Before we break, I let silence sit on the table for a moment longer than necessary. They all feel it—the shape of a house that might burn if you light it wrong.
“Keep this tight,” I say finally. “No loose tongues. No theatrics. We’re not a circus. We are a knife.”
They nod in different ways. Wraith with a grunt, Vale with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, Saint with the tilt of a prayer, Ash with an almost invisible hand movement across the console.
I leave them to their methods.
In the hallway outside my office I pause, fingers on the wood of the banister. Ember’s chair is still empty. My mind returns to the man I ordered to be taken in the night. My thumb presses a groove into the banister until my knuckle hurts.
If she is an operative, if someone planted her to burn me—then I will find them. If she’s a woman who can unmake a life with a look, then I will decide whether to break her or bend her to my cause.
Either way, I have choices now.
And I amnota man who gives away the advantage.
Chapter 17
Ash
The city does not give up its secrets easily, and Rook is not a patient man. I’ve been searching the old feeds ofbefore. Before we captured Ember. Before everything started going to complete shit.
London is a labyrinth built on bones and reinvention, every street layered over another, every brick holding three histories and a lie. People think surveillance makes it transparent. They are wrong. It only makes it louder. More cluttered. More arrogant.
And arrogance is where people make mistakes.
I sit in the glow of twenty-four screens, the feeds breathing and shifting in soft, predatory rhythm, the city flickering like a living organism under glass. Traffic veins pulse red and white. Crowds swell and disperse. Rain slicks the pavement until everything reflects like a wound.
Saint stands behind me, quiet as a held prayer, arms folded, eyes moving over the data with the patience of a man who knows obsession when he sees it.
“She’s not on any of them,” he says.
“No,” I reply. “She’s not.”
That is not the problem. We know when she accessed the warehouse. We know when she took the drive. We know when she disappeared. What we do not know is what she did in the space between those two points, and that space is where people reveal who they really are.
I pull up the footage again.
Ember Calloway, red hair a defiance in the rain, jacket too thin for the weather, eyes too sharp for her age. She moves through Shoreditch like she belongs to it, like the streets owe her something. She does not rush. She does not hesitate. She does not look like someone panicking.
She looks like someone executing.
“Pause,” I murmur. The frame freezes. She is mid-step, body angled slightly left, gaze flicking up. “Enhance.” The system obeys, pixels tightening, detail sharpening until I can see the tension in her jaw, the way her shoulders square.
She is scanning. Not for threats, but for infrastructure.
Saint shifts. “She’s not looking at people.”
“No,” I agree. “She’s looking at the city, searching for something specific.”
I bring up layered feeds. Municipal cameras. Private storefront systems. Obsolete grids. I overlay her path with maintenance maps, infrastructure records, areas the city no longer bothers to document because no one believes anything old still works.
“She’s not going home,” Saint says.
“No,” I say. “She’s not stupid.”
She cuts down an alley that doesn’t register on modern GPS. A relic corridor. Brick choked with ivy and old posters and rain. The camera coverage stutters there, frame rate dipping, the feed degrading.
I lean in, anticipation coiling through my gut like a viper ready to strike. Her pace slows. Not enough to draw attention. Just enough to let me know the pause was deliberate.
