I slip a hand into my pocket and flick the black switch on my keyring. A silent ping shoots to Sabine’s phone. It's a fail-safe I wired earlier this week. Not invasive. Just a trigger. If she leaves her shift early, if she strays from her route, I’ll know.
Then I text Grayson.
He’s back.
Need access to local cameras.
Timestamp: 11:43 – check diner exit.
Only after I hit send do I loop around the block, retracing every step, scanning every shadow, every blind corner. I know I won’t find him. He’s too careful for that.
Still, I look.
And then I stop.
Something catches in my chest. A flicker, then a freeze.
My burner buzzes.
Not the one I use for ops. The other one. The one no one’s supposed to have the number for.
One new message.
No contact name. No timestamp. No reply thread. No trace of origin. Not even the ping that should register the send.
That’s impossible. I rotate SIMs, cycle encryption hourly, store nothing locally. There’s nothing to breach.
And yet… it’s there.
Two lines.
You make the game more fun, Little Soldier.
Let’s see which one of us wins.
That’s all it says.
But it’s enough.
More than enough.
It confirms what I’ve been trying not to believe since I saw him on the street.
It was him.
And hewantedme to see him.
Worse, he just invited me to play.
The car ride back to the hospital is silent. So silent, in fact, it tells me Cassian’s mind is somewhere far away, and not in a good place. He’s clearly replaying whatever happened with that cop, and it shows.
We pull into our little patch of nowhere, and he kills the engine, staring into space like he’s stuck in some kind of trance. After a moment, he blinks and looks at me. Really looks at me—head to toe, like he’s seeing me for the first time all over again.
“Show me the object again,” he says at last.
I nod and reach into my coat pocket. My fingers find the cold metal, and I draw out the locket slowly, like it might bite. And honestly? It should. It deserves to. The thing practically hums with rot, even now.
Cassian takes it without a word, studying it with that strange detachment that might as well be his middle name right now. But he doesn’t open it.
