She doesn’t know I’m just the weapon.
I walk away from the door, needing to make a call. Not to the Judge. Not yet.
I need to call Varro. We need to double the perimeter patrols. We need to prepare for a siege.
Because she was right about one thing. William Hale will come.
And when he does, he won’t be coming to negotiate. He’ll be coming to bury me.
I touch the gun under my arm.
Good hunting,I think.
I head for the stairs. The war has begun.
I bypass the office and head straight for the Operations Room in the basement.
The house is built on a cliff, but its heart is buried deep in the granite. The elevator descends smoothly, the numbers ticking down. G. B1. B2.
The doors slide open to a blast-proof bunker humming with the sound of cooling fans.
Varro is sitting at the main console. A wall of monitors glows in front of him, showing thermal feeds of the perimeter, the access road, and the airspace above the estate.
He spins in his chair when I walk in. His eyes drop to my palm. “Trouble?” he asks, nodding at the bloody silk.
“Civilian resistance,” I say tightly.
He raises an eyebrow. “She cut you?”
“I crushed a glass.”
“Ah.” He turns back to the screens. “That’s worse. Self-inflicted usually means the intel was bad.”
“The intel was catastrophic.”
I walk over to the communications array. It’s a separate rack of servers, isolated from the internet, encrypted with military-grade algorithms. In the center sits the dedicated receiver for the Bluebird line.
“Any traffic?” I ask.
“Dead air,” he says. “I’ve been monitoring the police scanners, the federal bands, even the encrypted channels used by the Syndicate. Nothing.”
“No chatter about a missing person?”
“Not a whisper. No 911 calls from the museum. No flurry of activity at the precinct. It’s like she evaporated.”
I stare at the silent receiver.
It’s only been eight hours. He might not even know she’s missing yet. Or, he already knows, and he’s containing the blast radius.
“Boss,” Varro says, his voice dropping. “Who is she?”
I look at him. He has been with me for years. He stood back-to-back with me in the trenches of the coup.
But this...
This secret could get us all killed.
If I tell him she’s the Judge’s daughter, he will do the math. He will realize that the man holding my leash is now our biggestliability. He might advocate for killing her to erase the link. He is pragmatic. He survives.
