While she writes, I let my eyes lift to the wall of screens. Caldwell occupies a quarter of the largest panel, a muted news clip rerunning his last performance at a committee dais. He’s smiling the way clean wolves do—well-groomed, careful not to show too much tooth. Under him a crawler reads: SENATE SUBPOENA EXPANDS; PRIVATE FOUNDATIONS ON NOTICE. The sound is off. I hear him anyway.We’re just asking questions. We’re just trying to follow the money. We’re just doing oversight.
Reid looks at Aurora with an amiable half-smile. “The Annex is ugly right now,” he tells her. “You’ll hate the lighting. You’ll love the bones. Brick that wants to be something. We’ll put a room in there you won’t want to leave.”
“I don’t want to live in anything you build me,” she says, no heat in it; just the truth as she sees it right now.
Reid takes the correction like a man who respects the line. “Then we’ll build it for someone who needs it more.” He checks his watch. “We can roll at nine tomorrow. You want me to grab the keys and call the second car?”
“Do it,” I say. “Unmarked SUV. No plates that sing.”
“Already in the bay,” he answers, like he knew I’d say yes this morning and not in three days. He pulls his phone out as he steps into the hall. “I’ll brief the driver.”
I slide the signed pages back into the binder and set the pen on top of it. “We’ll keep it fast,” I tell Aurora, and I mean it two ways.
“Fast is fine.” She tucks a stray hair behind her ear. “I’ll grab a sweater and my sketchbook.”
I watch her cross the glass and feel the same wrong blend of emotions that have been owning me for days. Desire I can manage; I’ve spent a lifetime ordering hunger into acceptable shapes. The thing that has me off-center is I want her to see me. Not the man Caldwell wants to frame on cable or the operator my staff needs to keep the machine honest. Me. And there’s no protocol for that.
Movement in the bathroom mirror pulls my eyes. She’s in there with the door three-quarters open, hair twisted into a low bun, the damp ends darkening the collar of her sweater where it touches. She’s packing fast and efficient without looking like she’s fleeing. Sketchbook. Pencils. A cardigan thrown on top. She considers a scarf, shakes her head, tosses it aside, then picksit up again and rolls it into the bag because she’s learned wind lies.
“You don’t need to bring anything heavy,” I say, stepping into the threshold so my reflection puts me in her frame without crowding the doorway. “We’re not staying.”
“I know.” She catches my eyes in the mirror and holds them. Her mouth doesn’t move. Her gaze doesn’t soften. It isn’t cold. It’s unreadable. “I’m not packing a life. Just a day.”
She zips the bag and turns to face me. The bandage flashes again when she lifts the strap. I reach for the bag, and she reads the move correctly—chooses to let me take the weight instead of turning it into a contest. I set it by the door. The small domesticity of it knocks something off-balance in me that has nothing to do with surveillance or jurisdiction or who signs what.
“I’m trusting you,” she says, almost conversationally. Which is exactly how you should drop a grenade.
“I know,” I answer. I force my voice into the place I keep for promises I sign with my blood. “I won’t waste it.”
A sound from the phone on the kitchen counter pricks the room. I don’t look right away. She watches my face stay neutral, then strolls past me and pours herself water from the tap like she lives here. She takes a long drink and sets the glass down directly on my counter without a coaster. The ring of condensation it leaves prints precise and temporary. I don’t wipe it away.
Tomorrow will fix everything.
Chapter 56 – Aurora
I’m awake before the room knows it’s morning. The ceiling is gray, the windows still have that pre-dawn film, and the air has the quiet the Sanctuary engineers into everything—soft vents, padded hinges, the suggestion that noise only happens if you invite it.
My phone is face down on the nightstand. I don’t have to see the screen to know what waits. The charge light is a single green pinprick in the dark, accusatory, and patient. I turn it over and let it stab me.
Three new messages from the same unknown number.
We can get you out.
He won’t protect you.
Ask him about the night in Tulsa.
The third one is a gut punch. Not because Tulsa is some secret no one could guess—no one here has asked, but if they’d looked hard enough they would have found a breadcrumb trail of school transfers, intake forms, and a police report that goes nowhere. It’s the phrasing. The night in Tulsa, like an arrow shot straight into a small, specific wound nobody should know how to find.
I sit up too fast. The blanket slides to my waist. The room tilts like the floor just shifted an inch to the left.
“How do you know that?” I ask into the empty air. My voice is a rasp. I don’t expect an answer, and I don’t get one. The phone just sits there in my hand, screen casting white light over my knuckles, the words pinned in a neat blue bubble.
I throw the covers off and put my feet on the floor. The wood is cool. I pace—bed to window, window to door, door to dresser—then back again. I’ve never been good at stillness when the past reaches up through the boards. It doesn’t matter howmany layers you pour on top of it; it knows how to find the seams.
Maybe the texts are from Nadia. She’d know Tulsa because I told her in a bad year and she stored it like everything she stores. But Nadia wouldn’t hide. Nadia would call and yell and tell me in her controlled voice thatthis is dangerous, get out, I’m booking you a flight, we can fight the contract if we have to.These messages don’t try to save me with rules. They bait. They rake old ash to see where the embers still glow.
I think about telling him now. I can see how it would go: I walk to his suite, knock, stand in his doorway with my phone extended like a confession and say, “This came overnight.” I watch his face. He reads the words. I read him. Maybe we finally stop circling, and he tells me what he keeps behind his teeth.
