“He won’t,” I interrupt. “Because you’ll be there.”
I reach up and cover his large hand with mine, my fingers pressing into his calloused knuckles. His jaw unclenches a fraction of an inch.
“You’re the Ghost,” I whisper, leaning in until my lips are inches from his. “So hide in the dark. Let me draw him out. And when he confesses... Drop him.”
Cassian stares at me. His chest heaves with a ragged breath. The muscles in his neck stand out like steel cords.
But he also knows I’m right.
He breaks eye contact and looks at Varro over my shoulder.
“Can we spoof a cell signal?” he asks, his voice tight with reluctance.
“I can bounce a VoIP call through six different proxy servers across the city,” Varro says, already spinning his chair around to face the keyboard. “It’ll look like a burner phone pinging off a commercial cell tower in Midtown. Untraceable back to the estate.”
Cassian looks at me. He slides his hand from my arm to the back of my neck, his fingers curling possessively into the tight knot of my hair.
“If this goes wrong,” he says, his voice a low, hard threat, “I will kill every single person in the room. I don’t care if they wear a badge. I will burn the building down.”
“It won’t go wrong,” I say.
“Where?” he asks. “Where do we do it?”
I think about the exact place where it all started.
“The Waldorf,” I say. “The VIP Study.”
He considers it, his eyes narrowing. “At midnight, the public grid shuts down. If he uses his Chairman override at the loading dock, it bypasses the night watchmen. Varro can hack the server and loop the security cameras to cover our tracks. He walks right in.”
“The scene of the crime,” Varro notes, his fingers flying across the keys.
“Set it up,” Cassian orders.
Varro works rapidly for ten minutes, his eyes tracking lines of code on the monitor, setting up the complex proxy relays and isolating a secure audio channel. He reaches onto the desk and hands me a sleek, black headset with a boom mic.
“We do a voicemail,” Varro instructs. “If you call live, he might try to keep you talking to run a trace, or ask a question you aren’t prepared to answer.”
“I’ll leave it on his private emergency line,” I say. “He checks it every hour.”
I take the headset. The plastic is cold against my fingers, but my hands are perfectly steady.
I slip it over my ears and adjust the mic.
I close my eyes, reaching deep down into the visceral trauma of the last week. I pull up the blinding terror of the museum. I let my breathing turn intentionally shallow and force my vocal cords to tighten. I physically shrink my posture, dropping my shoulders.
Cassian watches me.
“Ready,” I whisper.
Varro hits a key. “Recording... now.”
I let out a ragged, trembling breath directly into the microphone.
“Daddy?”
My voice breaks perfectly on cue.
“Daddy, please... It’s Iris. I don’t know if this number still works, but I didn’t know who else to call.”
