CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Nadia — The Morning It Started
I felt lighter walking out of that diner than I had in a month. It didn’t last.
“Sable’s been made,” he said. “Someone clocked her at the second handoff. We need to move — now, not in an hour.”
“Move where.”
“Somewhere Vane’s people don’t have an address for yet, which is a shorter list than I’d like.
” He was already steering me toward the car, scanning the street with the particular focus I recognized now as the part of him built for exactly this.
“They know something’s happening. They don’t know what yet, or they’d already be doing more than watching. That gap won’t last.”
It didn’t. We were three blocks from the safehouse Sable had arranged when the car behind us — dark, unremarkable, the kind of vehicle I’d learned in the worst way to notice — pulled close enough that I felt Kael’s entire body shift into something coiled and ready beside me.
“Seatbelt,” he said, low, and I had just enough time to comply before he took a hard right that put two blocks of solid traffic between us and whoever had been following, a maneuver executed with a calm precision that told me, more clearly than anything else had, exactly how much of his life had been spent preparing for a day like this one.
We lost them near the bridge. I didn’t fully believe we’d lost them until we were inside the safehouse, doors locked, Sable already there with a laptop open and her jaw set in a hard line.
“They know the drive’s out,” she said without preamble.
“Doesn’t matter how, at this point — probably surveillance on one of the three newsrooms, or someone talked without meaning to.
What matters is they’ve stopped being careful.
Vane called an hour ago. Wanted to talk to you directly, Kael. Left a number.”
“Don’t call him,” I said, before Kael could reach for his phone. “Whatever he wants, it’s not a conversation. It’s a distraction while someone else does something worse.”
Kael looked at me for a long moment, something like pride moving through the tension in his face. “You’ve been paying attention.”
“I’ve had an excellent teacher,” I said, and meant it as something closer to gratitude than the bitterness it might have carried a month earlier.
Sable’s laptop chimed — an email, encrypted, routed through enough proxies that tracing its origin would take hours we didn’t have. She opened it, read it once, and went very still in a way that made my stomach drop before she’d said a single word.
“It’s not from Vane,” she said. “It’s addressed to you, Nadia. Specifically.”