Chapter 3
three
Daphne Wilde pushed her glasses up her nose and stared at six monitors that were telling her absolutely nothing useful, which was a first.
She hated it.
Eighteen hours. Eighteen hours since Dom had gone dark, and all she had to show for it was cold coffee, a stiff neck, and a bone-deep dread.
Her workstation on the ninety-third floor of WSW headquarters in Manhattan hummed around her—servers whirring behind reinforced walls, the glow of her screens painting everything in shades of blue—while the city buzzed endlessly beyond her windows, despite the late hour.
The rest of the Tech Lab was empty. Just her and the machines, the way she usually preferred it.
Not tonight.
Dom could be anywhere out there.
And. She. Couldn’t. Find. Him.
She had six separate tracking algorithms running across the monitors.
Traffic camera intercepts from every borough on one.
Signal analysis on another, scanning for Dom’s phone even though she knew it was dead—Praetorian, or whoever had taken him, would have ditched it within the first ten minutes.
A third screen crawled through dark web chatter, automated filters flagging anything related to Wilde Security, abduction, ransom, or a dozen other keywords she’d programmed in a haze of adrenaline at three in the morning.
The other three were running variations on the same hopeless theme: find a digital footprint where none existed.
Because whoever had taken Dom and Vivianna Cavalier had done it clean. Surgically, infuriatingly clean.
Daphne pulled up the traffic camera footage she’d already watched forty-seven times—she was counting, because counting kept her from screaming—and forced herself through it again.
The nightclub’s exterior camera, angled toward the street, had resolution just good enough to be useful if you knew how to enhance it. Which she did.
2:14 AM. Dom and Vivi exited the club. They stumbled out together, Dom’s arm slung around Vivi’s waist in a way that could have been romantic or could have been two people who’d had too much to drink holding each other upright.
Daphne couldn’t tell. She’d never been great at reading body language in person, let alone through grainy surveillance footage.
2:17 AM. They reached Dom’s car. He opened the door and disappeared into the backseat.
2:23 AM. A black van—no plates, no distinguishing marks, the kind of generic panel van you could buy at any used lot in the tri-state area—pulled up alongside Dom’s car. Three figures emerged.
2:24 AM. Dom and Vivi were extracted from the backseat. Neither resisted. Neither moved under their own power. Drugged, then. Something fast-acting. The figures loaded them into the van with the skill of people who had done this many, many times before.
2:25 AM. The van pulled away at a conspicuously unhurried pace. They weren’t worried about pursuit because they were sure they’d already won.
Bastards.
But they didn’t know they were up against her.
Daphne pulled up the van’s trajectory and traced it through the camera network she’d hacked—illegally, technically, but legality was a luxury she couldn’t afford when her cousin was missing.
The van was captured on camera at the intersection of M Street and Wisconsin, heading northwest. Then another camera at Whitehurst Freeway.
Then nothing. It vanished somewhere between the freeway on-ramp and the next camera cluster near Canal Road.
Professional. Not a crime of opportunity.
This was Praetorian.
She just couldn’t prove it yet, and she didn’t traffic in gut feelings. She believed in data. Evidence. The kind of airtight digital forensics that held up under scrutiny and couldn’t be dismissed.
The elevator chimed somewhere behind her, and she heard the distinctive uneven cadence of Davey’s walk before she saw him.
The slight drag of his left leg, the compensating rhythm his body had built around the metal in his femur.
He appeared at the edge of her workstation, looking like he hadn’t slept either, which he probably hadn’t.
“Anything?” he asked.
“No.” She swiveled her chair to face him and didn’t sugarcoat it.
He wouldn’t want her to. “No digital footprint. No ransom demand. No chatter on any channel I’m monitoring, and I’m monitoring all of them.
” She pulled her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“I sent Liam and Bridger to find the van. It was scrubbed. No plates, no VIN.”
“Praetorian.”
“That’s my assessment. The execution was too clean for a standard snatch-and-grab. And the timing—right after the Antarctica situation, right after Cade—” She stopped herself.
The name still stung, and she could see it hurt Davey, too. There was a flinch behind his eyes, but he’d never admit to it.
“Keep digging.”
