I don't look back.
CHAPTER 33- PHOENIX
The Vernon industrial district at midnight is all flat light and empty lots, the kind of place that exists to be invisible, and I walk out of the warehouse with Jade against my side and don't look back.
She's walking, technically, her feet moving when I guide them, but there's a vacancy in her eyes that I recognize from the cabin, that quality of someone whose body is present and whose mind is somewhere else entirely, processing something too large to fit inside a single moment. I keep one arm around her and match my pace to hers and say nothing because there is nothing to say yet that would help.
Dad is already outside.
He's standing thirty feet from the entrance with four men fanned out behind him, all of them in dark clothing, all of them reading the situation in the practiced way of people who have arrived too late to too many things and learned to assess the damage quickly. His face when he sees us is controlled in the way his face is always controlled, but I know him well enough to see what's underneath it.
He meets us halfway across the lot.
His eyes move over Jade first, cataloguing the bruise, the dried blood at the corner of her mouth, the raw skin at her wrists. Then they move to me.
"What happened?" His voice is low. "We got here as fast as we could. Dominic had a second team positioned on the east side, it took longer than?—"
"I heard the gunfire start and I couldn't wait." I say it flatly, without apology, because I'm not. "I went in alone.”
His jaw tightens. He looks at the warehouse, at the blood on my shirt, at Jade trembling against my side, and when his eyes come back to mine they're hard in a way I haven't seen directed at me since I was seventeen and totaled his car.
"You pulled the earpiece out." It isn't a question.
"I heard the gunfire and I couldn't wait.”
"I told you to hold position. I told you specifically?—“
"I know what you told me.”
The silence between us has weight. He looks at me for a long moment, and I look back, and neither of us moves.
“And Dominic?—?"
"Dead." I pause. "Jade killed him."
He goes still. His eyes move to Jade, and whatever is in them shifts, the anger not gone but pushed aside by something else, something that looks almost like respect, the kind he reserves for people who have genuinely surprised him.
"Then she did what needed to be done," he says quietly.
Jade doesn't react. She's looking at the ground somewhere to the left of his feet, her breathing shallow.
I pull Dominic's phone from my jacket and hold it out. Nicholas takes it before I can speak and hands it directly to one of his men.
"Every server, every backup, every account," he says, not to me but to the man already walking away. "All of it tonight. Nothing gets missed."
He looks back at me. "I've been doing this a long time, Phoenix. You're not the only one who knows what needs to happen." He holds my gaze, and the anger is still there underneath everything else, banked and waiting. "We've been running his known accounts since you called from inside. We have eight of the twelve locations already. We'll have the rest by morning."
The recording has been hanging over everything since the moment Dominic told Jade about it, and for the first time since then I'm finally able to breathe.
“Thank you.”
He glances at the warehouse door, then back at me. "We'll talk about this later."
It's not a threat exactly. It's a promise of a conversation I'm not going to enjoy, delivered in the tone he uses when he's decided to table something rather than let it go.
"Go," he says. "Take her home."
I don't need to be told twice.
