I still at the exact moment Saint stills. The rain seems to pause. Then I smile slow and sharp.
“She hasn’t moved it,” Saint murmurs.
“No,” I say. “Because she can’t.”
Because she never expected to be taken, and she assumed she had time.
But she underestimated us.
I lift the drive, the plastic cool against my glove, the weight insignificant for something that just altered the shape of several lives.
Saint’s eyes flick to it, then back to me. “Rook’s going to lose his mind.”
“Yes,” I agree. “He is.”
We close the box, erase our presence, remount the bikes. The engines snarl back to life, echoing off brick and rain and rot.
As we pull away, the alley swallowing its own secrets again, I feel it — that low, unwelcome curl of interest in my gut.
Not admiration. Not yet. But something equally dangerous all the same.
“She hid it well,” Saint says over the comm.
“Yes,” I reply. “She did.”
And that’s the problem. Because clever girls get noticed, and noticed girls get hunted.
And now that we have her leverage, the next step is inevitable.
“Let’s go home,” I murmur, leaning into the curve as the city blurs. “We have a ghost to collect.”
Saint
The city loosens its grip reluctantly.
London never likes giving anything back — not secrets, not bodies, not absolution. Even as we tear through the streets on black steel and intention, the rain still claws at us, the fog still tries to blind us, the night still pretends we belong to it.
We do.
That’s the problem.
The gates of the townhouse part at our approach, iron and shadow and obedience. The engines cut. Silence rushes in, heavy and immediate, like the world inhaling after violence.
Ash is already dismounting, efficient, precise, his attention fixed inward. He doesn’t look at the house—doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t need to. The weight in his jacket says everything.
We move inside without ceremony. No greetings, or wasted breath.
The corridors are dim, lit low and gold, the kind of light meant to soothe and deceive. It does neither. The house hums around us — quiet machinery, old money, older sins. I can feel it in the walls, in the floors, in the very bones of the place.
Rook is in the study. He stands at the window, back to us, hands clasped behind him, the city bleeding light through the glass like an open vein. He doesn’t turn when we enter. He doesn’t have to. “You found it,” he says.
Not a question, a statement. Like he already knows the answer and approves. Ash closes the door behind us, and the room is cocooned in silence.
I step forward, slow, deliberate, and place the drive on the desk. It looks obscene there — small, unassuming, capable of ruin. Rook’s gaze drops to it, sharp and immediate, like a predator clocking movement.
“Where?” he asks.
“Shoreditch,” Ash replies. “Infrastructure dead zone. Old junction box. She selected it.”