She nodded. He didn’t need to tell her that. Obviously, she would. But he’d said it anyway, because Davey needed to give orders the way other people needed to breathe—it was the only thing keeping him upright.
He lingered for another beat and looked like he wanted to say more. Maybe something human, something about Dom being tough or resilient or the kind of person who always found his way home. But he didn’t. He just gave her a short nod and walked back toward the elevator.
Yep. He was holding on by a thread and sheer stubbornness.
Daphne turned back to her screens. The algorithms churned. The data streams scrolled. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Ugh.
She was pulling apart metadata from a cluster of cell tower pings near the Lincoln Tunnel when the door to the lab burst open with enough force to rattle the glass, and Celeste blew in like a weather system.
“Coffee delivery for the genius who refuses to sleep,” her twin announced, sliding a paper cup across the desk like a bartender. “Before you say anything—yes, it’s from the break room. Yes, it’s terrible. No, I didn’t spit in it. This time.”
Daphne caught the cup. The coffee was lukewarm and smelled like it had been brewed sometime during the previous administration. She drank it anyway, because caffeine was caffeine and her body had stopped caring about quality around hour twelve.
Celeste perched on the edge of the desk—the one clear spot between a keyboard and a stack of external drives—and her eyes did the thing they always did, the quick sweep that looked casual but was actually a thorough assessment of her sister’s state.
They were mirror images in almost every way except the ones that mattered.
Same dark brown hair, except Celeste’s currently had electric-blue streaks and was twisted into an elaborate configuration that defied physics.
Same hazel eyes, same height, same build.
But where Daphne was stillness and shadow, Celeste was voltage and color.
Where Daphne retreated into code, Celeste charged into the field.
Two versions of the same blueprint, optimized for completely different operating environments.
Right now, though, they were both scared. Daphne could see it in the way Celeste’s fingers wouldn’t stay still. She picked at the cardboard sleeve on her own coffee cup, peeling it in thin strips.
“Anything?” Celeste asked.
“Nothing.”
“Shit.”
Yeah. That about covered it.
Celeste was quiet for a moment—which, for Celeste, constituted a minor miracle. Then she rallied, because that’s what Celeste did.
“So.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “Have you heard from your mystery man?”
Daphne closed her eyes. “We are in the middle of a crisis.”
“Which is exactly why you need a distraction. Has he messaged? Is he being all broody and philosophical? Tell me he sent you something devastatingly witty.”
“I’m going to regret telling you about him for the rest of my natural life.”
“Probably.” Celeste grinned, but it didn’t quite chase away the worry in her eyes. “But seriously. You’ve been staring at those screens for eighteen hours. You need something that isn’t code and doom.”
She opened her mouth to respond, but a soft ping stopped her. It hadn’t come from the six monitors, but from the seventh device on her workstation, the one that wasn’t connected to Wilde Security’s network.
Her personal laptop. The machine she used for exactly one thing.
The notification icon glowed on the dark screen. A single message, routed through three proxy servers and encrypted end-to-end with a cipher that would take the NSA approximately eleven years to brute-force.
The username: Titan.
Daphne’s muscles loosened by a fraction of a degree, and she exhaled for what felt like the first time in days.
She opened the message.
Titan: You’ve been quiet tonight. Everything okay?
It was the digital equivalent of someone leaning against a doorframe and asking about your day. He always did this. Had done it for almost a year now—appeared in her inbox at odd hours, always when she needed it, as if he had some sixth sense for when the walls were closing in.
It had started with a chess match. An anonymous online tournament where she’d been playing under a disposable alias, killing time between projects, and she’d encountered a player whose strategy was unlike anything she’d seen.
He was elegant, ruthless, and three moves ahead of everyone.
He’d beaten her. The first person to beat her in years.
She’d messaged him afterward. He’d messaged back. And somehow, impossibly, they’d never stopped.
Late-night debates about encryption theory and the ethics of surveillance.
Arguments about whether Asimov or Clarke better predicted the future.
Challenges he’d throw at her—puzzles wrapped in code, complex enough to keep her engaged and creative enough to make her laugh.
He’d send her a cipher at midnight; she’d crack it by two AM and send one back. He’d solve it by dawn.