“The drive you took.”
“I didn’t take anything,” she argues, defiance glittering in her pale blue eyes.
Lie. Too smooth to be her first.
I rise from my chair, and the table seems to shrink between us. The lights catch on the gold filigree of my mask as I descend the steps to the main floor. The crowd below keeps dancing, unaware that a different kind of rhythm rules the room now.
When I stop in front of her, she lifts her chin. She doesn’t step back.
Up close, she smells like paint thinner and rain. The pulse under her jaw is frantic. And still—she doesn’t break.
“Lyingto me is dangerous,” I say quietly.
“So is murdering innocent men.”
The words hit harder than she intends. For the first time in a long while, something shifts in my chest—an echo, faint and inconvenient.
Wraith tenses at my side. Ash watches from above, ready to intercept. I don’t give the order.
Instead, I reach up and touch the edge of my mask, tracing the seam. “You think you know what we are,” I murmur. “But you only ever saw the blood. Never the reason.”
Her eyes flash. “There’s no reason good enough.”
“Maybe not.”
Silence stretches. Beneath it, the city hums. I feel it under my skin—the same pull that’s haunted me since I saw her face on that camera feed. The problem with ghosts is that they don’t stay buried.
She isn’t supposed to make me curious.
She isn’t supposed to make me feel anything.
And yet…
“Take her to the townhouse,” I tell Wraith at last, forcing the words steady. “Put her in the west room. She stays there until I say otherwise.”
Her voice follows me as I turn away. “You can lock me up all you want. It won’t change what you did.”
I pause halfway up the steps and glance back, just once.
“No,” I say. “But it might teach you what it costs to chase ghosts.”
The rain’s turned to sleet by the time I reach my office. The windows blur the London skyline into streaks of gold and gray; every light looks like it’s bleeding.
I unfasten the mask and set it on the desk. The room exhales around me—quiet, heavy. The bass from the club filters up through the floor, distant, like a heartbeat that isn’t mine.
I should be working. There’s paperwork, ledgers, and a dozen shipments still waiting for clearance before dawn. Instead, I find myself replaying her voice.
You can lock me up all you want. It won’t change what you did.
She said it like a fact, not a threat.
And that’s the part that won’t leave me alone.
I’ve spent three years knowing—knowing—that Owen Calloway was guilty. We had the proof, for fuck’s sake. Coded messages, the intercepted calls, the drive Ash decrypted himself.
Traitor.
He sold us to the Russians, cost me threegoodmen, and nearly collapsed the entire transport chain through the Baltic corridor.
