But I need him to know. I can’t fight a war with a blind lieutenant.
“Her name is Iris Hale,” I say.
He goes still. His fingers stop typing. He stares at the screen for a long beat, processing.
“Hale,” he repeats. “Relation?”
“Daughter.”
He lets out a low whistle. He spins his chair around to face me, his expression grim.
“If the Judge ordered a hit on a building where his daughter was working...” He trails off, doing the mental calculus. “Then either he didn’t know, or he didn’t care.”
“Or there was never a bomb,” I finish.
He looks at me sharply. “The blueprints?”
“I haven’t decoded them yet. But the targets were structural. It feels like demolition, not terrorism.”
“Does he know we have her?”
“He knows exactly who has her,” I say. “I was the only operative in that building.”
He rubs his jaw, the stubble rasping against his palm. “When he moves on us...”
“He burns the whole operation,” I finish. “He sends a kill squad to get his daughter back and silence me.”
“So what’s the play?” he asks. “We can’t release her. She saw your face.”
“We keep her.”
“For how long?”
“Until I find out what was in that folder,” I say. “Whatever is in those blueprints, whatever intel Elias had... It’s worth more than his daughter’s life.”
“So we’re holding the bag,” he says.
“We’re holding the leverage,” I correct him. “As long as she is alive, the Judge has to hesitate. If she dies, he has nothing to lose.”
He nods slowly, understanding the reality. We are rogue agents now.
“I want the fence doubled,” I command. “Drone patrols every fifteen minutes. Sensors on maximum sensitivity. If a squirrel crosses the fence line, I want to know about it.”
“Done.”
“And Varro?”
“Yeah?”
“Nobody crosses the threshold of the Guest Suite but me. Slide the food through the chain. No talking. She’s quarantined.”
“Understood.” He pauses. “And the hand?”
I look down at the bloody silk sticking to the wound. “I’ll handle it.”
I turn to leave.
“Cassian,” Varro calls out.
