I stand up, a tentative smile forming on my lips. “Cassian, I?—”
The words die in my throat.
The Ghost stands in the doorway.
His posture is rigid, his shoulders squared, pulling his dark shirt taut across his chest. The white bandage is hidden, but his face is a mask carved from unforgiving stone.
My smile falters, my stomach twisting with sudden, sharp anxiety.
“Cassian?” I whisper. “What’s wrong? Did they come back?”
“No,” he says. “Follow me. We’re going upstairs.”
He doesn’t wait for my answer. He turns on his heel and walks out into the command center.
I hurry after him. We bypass the glowing server racks and the wall of monitors, stepping into the elevator. He swipes his palm on the biometric reader, hitting the button for the ground floor.
The doors slide shut, sealing us in the steel box.
“Cassian, you’re scaring me,” I say, wrapping my arms around my waist. “What happened?”
He stares straight ahead at the brushed steel doors.
“Varro finally cracked Elias’s flash drive,” he says, his jaw tight.
My brow furrows. “A flash drive?”
“It holds the blackmail files he was stealing.”
The realization clicks into place.Thatwas the evidence they were willing to kill for.Thatwas what Varro shoved into Cassian’s pocket at the elevator.
“Did you find out what the files are?”
“Yes.”
The elevator chimes, and the doors slide open. We’re on the main floor. The emergency shutters are still locked down tight over the massive windows, blocking out the morning storm. The house feels huge, empty, and hauntingly quiet.
As we walk out of the foyer, the physical reality of the siege hits me.
The Great Hall is destroyed. The marble pillars are chewed to pieces by heavy-caliber gunfire. Shattered glass from the display cases crunches under Cassian’s boots. The smell of bleach and harsh chemical cleaners drifts intensely through the air, fighting a losing battle against the lingering stench of cordite and copper.
Cassian doesn’t slow down. He leads me down the long, silent corridor and into his private office.
The door clicks shut behind us. The interior is miraculously untouched by the crossfire, but the thick steel plates covering the floor-to-ceiling glass turn the room into a dark, claustrophobic vault.
He walks behind his dark wood desk and doesn’t sit. He stands there, a dark monolith in the shadows, and gestures for me to step forward to the opposite side of the desk.
His demeanor is so grim, so devoid of light, that my hands start to shake. The danger hasn’t passed. It has moved inside the house.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a sleek, matte-black tablet. He sets it on the leather blotter and slides it across the smooth wood until it stops inches from my hands.
“What is this?” I ask, staring at the blank screen.
“The truth,” he says.
He looks up, finally meeting my eyes. The intensity in his gaze pins me to the floor. He looks like an executioner delivering a final sentence.
“Elias wasn’t just stealing files,” he tells me plainly, his voice cutting through the silence. “He was a whistleblower. He found the ledger of the city’s corruption, and your father was right at the absolute center of it. Elias was going to expose him, so your father ordered the hit.”
