“They thought taking her was easy,” I say.
Saint smiles, and it’s not kind. “I think they were told she’d be alone.”
Vale saunters in last. He’s barefoot, shirtless, tattoos black and carved across his chest and down his stomach like scripture written in sin. He’s got sweatpants hanging on his hips, blood on the heel of one hand he’s not bothering to wipe off, and eating an apple like he doesn’t have a care in the world. Of course he is.
“Good morning,” he sings.
Ash doesn’t look up. “Shut up.”
Vale grins, takes a bite. “Well then... Somebody woke up mean.”
Saint tips his chin toward the window. “Mateo.Focus.”
Vale flicks a glance outside, then back at me. The lazy amusement in his face doesn’t leave. But something else slides in under it. A line of real anger. It sharpens him.
“So,” he says lightly. “That’s a declaration of intent, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say.
He throws his apple core neatly into a bin across the hall without even looking. “Then I assume we’re done playing nice.”
“We were playing nice?” Saint asks mildly, scrunching his nose up in disgust.
Vale smiles without humor. “Relatively.”
Ash finally looks up from his tablet and shoves a hand through his hair. “We need to accelerate the timeline.”
I turn to him. “How fast?”
“Faster than we planned last night,” he says. “We were still in recon mode at dinner. We said rattle the Syndicate, pull Damien’s threads, starve him, ruin him, then end him.” He jerks his chin toward the window, toward the faint shapes cooling on our gravel. “He just told us he’s skipping to extraction. He’s not going to sit in some glass box and trade insults. He’s going to take her and leverage her. That was move one. Move two is louder. And after move two, it’s war on the street, and none of us get clean exits.”
Saint’s voice goes smooth. “We need to grab him first.”
I glance at him. “You volunteering to go to confession for it after?”
Saint smiles, all teeth. “Caelum, darling, I haven’t confessed honestly in years.”
Vale barks out a laugh.
Ash nods once, decisive. “We take Damien.Quietly. Before he can reposition. Before he can vanish behind whatever NATO-adjacent handlers he’s playing with. Before he can throw her name anywhere outside our reach. We pull him alive. We sit him somewhere no one knows about — not even Syndicate — and we peel him.”
Saint nods, approving. “Interrogation.”
Vale’s grin goes slow. “Finally.”
“Alive,” I say.
Vale lifts both hands. “Alive,” he echoes, like that part offends him personally.
Ash’s gaze slides to me. “Alive is the only way we get what we need,” he says. “We need to know who he’s talking to. What he promised. What he already said about her. Whether he’s recorded anything. Where he stored it. We take his head now without the intel, we’re still in a corner. We take him breathing and aware and scared, we flip him inside out and hang him with his own spine.”
Saint murmurs, almost reverently, “Poetry.”
I look at the three of them. My brothers. My blades.
All of them looking at me now.
Waiting.
