42. Damian
DAMIAN
The Yard came alive in under four minutes, which was three minutes slower than I wanted and still faster than I'd ever managed to pull this crew together before.
The bay still smelled like grease and cold metal, ordinary in a way that made everything happening around it feel wrong by comparison, the work lights humming overhead exactly the same as they did on any other night.
That ordinariness didn't last long. It never did, once I gave the order that turned a quiet garage into something else entirely.
I hit the bay doors already talking, Mira half a step behind me with the pill bottle still clutched in one fist like she couldn't make herself set it down.
Bear was up off his stool before I'd finished my first sentence, keys already in hand, and Fedya killed his radio mid-song and had his phone out before I'd said Viktor's name a second time.
"Talk fast," Bear said.
"Viktor's estate got hit. The door was forced, there's no ransom note, and he's got maybe six hours before his heart gives out on whatever this turns into.
" I was already moving toward the truck, the one built heavier than the others, reinforced under the frame in ways that never showed up on a registration form.
"There's a wiped whiteboard with part of a word on it. Zoya thinks it says bridge."
"Bridge as in a plan, or bridge as in an actual bridge?" Bear asked, already climbing into the driver's seat without waiting to be told.
"We don't know yet. Zoya's working on it."
"I'm driving," Bear said, like it wasn't a question anyone had asked, and when I opened my mouth to argue on pure reflex he cut me off before I got a word out. "I've been in more car chases than anyone in this family and I'm still here. That's not luck, that's a résumé. Get in."
I got in.
Mira reached the back door before I could tell her to stay behind, and I watched the argument die in my own throat before it started, because I already knew how that conversation would end, and there wasn't a minute to spare arguing about it.
She climbed in beside me instead of taking a separate car, her seatbelt on before Bear had the engine turning over, and something in me settled at that, small and strange in the middle of everything else that wasn't settled at all.
Whatever happened in the next hour, it was going to happen with both of us in the same seat, not split across two cars and two versions of the story.
"You're not putting me somewhere safe," she said, before I could try.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it."
"I was thinking about a lot of things. That wasn't the one that won." I meant it, and I watched her hear that I meant it, some of the tension in her shoulders easing by a fraction that mattered more than it looked like it should.
Zoya slid into the passenger seat with her laptop already open, three windows running before her door had fully shut, phone wedged against her shoulder and a second phone in her other hand like she'd grown an extra limb specifically for tonight.
"I've got a friend at the bridge authority who owes me a favor from two years ago that I've been saving for exactly this kind of emergency. I'm calling it in now."
"What kind of favor?" Mira asked.
"The kind you don't ask about in a moving vehicle," Zoya said, already dialing. "Drive, Bear. I'll talk while you do it."
Bear pulled out of the bay hard enough that the tires barked against the concrete, and Fedya swung up into the front of his own truck a half second behind us, phone still pressed to his ear, already three names deep into a call list I knew from experience he kept updated better than most legitimate businesses kept their books.
"Yuri," Fedya was saying, loud enough to carry through the open window as we pulled even with him at the gate, "anybody move a Northline rig tonight that wasn't supposed to be moving? I don't care if it looked legitimate. Those are the ones I want to hear about first."
Something scrabbled in the cargo area behind Mira's seat, low and frantic, and I twisted around fast enough to startle her before I placed the sound.
"Bear."
"I didn't put him in there," Bear said, eyes on the road, entirely too calm for a man who had clearly just done exactly that.
"He put himself in there. I opened the tailgate for two seconds to grab a jack and he was in before I turned back around.
Dog's got better instincts than half the men I've worked with. "
Piston's head appeared between the seats a moment later, his one ear up, tongue out, entirely unbothered by the fact that he had smuggled himself into a moving vehicle headed toward a possible gunfight.
Mira's hand found his head automatically, and I watched some of the rigid fear in her face soften for exactly as long as it took the dog to lean his whole weight against her arm.
"We are not bringing the dog," I said.
"We're already bringing the dog," Bear said, "unless you want me to stop the truck and lose forty seconds arguing with an animal who doesn't speak English."
"He understands plenty," Mira said, one hand still buried in Piston's fur, her voice steadier than it had been since the study.
"He understands sit, stay, and dinner," Bear said. "Everything else is guesswork on his part."
It shouldn't have worked, that exchange, not tonight, not with Viktor somewhere out there running out of time on a medication he'd have needed an hour ago.
But I felt something in the truck loosen half a degree anyway, the particular grace this crew had always had for finding one true, ordinary thing to hold onto in the middle of whatever came apart around us.
I'd built this family out of people who'd learned the same lesson I had, that you survive the worst nights by refusing to let them own every single minute of you.
