"Hold."
I settle in to wait.
She arrives on time. Punctual even walking into disaster, and something about that, her reliability, the way she keeps showing up, makes my chest cavity feel two sizes toosmall. I watch her enter through the south corridor, moving with that new alertness Astra beat into her, checking corners, keeping her back to the wall. Not enough. Not nearly enough for what's waiting. But something.
She stops in the center of the bay. Turns a slow circle. The overhead strips paint her in bands of yellow and shadow, and from up here she looks small in a way she doesn't look when she's underneath me, when she's taking up every inch of space in my head.
"Hello?" Her voice echoes off the metal walls. "I'm here. I got your message."
Nothing moves. Ten seconds. Twenty. I can feel her heartbeat accelerating, can feel the hope starting to curdle at the edges.
"I'm looking for information about Marcus St. Laurent," she tries again. Louder. Braver than the tremor in her pulse would suggest. "You said you had something."
The north wall crates shift.
She sees them before they reach her. Credit to Astra for that. The first operative comes fast, low, reaching for her arm, and Talia drops her weight and twists the way Astra likely drilled into her. The grab misses. She throws an elbow that connects with something, and I hear the grunt through my surveillance mic. The second operative is already behind her. She kicks backward, catches a shin, buys herself a half-second of space.
It's not enough. It was never going to be enough.
The east corridor operatives converge. Four on one. She fights all of them, and for a span of six, maybe seven seconds she is magnificent, all that training firing at once, her body doing things she didn't know it could do. She breaks someone's nose. I hear the crunch. She gets a hand on one of the pulse carbines and almost,almost turns it before the stunner hits her in the side and her muscles lock.
She goes down.
The sound she makes when she hits the deck goes through me like current, blue and scorching, and my marks flare so bright they burn through the fabric of my shirt. The bond opens like a wound and her terror floods into me. Not the clean copper fear of earlier. This is animal panic, black and vast and drowning. Her lungs are locked from the stunner and she can't breathe and she thinks she's dying. She thinks I don't know. She thinks she's alone.
I grip the edge of the control booth console until my knuckles go pale blue and I do not move.
They zip-tie her wrists behind her back. Rough, too tight, the kind of bind that cuts circulation in minutes. One of them grabs her by the hair to pull her head back, checking her face against what must be a reference image. Confirming the target. She's crying, silent tears that she probably hates herself for, and I can taste salt in the back of my throat that doesn't belong to me.
"Package confirmed," one of them says into a comm. "St. Laurent's daughter. Moving to extraction point."
"Copy. Vehicle bay twelve."
I have what I need. The comm frequency. The extraction route. If I follow them to vehicle bay twelve, I get the transport, the pilot, the next link in the chain.
Dexter's voice in my ear, vibrating with barely contained fury. "Extract now, Zane."
"Not yet."
"She's terrified. She thinks we've left her."
"I know what she thinks." I can feel it, every shade and frequency of it. Abandonment the size of a black hole opening in her chest. The certainty, total and crushing, thatnobody is coming. She's unaware that the man she trusted, the man she let inside her body and her mind, weighed her life on a scale and found it lighter than information.
They haul her upright. She can barely stand, the stunner's aftereffects turning her legs to water, and two of them grip her arms with careless force that will leave bruises I'll catalogue later in the precise shape of each finger. They start moving her toward the east corridor. Toward vehicle bay twelve.
I track their progress through the surveillance feeds Astra patches to my display. Corridor by corridor. Junction by junction. Talia stumbles once, and the operative on her left yanks her upright by the zip ties, wrenching her shoulders in a way that sends a lance of white pain through the bond so sharp I bite through my own lip. Blue blood fills my mouth.
"Zane." Dexter again. "We're losing the window. If they get her to the vehicle bay, we're looking at a ship-to-ship pursuit. The risk profile changes."
He's right. He knows he's right. I know he's right.
But it's not the tactical assessment that moves me.
It's the moment, captured on surveillance feed, when Talia stops struggling. When her face goes still and empty and she closes her eyes and I feel through the bond the exact second she gives up. Not fighting. Not afraid. Just gone. A candle flame pinched between two fingers. She retreats to somewhere inside herself where nobody can reach her, and the connection between us goes so quiet I can barely feel it, like she's already decided I'm not on the other end.
That silence is worse than her screaming.
"Now," I say.
