He walks away before I can respond.
I stand in the corridor, fists at my sides, and hate him for being right.
The meeting with Aurelio runs until midnight. We review the financial trails, the shell corporations, the accounts that bounce through six countries before vanishing. Somewhere in the mess, there's a thread. A name. A face. Someone powerful enough to fund a war and invisible enough to avoid detection. Every lead we pull dissolves into another dead end, another layer of insulation designed to protect whoever sits at the top.
Alexandra's notes are spread across the table. Her handwriting is sharp, angular, impatient. She circles things three times when they matter and draws arrows between connections with enough force to tear the paper. I've been studying her work for days, and every time I pick up a new page, I learn something. Not about the money.
About her.
She thinks in systems. Sees networks the way I see battlefields. Every number is a soldier, every transaction a movement, every gap a vulnerability. She's brilliant in a way that has nothing to do with education and everything to do with survival. She learned to read patterns because missing one meant her father's debt collectors would show up at the door.
Aurelio taps one of her notes. A cluster of transfers that all route through the same bank in Cyprus before scattering. "She found this?"
"In under two hours."
"Impressive." He leans back. "And dangerous. If whoever is funding the Castillo’s realizes we have someone capable of tracing their money, she becomes a target."
"She's already a target."
"She becomes a priority target. There's a difference." He studies me across the table. "Can you protect her and run this war at the same time?"
"Yes."
"You answered that very quickly."
"Because the answer is simple."
Aurelio watches me for a long time. I hold still and let him look. Whatever he's searching for, whatever test he's running behind those grey eyes, I don't flinch from it.
"Go get some rest," he says finally. "You're no use to me exhausted."
I leave the war room and walk the corridors on autopilot. My body knows the way. Down two flights, through the east wing, past the kitchen that still smells like the garlic from dinner, past the guards who straighten when they see me, past the medical wing where the lights are always on.
The compound is quiet at this hour. The quiet that comes after sustained violence, when everyone is too tired to speak and too wired to sleep. A few soldiers sit in the common room, cleaning weapons in silence. One of them, a kid named Leonardo who can't be older than nineteen, looks up when I pass. His eyes are red. He lost a friend in the attack four days ago. I nod at him and keep walking. There's nothing I can say that will bring his friend back, and empty words have never been my thing.
I think about what Aurelio said.Priority target. If the people behind those bank accounts realize Alexandra can trace their money, they won't send mercenaries next time. They'll sendsomeone quieter. Someone who knows how to make a person disappear without leaving a mess.
My chest constricts.
I've lost people before. Soldiers. Friends, or the closest thing to friends this life allows. I watched my sister's coffin go into the ground when I was twelve years old, and I put three rounds into the man who killed her a year later, and I felt nothing. Not grief, not satisfaction, not relief. the cold certainty that the world had taken something from me and I'd taken something back and the math would never balance.
Losing Alexandra would not be like that.
Losing Alexandra would be Dahlia all over again, except worse. Because Dahlia left by choice. She walked away because she knew she’d never be happy with me. Alexandra didn't choose any of this. She was dragged into my world by her father's failures and my organization's greed, and she's stayed because the alternative is worse.
If she dies because of me, because I brought her close and made her visible and painted a target on her back with my own weakness, I will never recover from it.
I know this the way I know my own name. Absolute. Bone-deep. Terrifying.
I stop outside my door.
I can hear her inside. Not talking, not moving. ... there. A presence that fills the room even through solid wood. I press my palm flat against the wood and close my eyes.
Claudio's voice echoes in my skull.Either touch her or let her go.
Dahlia's voice follows, softer.You know what happens when you let them in.
And then Alexandra's voice, the loudest of all.Come with me.
