"He won't confess. He'll come for me instead."
Something shifts in his expression. The corners of his mouth move in a way that isn't quite a smile but is in the same neighborhood. "I know.”
The word lands wrong. I go still. Something cold moves through me that has nothing to do with the concrete floor or the water soaking my clothes, and I look at him, really look at him, past the controlled face and the eyes.
”You're using me as bait."
He doesn't confirm it. He doesn't need to. The almost-smile does it for him.
"This was never about the confession," I say. "You don't want a confession. You want him to walk through that door."
"Smart girl." He says it without inflection, a simple acknowledgment. "Phoenix will come rushing in to save you, exactly the way he did at the cabin. Impulsive. Emotional. Thinking with everything except his judgment." He pauses. "Only this time I'll be ready for him."
My stomach drops. "He's going to kill you. You understand that, right? Whatever you're planning, however many men you have in this building, Phoenix will find a way."
Dominic leans forward until his face is very close to mine, until I can see my own reflection in those colorless eyes. "Maybe," he says quietly. "But I'll take him down with me. And you'll be here to watch it happen."
He holds my gaze for one more moment, then stands and straightens his jacket with those precise mechanical movements. He looks at the two guards with an expression that makes the broader one take a small step backward.
"Get her cleaned up," he says. "We're recording in an hour."
Then he walks out and the door closes and I am alone again with two men and a concrete floor and the smell of machine oil.
I am not a hostage waiting to be rescued.
I am a trigger. A mechanism. The thing Dominic Webb has built this entire trap around.
My ribs grind when I breathe. My face throbs in time with my heartbeat. The binding on my wrists has a millimeter of give that wasn't there an hour ago.
I press my thumbnail into the rope and start working again, and underneath the fear, underneath the pain, underneath the image of Phoenix walking through that warehouse door into whatever Dominic has waiting for him, something else isburning. Something that has been building since the parking lot and the hood over my head and the two gunshots that ended Torres.
I survived Marcus Webb.
I am not going to be the reason Phoenix doesn't survive this.
CHAPTER 30 -PHOENIX
The license plate comes through at 6:43 pm.
A warehouse in Vernon, twelve miles southeast of my office, registered to a shell company that my father's people traced back through four layers of incorporation in under two hours. The building has been empty for eighteen months on paper. The utility records tell a different story, power draws consistent with active occupancy, security system pings going back six weeks. Dominic has been planning this for a long time.
My father calls before I can reach for my keys.
"I have the address," he says. "Don't go anywhere."
"I'm not waiting."
"Phoenix." The way he says my name tells me everything. The discussion is over. Whatever comes next has already been determined. "I have a team assembling. Ex-military, four men, they've done extractions before. They need two hours to brief and equip. Two hours and we go in the right way."
"Jade has been in that warehouse for three hours already."
"And she'll still be there in two more. Dominic needs her alive for the video he's planning. She's safe until he gets what he wants from her."
I think about the bruise forming on her jaw through the phone screen. I think about the word safe and what the reality of it might be, and the thing in my chest that has been burning since this afternoon gets harder to contain.
"Two hours," I say, and hang up.
My father arrives forty minutes later with two men I don't recognize and a bag that gets opened on my kitchen table without ceremony. Body armor. Weapons. The kind of equipment that doesn't come from conventional sources and doesn't leave paper trails. He moves through my space with the efficiency of a man who has done this before, which I have always known abstractly and am only now understanding fully.
