CHAPTER TWENTY
Nadia — The Line We Cross
We spent two days building a plan, the three of us — four, once Priya found out what was happening and refused, with a stubbornness I recognized as identical to my own, to be left out of anything that involved my safety.
“I’m not a bodyguard,” she said, when Kael raised the obvious objection. “But I’m a journalist’s assistant editor with a contact list a mile long and zero patience for men who think women should sit out their own rescue. Use me or don’t, but I’m not leaving.”
Sable liked her immediately, which I found more reassuring than I expected to.
The plan itself was simple in its shape, if not its execution: copies of the drive, distributed in advance to three separate investigative reporters at three separate outlets Priya trusted, with a coordinated release date set far enough out that no single point of failure — a stolen laptop, a compromised email, a car that didn’t start one morning — could stop the truth from eventually surfacing.
Sable handled the physical security of the handoffs.
Kael handled what he called, grimly, “managing exposure,” which I understood to mean making sure nobody currently watching either of us realized what we were doing until it was already too late to stop.
“Once the first reporter has a copy,” he said, the night before we executed it, sitting across from me in an apartment that wasn’t mine or his, borrowed from someone in Sable’s network I never met, “there’s no walking this back.
Whoever’s above Vane will know within hours.
I need you to understand what that means before we start — it means the careful version of this, the version where I keep you at a safe distance and manage the danger from the shadows, is over.
From that point forward, you’re a target in the open, and so am I. ”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you fully do, and I say that with respect, not condescension.
” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the careful stillness he usually carried finally cracking under the weight of what he was trying to say.
“I’ve spent four years making sure nothing about my life touched yours in any way that could be traced.
The moment we do this, that ends. Whoever comes after the drive comes after both of us, together, and I won’t be able to protect you from a distance anymore.
I’ll be right next to you, in the open, and that terrifies me more than anything my father’s people were ever capable of doing to me directly. ”
“Why.”
“Because for four years the worst thing I could imagine was losing you to a danger I never let you see coming,” he said quietly.
“Now I have to imagine losing you to a danger we walked into with our eyes open, together, because it was the right thing to do. I don’t know if I can survive causing that, even if it’s not technically my fault. ”
I reached across the space between us and took his hand — the first time I’d touched him deliberately, without the excuse of fear or exhaustion or a car ride that put us close together by accident. His hand was steady. Mine wasn’t, not entirely, but I held on anyway.
“You’re not causing it,” I said. “You’re standing next to me while I do the thing my mother spent fourteen years hoping someone eventually would. That’s not the same as putting me in danger, Kael. That’s the opposite of everything you’ve been doing wrong.”
He looked at our hands, joined, and then at me, and for the first time since the storage unit, I watched him let himself want something without immediately building an argument against wanting it.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We do this tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” I agreed, and didn’t let go of his hand for a long time after, both of us sitting in the quiet of a borrowed apartment, gathering whatever courage we had left for a morning that was going to change everything, one way or another.