Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
GAGE
I don’t make it to the car right away.
I stand outside River’s door after it clicks shut, forehead against the cool metal, palms flat like I can push my pulse back through.
The red camera light over the frame ticks steady.
I force myself down the hall, down the stairs, out into the damp night before I do something stupid like knock again just to steal one more kiss.
I want to stay.
I want to stay so badly it feels like a pulled muscle—tender and hot and impossible to ignore.
Instead, I drive with the windows cracked and the radio off, letting the city wash through the open seam like a bag of ice on a bruise. Every red light is a dare to turn around. Every green one is a threat that I’ll keep going.
By the time I hit my place, my chest still hasn’t learned how to be a ribcage again.
Arrow’s on the couch with his laptop open and a bowl of something vaguely healthy in his hand. Juno’s tucked into his side, barefoot, hair up, her own laptop glowing with a dozen tabs. The TV’s muted on some nature documentary; a cheetah is making unwise life choices in 4K.
Arrow looks up. “You look like you lost an argument with a semi.”
“I kissed her,” I say.
Juno’s eyebrows arc. “Hi to you, too.”
“Sorry.” I set my keys in the dish, then set them again because my fingers forgot “down” is an option. “Hi.”
Arrow leans forward, interest shifting from feral to focused. “She okay?”
“She’s… more than okay.” I scrub a hand over my face. “I might be getting in too deep.”
“Buddy,” Juno says gently, “you already live at the bottom of that well.”
I huff a laugh, short and helpless. “You’re not wrong.”
She sets her laptop aside and pads into the kitchen, returns with a glass of water and the soft look she reserves for broken things that bite. “Tell me everything.”
I drop into the chair opposite them. The words come in a rush: the mask off, the kiss, the way River said part of me always wanted it to be you and the way that sentence is going to carve light into me for the rest of my life.
Also the plan talk—Regent, ears in NovaPlay, no confidences at the office.
Juno listens like it’s her job. Arrow listens like he’s writing a strategy doc in his head.
“So she knows you’re Mask,” Juno says, confirming.
“Yeah.”
“And she didn’t throw you into the hallway.”
“She thought about it,” I admit. “She’s still angry. She has every right to be.”
Arrow nods once, satisfied. “Good. Anger keeps you cautious.”
I cock a brow. “That your couples therapy tip of the day?”
“It’s my ‘don’t get murdered’ tip.” He sets the bowl down and spins his laptop around to face me. It’s a heat map of internal NovaPlay traffic and a list of likely leak points. “Now that she knows, we can pull her in on the hunt.”
“Carefully,” Juno adds. “On her terms.”
“She wants in,” I say. “She hates feeling like this is happening to her. Today she took down a troll in under ten minutes and smiled like she remembered how.”
Juno’s smile goes soft. “That’s our girl.”
I jerk my chin at the screen. “We still don’t have Regent. And Tasha…”
Arrow’s expression tightens. “Yeah.”
I brace. “River doesn’t know about Tasha. And we’re not a hundred percent. I’m not telling her until we are.”
“Agreed,” Arrow says immediately. “We don’t accuse a friend on a hunch.”
Juno worries her bottom lip between her teeth. “Then we make it not-a-hunch. We need Tasha in a room where she drops a thread we can follow. Somewhere she thinks she’s safe.”
“HR,” I say. “Her turf.”
Juno shakes her head. “Too obvious. Too many variables. And if she suspects, she’ll sanitize before she even leaves her desk.”
Arrow swivels toward her. “What are you thinking?”
“A girls’ night,” Juno says, like it’s the most obvious op in the world. “At my place. Low-stakes. Wine, face masks, zero men allowed. I invite River because she needs a soft landing. I invite Tasha because she won’t say no to being the supportive friend. And—” she glances at me “—we invite Lark.”
My brain stutters. “My sister?”
“She’s funny as hell, people tell her things, and she can read a room like she coded it,” Juno says. “She won’t know the op details—no one will except us—but she’ll keep the energy right. River will relax. Tasha will relax. We’ll see what falls out.”
Arrow is already nodding. “Juno runs point inside. We run point outside.”
I can see it—Juno pouring wine, Lark telling some ridiculous story about me falling off a skateboard when I was twelve, River laughing until her shoulders lift and drop and stay dropped.
Tasha watching, calculating. The places in the conversation where HR policy knowledge leaks into bathroom gossip.
The names she shouldn’t know, the timestamps she shouldn’t have.
“Clues,” I say slowly. “Not a gotcha. Just enough to anchor a warrant. Or to justify an internal audit so thorough Regent gets heat rash.”
“Exactly,” Juno says.
Arrow taps keys, new boxes popping on the screen like a constellation. “I’ll set an RF sniffer in the hallway outside your place and on your fire escape. If she uses her phone, we’ll get MACs, signal strength, app chatter. If she’s on a work device, even better.”
“Render can float the building with a passive cam in a plant across the hall,” I add. “Time stamps on comings and goings. He loves pretending to be David Attenborough for urban fauna.”
Juno laughs. “He does. It’s unsettling.”
“And Knight?” Arrow asks.
“He’ll shadow the route to and from Juno’s,” I say. “If Tasha detours, we follow. If she meets someone, we meet them too.”
