“Try harder.”
He wanted to. He really did, but his eyelids weighed a ton each, and keeping them open was a chore. “Viv, I love?—”
“Don’t you dare, Dominic.” She lightly smacked his cheek. “I don’t want to hear it. Not now.”
“Later?” he tried to ask, but his lips had gone numb. He fought against the darkness, desperate to stay with her just a little longer. The pain in his shoulder had transformed into a crushing weight that seemed to be pressing him down into the floor of the van.
He tried again to focus on Vivi’s face, but his vision had narrowed to a pinpoint, the edges black and closing in fast. Her hands were on his face, her touch warm against his increasingly cold skin.
“Dom!”
She was scared. He’d never heard that terror from her before, not even in Istanbul. He wanted to reassure her. He wanted to tell her he wasn’t going anywhere. Wanted to make the joke that would cut the tension and make her furious with him and put the familiar irritated curve back on her mouth.
He got her name out. Just her name.
twenty-three
Daphne rubbedher eyes and checked the time stamp in the corner of her monitor: 4:47 a.m. The extraction team’s plane wouldn’t land for another four hours, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the lab. Everyone else had scattered to prepare for their arrival—Fiona coordinating with medical, Celeste handling logistics. She’d stayed behind, ostensibly to monitor communications, but really because the quiet, blue-lit sanctuary of her lab was the only place she felt she could breathe.
She pushed her glasses up into her hair and pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyes until colored lights bloomed in the darkness. Seventy-two hours without proper sleep was catching up with her. The adrenaline that had carried her through the hack was draining away, leaving her hollow and jittery, running on coffee and stale energy bars.
On the main screen, the extraction team’s plane moved across the Atlantic, a small blinking dot making its way home. Dom’s vitals had stabilized—Tessa had managed to get the bleeding under control—but Sabin’s neural readings continued to show abnormal patterns even through sedation. WhateverPraetorian had done to him, it wasn’t going to be fixed with a few stitches and some rest.
A soft chime pulled her attention to her secondary screen, where a message window had appeared in the corner.
Titan: You finally found your cousin.
She stared at the words, her exhaustion evaporating in an instant. She sat up straight, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
How did he know?
The extraction had happened less than six hours ago. The op was completely off-book, not even logged in WSW’s own internal systems. There was no way anyone outside the immediate family could know they’d recovered Sabin.
She took a deep breath and typed back.
Lovelace: How do you know about that?
The reply came immediately, as if he’d been waiting.
Titan: I know many things, Love. The question is, what will you do now that you have him back?
Her heart hammered against her ribs. This wasn’t the first time Titan had revealed knowledge he shouldn’t have. Last month, he’d known about a security vulnerability in WSW’s systems before she’d discovered it herself. Three weeks before that, he’d mentioned her father’s trip to Singapore before it had been announced to the company.
At first, she’d tried to track him, to figure out his identity. She’d run traces and backtracked signals, deployed spiders and tracking cookies. She’d come up empty every time. Titan was a ghost in the system—there when he wanted to be, gone the moment she tried to pin him down.
Lovelace: You know I can’t discuss that.
Titan: Of course. Professional discretion. Admirable.
A pause, then:
Titan: He won’t be the same, you know. What they did to him can’t be undone so easily.
Her blood ran cold. She glanced at the biomonitor readouts from the plane—Sabin’s neural patterns still spiking erratically despite the sedation.
Lovelace: You know what they did?
Another pause, longer this time. Daphne held her breath, waiting.
