On the screen, he glanced up. It should have been at the camera. The angle was right for that.
But he wasn’t looking at the camera.
He was looking past it.
“Amanda,” Cap said under his breath.
She was in frame now, way in the background. Just a blur at first. Then the camera tracked as she walked. Her red hair pulled back. Plain clothes. A stack of printouts in her arms. Just another temp at a shitty warehouse.
She was undercover with them by her own insistence. Because of her hacking background, she could get into the systems and figure out how these people moved their money. Her being inside had been half the reason we even had any intel at all.
She heard something. I saw it hit her. Her steps slowed. Her head turned.
Her gaze landed on the elevator.
The girl saw her and tried to lurch forward. One of the men jerked her back, shoved her against the far wall. The gag muffled her scream.
The Watcher stepped into view beside her, between the elevator doors and the corridor.
He looked at Amanda. Not at the camera. Not at the doorway. Straight at her.
The air went cold in the surveillance room. I remember that. The way every hair on my arms stood up.
Amanda froze.
She stopped so fast the papers tilted in her grip. For a second, she looked like she had forgotten what to do with her own feet.
I leaned closer to the screen. “Come on,” I muttered. “Move. Red, move.”
She didn’t. Couldn’t.
The Watcher smiled. Slow. Like he had all the time in the world. He did not look alarmed at all that someone had seen him with a gagged girl shoved in a corner of a freight elevator.
He lifted his hand. Two fingers. Pressed the elevator button. Never broke eye contact.
The doors began to slide shut.
Amanda still hadn’t moved.
The last thing we saw before the doors met was the girl’s eyes. Wide. Wet. Terrified.
Then steel.
The monitor went back to a blank view of the closed doors and the empty hall.
Amanda’s papers slipped out of her hands on screen. They hit the floor. She didn’t even look down at them. Her chest was moving, quick and shallow. She backed up, one step, two, then pivoted away out of the camera’s view.
“Ghost,” Cap said, voice flat. “Get me every angle of the last five minutes. All floors. Wrecker, find her. Now.”
I didn’t bother answering. I was already moving.
It took me three minutes to get from the surveillance room into that building through the access point we had set up for extraction. Another ninety seconds to find the supply closet on Level Two, back hall.
She was there. On the floor, knees pulled up, face pressed to them. Hands locked around the back of her neck. Whole body shaking, but she wasn’t making a sound.
“Amanda,” I said, dropping to a crouch. “Red.”
Her head snapped up. Her eyes were blown wide, pupils huge, skin white as paper. She looked at me, then at the door past my shoulder.
