I stare at the open doorway where Glar disappeared, then at the faint red glow of emergency strips, the evidence of how close this came to ending in quiet murder.
“Kel made his choice,” I say. “Now he lives with it.”
Renn swallows and nods, then starts barking orders, scattering the room into motion.
Jordan stays beside me, fingers still lightly on my arm.
When the suite finally empties, the silence that remains is different from before—charged, cracked, irreversible.
Jordan looks up at me, her voice softer now. “You just lit a fuse.”
I exhale slowly, tasting the last faint sweetness of gas in the air. “Yeah.”
“And you did it for me,” she says.
I meet her gaze. “I did it because they tried to take you.”
“That’s… for me,” she replies.
I don’t argue. I don’t have the energy to pretend this is purely strategic anymore.
My house is fracturing. My family is splitting down old fault lines. The Nine are watching. Kel is afraid. Fyr is ambitious. Glar is smiling.
And in the middle of it all, a human woman stands in my suite wearing my shirt and holding a drive full of proof like it’s a knife.
I lean slightly toward her and speak low, honest.
“Stay close,” I say. “This place is about to get ugly.”
Jordan’s mouth curves faintly. “Lonari, sweetheart… it’s already ugly. It’s just finally honest about it.”
For a second—just a second—I feel something like pride.
Then the building’s comm system chimes softly in the corridor outside, and I know the next move is coming.
Because in a place like this, defiance doesn’t echo.
It detonates.
CHAPTER 11
JORDAN
Idon’t sleep.
Not because I’m brave, not because I’m wired for heroics—because every time I close my eyes, the Defrocked Nun goes dark again behind my lids and the sound of bodies hitting carpet comes back like a cruel little ringtone I can’t mute. My nerves keep insisting the danger is still in the room, even when my brain knows the door is locked and Lonari’s people are pacing the hall like bored apex predators.
So I do what I’ve always done since the orphanage: I make the world smaller by turning it into a problem I can solve.
The Nun has a server spine—its hidden skeleton, the piece nobody wants to admit exists because it ruins the illusion that this place runs on charm and luck. It doesn’t. It runs on cables, heat, and the kind of encrypted backbones that always, always have someone listening unless you get mean about it.
And right now, if I’m going to talk to Clint Rogers—the real Clint Rogers, not some honeypot wearing his name like a stolen jacket—I need a comm space so clean it squeaks.
I slip out of Lonari’s suite early, moving like I belong because looking like you belong is ninety percent of escaping in one piece. The carpet swallows my steps; the corridor smells likeexpensive cologne and recycled air and faint smoke from last night’s chaos—blood scrubbed away, fear still clinging to the corners. A guard nods at me and looks away, pretending not to notice the tech bag on my shoulder, because everyone here has learned the same survival skill: don’t ask questions you don’t want answered.
The access door to the spine is tucked behind a “VIP Staff Only” hallway that reeks of bleach and warm electronics. I palm the panel.
Denied.
