We exchanged this information in the car—half shouted over engine noise and adrenaline—so now Knight delivers it cleanly.
“We overheard a name in the cabin,” he says. “Not Luka’s. Not Helios. A woman. Serafina.”
Silence.
So immediate and heavy it makes my spine tighten.
“What did you say?” Arrow asks.
“Serafina,” Knight repeats. “And a tag: NS-11.”
I glance at Knight.
His expression is unreadable.
But the tension in his shoulders says he feels it too—the moment you say something that changes the game.
Arrow doesn’t answer right away.
Instead, I hear movement on his end. A chair scrape. The soft murmur of voices.
Then Arrow says, “I’m patching Dean in.”
A beat later, a new voice joins the call.
“Knight,” Dean Maddox says. “Lark.”
“Dean,” Knight replies.
My mouth goes dry.
I’ve met Dean, technically. At Gage and River’s chaos-HEA era. But hearing him now—like this—makes him feel less like a legend and more like a man about to decide whether we’re a problem or an asset.
“Tell me exactly what you heard,” Dean says.
Knight repeats it. Slow. Precise.
“Serafina. NS-11.”
Another pause.
Then Dean says the words that make the hotel room feel colder:
“Northstar.”
“What the hell is Northstar?” Knight asks.
Dean doesn’t answer in one clean sentence. He answers like this is an old wound he keeps a bandage on becauselookingat it hurts. “Northstar was an operation that went south years ago,” Dean says. “Black-ops-adjacent. The kind of work that gets buried under paperwork and deniability.”
Arrow adds quietly, “The kind of work that creates enemies who don’t stop.”
“Serafina was tied to it?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dean says. “She believes I’m responsible for what she lost. Some of that is true. Some of it… isn’t that simple.”
“That’s a very dramatic non-answer,” I mutter.
Knight squeezes my shoulder like he approves.