Juno’s phone buzzes. She glances and grins. “Speak of chaos: Lark just texted me a cursed meme. She’s in for Friday if there’s pizza.”
“Of course there’s pizza,” I say automatically, already texting my sister. Friday. Juno’s. Girls’ night. Bring your gremlin charm. Be kind to River.
Three dots. Then: Was born kind. Will deploy gremlin charm at 20% unless escalation warranted. Proud of u, idiot.
I exhale through a laugh I didn’t know I had left.
Arrow sobers. “We keep River out of any sharp edges. Juno asks soft questions: How’s HR handling the fallout? Who triages reports? Has compliance changed policy? Watch for tells.”
Juno nods. “No traps. No corners. I’m not trying to break her. I’m trying to see who she is when she thinks she’s not being watched.”
“She’s been watching River,” I say flatly, rage surfacing like a dorsal fin. “From the inside.”
Juno’s hand finds my elbow. “We’ll prove it. And we’ll do it clean.”
I rub my thumb along the edge of my watch, a nervous habit I’ve had since Lark gave it to me for graduation. The leather’s worn into the shape of my wrist. Everything is shaped into the shape of River now—my day, my night, the way I breathe when a notification pings at 2 a.m.
“She told me not to disappear,” I say.
“Then don’t,” Juno says simply. “Tell her where you are when you can. Give her lights instead of shadows.”
Arrow’s gaze sharpens. “You told her how you feel?”
“Not… in a sentence,” I admit. “But she knows I’m in it. She knows.”
Juno’s smile turns smug. “About time.”
Arrow points his fork at me like a gavel. “New boundaries, then. No dropping in on the feed when you’re not on watch. No ‘just one more text’ at 3 a.m. We keep our heads. If Regent escalates, we need you smart, not feral.”
“Define feral,” I say.
“Your wall has a fist hole from the splash screen day,” Juno reminds me.
“Fair.”
Arrow’s face softens by degrees. “We’ll get him.”
“We’ll get them,” I correct. “Regent and whoever else is hiding behind the HR firewall.”
He nods. “Them.”
I push up from the chair and pace, because sitting still makes the thoughts too loud.
“We need fail-safes. If Tasha doesn’t bite, we pivot.
If she does, we need to capture without exposing Juno.
I’ll stage a Faraday sleeve for her phone—‘charger’ that blocks outbound.
If Tasha asks to charge, we sandbox it.”
Juno winces. “She’s not dumb.”
“Neither are we,” Arrow says. “And we’re patient.”
My phone buzzes with the team thread lighting up.
Knight: Got a whisper. Regent scheduled a late-night mod sync Friday, 10pm. If Tasha’s on that call, we’ll see the traffic.
Render: I can get eyes on the alley behind Compliance. They use it as a smoking area / gossip fountain.
Ozzy: I’ll park on the next block with my prettiest antennae. If anyone sneezes in LTE, I’ll know their blood type.
I type back: Girls’ night Friday. Juno + River + Tasha + Lark. Keep it quiet. We want signal, not fireworks.
Thumbs-up emojis roll in.
Juno stands, stretches, and kisses Arrow’s temple—a small, domestic thing that hits me like a flashbang because I can suddenly see River in this room, bare feet, hoodie, claiming a mug. The world tilts again and lands a millimeter to the right.
“She’s going to be okay,” Juno says, reading my face like a debug log. “You know that, right?”
“I want her to be more than okay,” I say before I can talk myself out of it. “I want quiet mornings and stupid fights about laundry and a world where her name only trends when she writes something brilliant.”
Juno grins. “Tell her that.”
“I will.”
“Good.” She pads toward the kitchen. “I’m going to start a group text that pretends to be about face masks and is actually about entrapment.”
Arrow salutes her with his fork. “That’s the most on-brand sentence you’ve ever said.”
She grabs a bag of popcorn and tosses it into the microwave.
Arrow closes his laptop and studies me. “You good?”
“No,” I say honestly. “But I can get there.”
He nods. “We keep her breathing. We get the proof. And then we take Regent’s teeth.”
“And Tasha?” I ask, softer.
“Truth will handle her,” he says. “We just make sure it has a microphone.”
I sink back into the chair, energy finally ebbing. The cheetah on TV stretches in slow motion, sunlight striping its back. For a second, the room is just a room.
My phone buzzes.
RIVER: Made it to bed. Left the light on. Good night
A weight in my chest lifts an inch. I type: Good night. Sleep tight. I’ll be here in the morning
Three dots. Then: RIVER: Don’t disappear
Never, I send, and mean it.
Arrow stands and claps a hand on my shoulder. “Get some sleep, Romeo. Tomorrow we build a girls’ night and a trap.”
“Copy that,” I say, and for the first time in a long time, sleep feels like something I might actually catch.
I turn off the TV. The apartment dims. In the quiet, I let myself imagine the end: arrows on a whiteboard becoming handcuffs; a forum going dark; River laughing in my kitchen with my sister while Juno steals the good olives.
Lines in the sand, I think, as I crawl into bed. Don’t cross. Don’t bend.
But the line I drew years ago—the one that said keep your distance—didn’t survive tonight.
I don’t know if that makes me reckless or finally, mercifully, right.
Either way, I’m in.