“You want water?” I asked.
She nodded, so I let go of her wrist long enough to grab the cup from the nightstand. Steam curled from the top. Doc had insisted on warm, not cold. Better for shock or some bullshit like that. I had not argued. Doc knew his shit.
She pushed herself up on one elbow, took the cup with slightly steadier hands than last night. Her fingers brushed mine. There was the smallest tremor there. If you didn’t know her, you’d miss it.
I knew her.
She’d been at the compound four days. It felt like four years.
Outside the thin wall, the place was waking up. I could hear it. Pipes groaning. Voices carrying. Boots on boards. Smoke’s claws clicking on the porch as Ranger took him out for a run. The sound of Brutus’s low bitching from somewhere near the kitchen. Doc telling someone to drink water or he’d put them on a drip.
Iron Battalion, alive and moving.
And Amanda, sitting in one of our beds, wrapped in one of our blankets, in one of our shirts, eyes ringed in purple shadows, trying to sit up straight like this was just another morning.
She took a sip, grimaced. “Tastes like ass.”
“Doc put electrolytes in it.”
“Of course he did.”
She drank anyway.
I watched her, because that was what I had been doing since we pulled her. At first because Cap told me to stick close. Then when I had seen the footage, there was no fucking way I was letting her out of my sight again.
The thought of that elevator hit me, sharp and clean, like it had been carved into the inside of my skull.
I had been in the surveillance room that night. While Amanda and I had gone undercover, the rest of the guys had built a makeshift surveillance point near the warehouse. A place where Amanda and I could come back to after our undercover shifts and an easy access place to tap directly into their systems. With some of my tinkering and the help of Ghost, we had been able to sneak out way into their camera feed at the warehouse. We had three monitors going at once with the logistics hub’s basement level filled on one screen. The parking lot and loading docks filled the others.
The truck traffic looked normal, and the security guard was half asleep in his chair. Nothing pinged my radar.
Until I heard a sound.
Muffled crying. It was barely picked up by the cheap camera mic. I frowned and leaned in toward the feed on the lower left.
The freight elevator doors were open on the loading level. Two men stood inside. One had his hand wrapped around a skinny arm. The girl attached to it was maybe sixteen, seventeen at most. She was bruised and gagged. Her eyes were red and raw like she had already used every tear she had.
That had jolted me upright.
“Cap,” I had called. “You need to see this.”
He had been at the table behind me, going over schedules with Ghost. One look at the screen and the whole room had gone tight.
“Where the hell is that?” he asked.
“Freight bay. East corner.”
The view was skewed with the camera up in the ceiling, looking down on the open doors. The girl tried to dig her heels in. One of the men yanked her forward. The other checked the corridor, like he was waiting for someone.
Then we got him. On camera.
He stepped in from the hallway, smoothing his suit jacket like he was heading into a meeting, not into hell.
The Watcher.
It was the name Ariel and Cap had given him. This was the first clear image of him that we had. We had only seen him in still photos or grainy clips before. Always clean. Always calm. Expensive watch. No visible tattoos. The kind of son of a bitch who looked forgettable until you saw his eyes.
“Record this now,” Cap growled. Ghost nodded and hit the record button.