This was what The Yard had become underneath every gear and file, a place where nobody had to carry the hardest night of their life alone, because somebody else in the room had already survived one of their own and knew exactly how much room to leave for it.
Zoya ended one call and immediately started dialing another, narrating as she went because she'd learned, working with me this long, that I needed the information as fast as she could produce it.
"Bridge authority's pulling their overnight camera logs now.
It'll take a few minutes, they're not exactly built for speed at ten at night.
I've also got someone inside Customs and Border Protection who I'm calling next, an actual contact this time, not a favor, an old connection from back when the seizure case first opened. "
"Call her," I said.
"I'm already dialing." Zoya's thumb moved fast across the screen. "Fedya's still working the ground. Between the three of us, something's going to give."
Fedya worked through three more names on his list while we drove, each call shorter than the last, each one ending the same way, a shake of his head visible through his own windshield that told me nothing before he'd even lowered the phone.
I watched the exits blur past outside my window and made myself sit still, because pacing inside a moving truck accomplished nothing except making everyone around me more afraid than they already were.
It gave faster than I expected.
Fedya's voice cracked through the open connection between our trucks, sharp enough that Bear reached over and turned up the radio without being asked.
"Yuri's got something. It's a commercial transport rig, Northline plates, reported stolen out of the north lot this afternoon.
Nobody flagged it because it looked like a routine pickup on paper.
The driver's badge scanned in and everything, except the driver on record had called in sick two hours before that truck ever left the lot. "
"Somebody used a stolen badge," Mira said, already ahead of it, the same fast, methodical read she'd brought to every piece of this since the archive.
"This was somebody who knew our schedules well enough to know exactly which badge to steal," I said, and felt something cold settle low in my chest, because that kind of knowledge didn't come from outside this family. It came from someone who'd sat at our tables for fifteen years.
"Where's the truck now?" I asked.
"It's headed toward the river," Fedya said. "Last confirmed sighting had it moving toward the Ambassador Bridge."
Nobody said anything for a full second, and in that pause I felt the whole shape of it click into place at once, ugly and exact and almost too clean to be an accident.
The same corridor. The same crossing where a twenty million dollar shipment had vanished into a customs hold and set this entire year in motion.
It was the theft that had put a ring on Mira's finger and a debt on my ledger, the first domino in everything that followed.
Niko had learned that corridor from the inside, had probably helped build the very blind spots he was using to run through it now, and there was something almost obscene about the symmetry of it, the story closing its own loop with him standing at the exact door he'd opened to start it.
"That's not a coincidence," Mira said, quiet, reading it the same way I had.
"No," I said. "That's a man who only knows one way out, because he spent fifteen years learning it was the only door nobody watched closely enough."
Bear merged onto the freeway hard, the truck's engine climbing into a register I only ever heard from him when he'd stopped caring who noticed.
Fedya's truck stayed tight behind us, headlights steady in the mirror, and somewhere in the dark ahead of us a bridge sat waiting with a stolen truck already threading toward it, carrying a man I'd known most of my life toward a border he thought would put him somewhere none of us could follow.
He was wrong about that. I intended to make sure of it personally.
"Zoya," I said. "Anything on that camera footage yet?"
"I'm working on it. Give me two minutes, maybe three."
"We don't have three minutes to spare on anything tonight."
"I know that better than anyone in this truck," she said, not looking up from the screen, fingers moving fast across the keys. "That's why I'm working as fast as I can instead of arguing with you about how fast that actually is."
Mira's hand found mine in the dark of the back seat, steady despite everything, and I held it hard enough that she'd know exactly how much I needed the contact without either of us having to say it out loud.
Piston had gone quiet against her side, sensing, the way dogs always seemed to, that this wasn't a moment for noise.
The freeway stretched out ahead of us, lights strung along it like a fuse already lit, and somewhere past the horizon sat the one crossing I had no intention of letting Niko reach.
Zoya's phone buzzed against her palm, and I watched her whole posture change before she'd even answered it, the particular stillness of someone who already knew the call mattered before they'd heard a single word.
"Talk to me," she said into the phone, and then went quiet, listening, her jaw tightening by degrees the longer the silence stretched.
"Zoya."
"Truck's flagged." Her voice cracked on the second word, thin in a way I'd almost never heard from her, and when she finally looked back at me her eyes had the flat, urgent shine of someone delivering the worst kind of good news. "It's already at the queue for the crossing."
"Go," I said, before she'd even finished the sentence, and Bear's foot found the floor without needing to be told twice, the truck surging forward into the dark with the bridge somewhere ahead of us and less time than any of us wanted standing between where we were and where we needed to be.