I looked at my father, heat rising in my chest. "Yeah," I said. "It was necessary. The prick put his hands on Amelia. And he knows more than he thinks. I'm going to squeeze every memory out of the guy."
Dad’s jaw worked. His eyes flicked to the Charleston Danes, then back to me.
For a second, I thought he might push back. Might tell me I'd made a tactical error, brought a liability into the house, compromised operational security.
He didn't.
"All right," he said quietly.
Atlas gave me a small nod. Approval, maybe. Or solidarity. Hard to tell with a man I'd known for less than five minutes.
We kept walking.
The room Dad led us to was unlike anything I'd seen in the house so far. It was huge—fitting for a mansion like this—but it looked like a military command center ripped straight out of the Pentagon.
A massive table dominated the center, large enough to seat twenty. Screens lined the walls, some dark, some flickering with maps and data streams I didn't have time to process. There were secure comms stations, filing cabinets that looked like they could survive a direct hit, and a surveillance setup that would make most government agencies jealous.
This was the war room.
I filed it away. Another piece of the puzzle. Another reminder that Dominion Hall wasn't just wealth and real estate. It was infrastructure. Operational capability. The kind of setup you built when you expected to fight wars that never made the news.
Everyone filed in, taking seats around the table. Dad sat at the head. The Charleston Danes filled in on one side, my Montana brothers on the other.
I stayed standing.
The air in the room felt charged. Expectant.
These men—my brothers, all of them now, whether I was ready for that or not—were waiting for intel. Waiting to know what we were up against. Waiting to see how we would take action, together.
I thought about the van. The zip ties. The woman's voice in the dark.
We're always watching.
"Tell them what the editor said," Ethan said, looking at me.
I nodded and started talking.
I told them everything. The staged accident. The abduction. The two men in the van I'd killed. The parking lot ambush. The underground room where they'd tied me to a chair.
And the woman.
Her voice—older, raspy, like she'd smoked her whole life. The way she'd spoken with absolute confidence, like she owned the world and was just letting the rest of us live in it.
The threat she'd made. Amelia. My brothers. All the women. Everyone I cared about, lined up like targets.
The ultimatum: go back to Dominion Hall and tell Byron that The Vanguard wanted a meeting. A truce.
Or watch everyone die.
Then I told them about Derek.
The offer The Vanguard had made to him—save his company, take down a crooked operation, ten years of runway. The appeal to his vanity, his fear, his desperation.
The way he'd cracked under pressure in the hotel room, spilling details he probably didn't even realize mattered.
I didn't sugarcoat it. Didn't leave out the part where I'd beaten Derek bloody, or the part where we'd stuffed him in a duffel bag like cargo. These weren't men who needed things sanitized.
When I finished, the room was silent.
