My gaze drifts. Down the hall, through an open door to one of the guest rooms never used before. A man is sitting on the edge of the bed, hands hanging between his knees, staring at the floor. He's in his mid-thirties, maybe, average build, face swollen anddiscolored. Bruises layered on bruises, older ones fading yellow under fresh purple.
The only male pulled from the compound. Violet mentioned a man's name. Someone who was held alongside her. This must be him.
I stand in that doorway, taking inventory, for three seconds, maybe four. He flinches when one of my guards passes in the corridor. There's a tremor in his hands, and he won't look up, won't make eye contact, won't acknowledge the room or the bed or the fact that he's no longer in a cage.
Everything exactly where you'd expect it.
Yet something tugs at the back of my skull. A signal too faint to read, like radio interference. Noise without shape.
I'm too tired to chase it. And Violet's in my room, sleeping. Every second I spend out of that room is a second I can't verify she's still breathing.
"The man," I tell Valente without looking away from the doorway. "Make sure he eats. Sleeps. Has what he needs."
"Done."
I turn back toward my room, but there's one more stop I should make.
My office.
The compound documents are spread across my desk where my men left them, pulled from a locked room in the sub-basement that we almost missed. Steel door behind a shelving unit, padlocked, which tells me whoever ran that operation didn't trust digital storage. Smart. Harder to hack paper. Harder to trace. Also harder to destroy in a hurry.
The files are coded. Columns of alphanumeric identifiers that don't match any system I've encountered, and I've encountered most of them. Authorization logs with timestamps and initials that could mean anything. Shipping manifests with origin cities and destination codes. Transfer protocols. Intake records.
Chain-of-custody paperwork for human beings, formatted like inventory management.
I pick up a page. The paper is standard A4, the ink from a standard printer, the formatting clean and professional. Columns for date, identifier, origin, status, destination. Status options include INTAKE, PROCESSING, TRANSFERRED, and a fourth column header I have to read twice before I understand it.
SOLD.
Someone sat at a desk and designed this spreadsheet. Chose the font. Aligned the columns. Printed it. Then they filed it in a locked room behind a shelf and went home to whatever life they live when they aren't treating women like products.
My hand tightens on the page until it crumples. I smooth it out. Force myself to be methodical. Photograph every document with my phone, front and back, thirty-seven pages. Send copies to Gio, to the forensic accountant in Milan, to a contact in Rome who decodes intercepted communications for a living and owes me for the fact that he's still breathing.
The originals go in my safe.
The American. Half the survivors who can speak describe the same ghost. American accent, educated, male, mid-thirties. Visited the compound periodically, always masked, when he looked at them, gave orders to the guards in English. No name. No physical description beyond build and nationality.
American. Educated. Mid-thirties.
Which narrows it down to roughly half a fucking continent.
I lock the office and go back to her.
Violet hasn't moved. The sheet rises and falls with her breathing, and I count the rhythm before I sit.
One. Two. Three. Four.
She exhales on four. Inhales on one. Steady. Alive.
I lower myself to the bed beside her, on top of the covers, still dressed, still wearing boots I should have taken off an hour ago. My body is screaming at me. Every joint swollen. Every muscle a frayed rope. The burning behind my eyes says sleep isn't a request anymore, it's an ultimatum.
I count her breaths instead.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Lose count somewhere in the twenties because my mind won't stay on the numbers. It keeps sliding sideways to the cell. The guard with his belt buckle undone. Her face when I came through that door, the way her eyes looked through me before they focused, like she'd already left her body and was watching from somewhere safer.
Three minutes.
