."
"So what?" Raze asked.
"We learn the routes around it without touching the property. Service roads, sight lines, traffic patterns, places security can stage vehicles. If we're going in later, I want three exits that don't depend on the same road."
Skye reached for her coat.
I looked at her.
"What?"
"You haven't eaten."
She stared at me.
Raze slowly leaned back in his chair.
Storm bit the inside of her cheek.
Skye looked at the breakfast bag, then at me. "Are you checking whether I've eaten again?"
"Aye."
"Professional concern?"
"No."
The answer came before I could stop it.
Her eyebrows rose.
I heard Maverick mutter something suspiciously like, "Progress."
I ignored him.
Skye walked to the table, took one of the sandwiches, and held it up. "Satisfied?"
"Not remotely."
Her mouth curved.
That was becoming a problem.
We split two hours later. Trigger and Hawkeye took the eastern route while Raze and Storm headed south to watch the road network connected to Croft's supply contractors.
Maverick disappeared to meet someone near York who had once worked security for one of Covenant Renewal's legitimate charities.
Skye came with me, which was tactical because she knew the buildings along the western approach better than anyone else available and had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I trusted her beside me more than I had forty-eight hours ago.
At least that was what I told myself. We left the vehicle several miles from Croft House and walked through a market town that offered enough pedestrians, cafés, narrow streets, and old stone buildings to teach her the parts of counter-surveillance she hadn't learned during yesterday's escape.
Skye listened more seriously than she had the first time I explained it, probably because two vehicles following us had turned theory into something she could no longer dismiss as my particular brand of paranoia.
"Don't look for the same person," I told her as we crossed a crowded square. "Look for repetition."
"Meaning?"
"Same coat appears twice where it shouldn't. Same car turns up after two direction changes. Somebody enters a shop behind you but never looks at anything. People are easier to disguise than habits."
She glanced toward a café window.
"You're checking reflections."
"Aye."
"And you know where every exit is."
"Most of them."
"That's exhausting."
"It becomes automatic."
Her expression shifted.
I knew that look.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Skye."
She gave me a sideways glance. "You tell me not to push."
"Doesn't mean I won't."
"That seems unfair."
"Probably."
She walked another few steps before speaking. "I was wondering how long you've lived like that."
The question was quiet enough that I could have pretended not to understand.
Instead, I looked toward the opposite pavement.
"Long enough."
"Since Ireland?"
My shoulders tightened.
She noticed and didn't ask again.
That was the difference between Skye now and the woman who had stood in the arcade demanding every answer I possessed. She still wanted to know. She just no longer believed knowing required forcing the door.