“No,” I admit, “but it’s the only one I have.”
She looks away first, lowering herself onto the edge of the cot again as if standing any longer would force her body to decide for her. The fluorescent light highlights the edge of her cheekbone and the dampness along her hairline. Pain is making her breathing shallower, though she’s trying hard not to let it show.
“You still think Kiren will find us,” she murmurs.
I hold her eyes. “I do.”
“How?”
I glance toward the wall, toward the layered noise of engines and metal and distant voices.
“I don’t know how Kiren is getting here,” I tell her quietly. “I don’t know what he’s learned or how much of this he already understands. But Kiren doesn’t stop when things turn bad. He becomes colder. More focused. And once he has enough information, he moves.”
Lila’s fingers tighten briefly around the edge of the mattress. “I’m not sure I can reach that kind of certainty yet.”
The comment draws a tired breath out of me that almost becomes a laugh and dies before it fully forms. “It isn’t certainty.”
“What is it, then?” she asks quietly.
I think about Kiren’s face in my memory, the stillness that always came over him when something mattered enough to narrow his entire focus. The way he looked at a problem and stripped it down to its bones. The way he looked at me when there were no guards in the room, no weapons between us, and no reason to hide what was there.
“I know him,” I tell her.
The words feel simpler than the truth but closer to it than anything else I could have offered.
Lila studies me, then gives a small nod, as if that answer makes more sense to her than certainty ever would.
In the next heartbeat, the building shudders. The sound reaches us almost half a second after the vibration does, a deep concussive force that rolls through the warehouse and rattles the vent, the light fixture, the table, everything. Dust trembles loose from the ceiling seam above the door.
Lila jerks upright.
I’m already moving before the second blast hits.
This one is louder, close enough that the fluorescent light pulses hard overhead, and one of the empty bottles on the table rolls off the edge and hits the floor.
Then the entire warehouse erupts. Shouting tears through the corridor. Boots pound past the door in both directions now.Somewhere deeper in the building, a burst of gunfire cracks through the air and echoes off metal with a violence that leaves no room for interpretation.
Lila stares at me, eyes wide now, all the exhaustion gone from her face in one instant and replaced by something hotter and sharper.
“What the hell was that?”
I feel my pulse hammering in my throat, not from fear but from recognition.
“This isn’t relocation,” I breathe.
The words are barely out before another round of shots echoes from somewhere closer, followed by the sound of men yelling over each other. And beneath all of it, rising so hard and fast it almost hurts, comes one thought.
Kiren.
I don’t have time to say it out loud. The door flies open so hard it slams against the wall with a metallic crack that seems to split the room in two. One of the enforcers fills the doorway almost immediately, broad-shouldered and breathing hard, his face damp with sweat despite the cold that has been creeping through the warehouse all night. Smoke and dust follow him on a rush of air that smells like burned fuel, hot metal, and explosive residue. Somewhere behind him, men are shouting, their voices colliding into one ugly wall of noise that makes the corridor feel suddenly smaller.
“Move,” he barks, already reaching for me.
I twist back before his hand closes around my arm, but he catches me anyway, his fingers digging hard into my elbow.The force of it jerks me off balance and sends the metal table scraping across the floor when my hip clips the corner.
Lila tries to push off the cot. “No!” she screams.
The word tears out of her with more force than I’ve heard from her in hours, but the enforcer barely glances at her. His attention stays fixed on me as he drags me toward the open doorway.
