It wasn't a confusion. It wasn't a mistake. It was a logical conclusion to the data set. They were the only people in the world who saw the paperwork as a love language.
I didn't say it. To say it would be to give the universe a variable it could use against us. To say it would be to acknowledge that I had something to lose other than a lawsuit.
I swallowed the words. I capped the marker with a sharpclick.
"Right," I said, my voice only trembling a little. "We have a precedent to set."
I turned back to the laptop.
"Stephen, file the motion. Juno, leak the data set to the Substack. Mateo, get the car ready."
I looked back at them over my shoulder.
"We have work to do."
TWENTY
Rowan
The call came in on a burner phone Stephen had specifically routed through a server in Reykjavik to strip the geolocation data.
"Mitchell King," Juno said, staring at the caller ID like it was a live grenade. "He wants you."
"Of course he does," Stephen said, not looking up from his laptop. "He smells blood in the water.The King Reportisn't journalism, Rowan. It’s a televised gladiator match where the lions are fed Red Bull and the Christians are given microphones that cut out intermittently."
"It's a kill box," Mateo rumbled from the window. He was checking the street again. He had been checking the street every seven minutes for the last twelve hours. "No exits. Hostile terrain. High probability of an ambush."
I looked at the phone vibrating on the table.
Mitchell King. The man who had ended the career of the Home Secretary last year with a single, perfectly timed eyebrow raise. If I went on his show, I wasn't just stepping into the light; I was stepping into the sun.
"We decline," Mateo said. "We hold the perimeter."
"We accept," Juno countered.
The room went still. Mateo turned slowly, his eyes dark.
Juno didn't flinch. He was currently scentless, his blockers cranked high, but his posture was fluid, aggressive. He tapped the screen showing the social media metrics.
"The Anchor Protocol is trending, but the narrative is fraying at the edges," Juno explained, his voice clinical. "Vance is pushing the 'radical extremist' angle hard. If Rowan stays silent now, she looks like she's hiding. She looks guilty. To make the Protocol stick, she can't just be a viral moment. She has to be a leader."
"A leader doesn't walk into a trap," Mateo growled.
"A leader walks into the trap and dismantles the mechanism," Juno said. He looked at me. "Can you handle him, Rowan? Can you sit in the chair and not bleed?"
I looked at the phone. I thought about Illyana, silent in Manchester. I thought about the thousands of messages in my inbox.
"I don't bleed," I said, reaching for the phone. "I negotiate."
I picked up.
The conversation took four minutes. I didn't ask for questions in advance, King wouldn't give them anyway. I asked for structure.
"Live broadcast," I told the producer on the other end. "No pre-record. No edits. I want a hard out at eighteen minutes. And my legal counsel, Mr. Ashcroft, will be in the control booth. If your audio feed to my earpiece cuts out? He cuts the fiber optic cable to your transmitter. Yes. That is a threat. No. I am not joking."
I hung up. My hands were shaking, just a tremor in the pinky finger.
"Eighteen minutes," I said to the room. "Tomorrow night. Prime time."
