“English, please,” Lila grumbles. “Preferably the short version.”
“It means Angelina didn’t want us to find her,” he says. “And she was very good at it.”
Kiera’s muscles jump in her jaw. She covers it by reaching for her mug of cold coffee, judging by the way she doesn’t bother sipping. “Yeah,” she says. “She was.”
I lean against the doorway, arms crossed. “Walk me through it again.”
Cam doesn’t look up; he’s in full analyst mode—one hand on the trackpad, the other drumming against the table in patterns only he understands. “I was able to clone the SIM card and dump what’s left of the memory. Most of the call and text data is wiped or corrupted, but there are a few pings from tower handoffs, and a few GPS crumbs from when the location services glitched on.” Cam taps a key. A map pops up, and dots start to bloom across it; faint, scattered fireflies. “These are her last known movements,” he continues. “At least, the ones the phone was present for.”
The dots cluster around places we already know: the Nesting House, the chapel, safe motels. There are still some gaps—places where something should be and isn’t.
Kiera stares at the screen, looking for the missing pieces. “You said there were other locations,” she says. “Where they might’ve moved kids. Or stored…whatever they didn’t want in this facility.”
“There are.” Cam points to a spot on the screen. “But they’re not going to glow red and label themselves as an evil basement. I’m cross-referencing the tower hits with utility records, the land registry, and shell companies—anything we can tie to the Cicada fronts. That takes time.”
“How much time?” I ask.
Cam shrugs one shoulder, a tight movement full of frustration. “I don’t know. Days, weeks, months, if they were smart.” He doesn’t say your mother out loud, but it hangs there anyway.
Kiera’s fingers curl around the mug until her knuckles pale, vibrating at a frequency only I seem to hear—a new sharpness under her skin, something restless and coiled. “Are you sure you’re up for this?” The question comes out more pointed than I intended.
Kiera’s gaze cuts to me, sharp enough to shave bone. “Do I look like I’m not?”
Yes. No. Both. “You look like you haven’t slept,” I say. “And like you’re one bad piece of news away from punching a hole in my wall.”
Kiera snorts, but it’s thin. “Then consider it motivation for you two to find somewhere safe for these kids before I start to redecorate.”
Cam glances between us, reading the air. He doesn’t say anything, but his eyes linger on the distance between Kiera’s chair and mine. “I have a contact,” he says, zooming in. “She runs a safehouse for victims of traffickinguntil they can be reintegrated into reality. No obvious facility on public records.”
Lila stumbles back into the room. “That will work, but who is this contact?” A hint of jealousy drips from her tone.
“Are you jealous?” Cam mocks sweetly, obviously trying to get a rise out of her. Lila glares at him as she pours her coffee, her eyes never leaving his.
“You two focus on the task,” I grumble.Jesus fucking Christ, it’s like living with children with them.“Is her safehouse underground or disguised?”
“Probably both,” he says. “But I need to call and make sure she has room.”
“Do it,” Kiera agrees.
“What are we going to do with Evelynn and that psycho doctor?” Cam asks.
“They come with us until we get everything we need, or they become useless,” she says.
He stops. The word hangs between them, raw. “Then what?” Lila asks quietly.
“Then they get everything that’s deserved,” she says. “There will be no other endings for them.”
Cam’s face softens. “You sure about this?” He questions. “You’ve been through a lot lately.”
Kiera looks like she wants to keep fighting. Instead, she leans back, slumps just enough that I can see the exhaustion under the anger. “It’s fine. My mom has been dead since I was eight years old. Now it will be just…permanent.” There it is again, that extra layer of tired she’s been carrying. It’s something smaller and denser, like a secret lodged under her ribs.She’s fucking hiding something.The worst part is that some selfish part of me already knows roughly what shape it might be. But knowing the math and hearing the answer out loud are not the same thing.
“Okay, I’ll give my contact a call,” Cam says, nudging us all back onto the rails. “Lila, check on the kids, prepare them to move. Sterling, can you get a van?”
“Yep. I’ll go make calls.” I nod.
“And what about the other facilities? We can’t just leave them,” Kiera demands.
“One thing at a time, Ki. We have our hands full with the seventeen now, and we have no other space. We will get to them soon, but we need to rest and regroup. We won’t survive if we keep pushing ourselves with bare-minimum plans. Then we are useless to everyone.”
