Something ugly and protective claws at the back of my throat, but I keep my tone even. “You with her?”
“Obviously,” Wraith says.
“She has eyes on you?” Ash asks, clinical as a surgeon.
“Yeah.”
“Keep it that way,” Ash says. “She’ll stabilize faster if she can see you. She dissociates by thinking, not by shutting down. If you let her sit in her head after that wake-up, she’ll spiral. Narrate for her.”
“Iknowhow to talk to her,” Wraith growls.
“I’m not saying you don’t,” Ash mutters.
Saint lets out something like a chuckle. “Ah.Domesticity.”
“Saint,” I say.
“Yes, my king,” he answers, voice tinged with something light and teasing.
“Bring them in,” I tell him. “All four. I want them in the cellar. Clean, cataloged, stripped. Pull IDs, tattoos, comms, everything. Ash, scrub any signal from that van and wipe the drive from the cams on the main road. Vale—”
“I know,” Vale purrs. “I’m already calling our friends.”
“Careful,” I warn.
“Don’t I always disappoint you,” he says sweetly.
Saint snorts softly in my ear, and I cut the channel.
For a second I just stand there in the foyer, watching the mist hang low over the drive, the iron gate beyond it still closed and gleaming wet in the pale light. Body heat is just starting to rise off the men in faint curls, barely visible. The gravel looks like spilled ink.
First shots have been fired. It's official, now.
Not implied, or whispered. Not backroom threats. He sent people to my fucking door.
And not just my door — tothisdoor. The one place in this city nobody touches. The one line you don’t cross unless you’ve decided you don’t care if you walk back out. Damien either truly doesn’t care, or he doesn’t understand.
Either way, he’s not going to get a second chance to learn.
Footsteps come down the main stairs. Ash first. He’s shirtless under an open zip hoodie, joggers hanging too low, hair a mess, eyes too awake for this hour. He looks like he hasn’t slept, which means he probably hasn’t. He’s already got a tablet in his hand, scrolling through feeds he shouldn’t be able to access that fast. He stops beside me, glances once out the window, then back down at his screen.
“Two burner mobiles in the van,” he says. “One of them’s already clean wiped, no data — so they thought. The other one’s pretending to be, which means I can pull the ghosted registry. Give me twenty minutes and I’ll have a chain.”
I nod. “Good.”
He doesn’t move away—doesn’t have to say what he’s thinking. I know it already.
They came straight for us. They didn’t scout, didn’t post, they didn’t even fucking send eyes first. They drove a van right up to our gate and tried to breach. That’s not professional. That’s desperate.
Which means Damien’s already bleeding. Or panicking. Maybe both.
Saint appears a few seconds later, walking in from the front hall like a man coming back from morning prayer instead of dragging four fresh corpses off our lawn. He’s in black slacks and a white shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled, rosary glinting over his collarbone. There’s blood misted across his knuckles, his jaw, the line of his throat. He looks satisfied.
He drops a folded piece of fabric onto the table by the entry console. “Patches,” he says. “No insignia I recognize. Not Syndicate colors. Definitely not police. No formal tactical branding. They’re freelancers.”
“Hired grab team,” Ash says without looking up.
Saint nods. “The kind you throw at a problem you think is easy.”
