EIGHT
Mateo
I stood by the heavy velvet drapes of the safehouse study, leaving a two-inch gap to watch the street below. My pulse was resting at fifty-eight beats per minute. Steady. Operational. But the air inside the room was vibrating, thick with the scent of Rowan's stressed peppermint.
Rowan Quill was tearing herself apart at the desk behind me.
It was 2:00 AM. She had been staring at the encrypted files Stephen pulled from theAegisserver for six hours. She was muttering, her fingers flying across the keyboard with a violence that threatened to crack the plastic.
"The routing numbers loop," she hissed to herself, the sound of a woman arguing with a ghost. "He’s using a charitable trust in the Caymans to pay the scouts. It’s messy. It’s so fucking messy."
I turned from the window.
She looked wrecked. Her hair was a disaster, a bird’s nest of golden-brown escaping the severe bun she tried to maintain. She was wearing one of Juno’s oversized hoodies, but she still looked sharp, angular, dangerous. The mismatched hoodie and pencilskirt just highlighted how much of a mess she was. The blue light of the monitor hollowed out her cheeks.
She wasn't running on fuel anymore. She was running on fumes and spite.
"Quill," I said. My voice was a low rumble in the quiet house.
She didn't look up. "Not now, Mateo. I’m tracing the payment for the surveillance team. If I can link the scout who filmed me to Vance’s personal account, we bypass the corporate veil."
"You need to sleep."
"I need ten more minutes," she corrected, highlighting a column of data.
I looked back out the window. The street was empty. A black cab splashed through a puddle. A delivery driver on a moped skidded around the corner.
And then I saw it.
Across the street, three floors up in the tenement building facing us. A glint.
It wasn't a light turning on. It was a reflection. A lens catching the streetlamp.
My heart rate didn't spike, it just shifted gears. Combat pace.
"Rowan," I said. "Kill the screen."
Something in my tone cut through her administrative fog. The typing stopped instantly.
"What?"
"Kill the screen. Now."
She slapped the laptop shut. The room plunged into darkness, save for the faint orange glow of the streetlights filtering through the gap in the curtains.
"Someone’s out there?" Her voice was a whisper, stripped of the bravado.
"Third floor. Brick building. Forty degrees left." I didn't move from the gap. "Long lens. Maybe a directional mic. They’re looking for a heat signature."
I heard the scrape of her chair. She was moving toward me.
"Stay back from the window," I ordered.
"I want to see," she whispered, disobeying me immediately. She came up beside me, keeping to the shadows. She smelled of peppermint and the stale, electric scent of anxiety. "Who is it?"
"Freelance," I assessed, watching the shadow shift in the window across the way. "Vance hires professionals. This guy is sloppy. He’s using a flash suppressor, but he’s shifting his weight too much."
I let the curtain fall shut, sealing us in absolute blackness.
