Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77051 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
I bite down. Nod once.
Rae raises a hand. “Heads up. Cathedral just spun up chatter.” One of her screens fills with a dark forum thread—handles, timestamps, nested replies. “User Vainglory posted ‘Psalm88 closes tonight.’”
Knight goes still. “That handle hit our sandbox last week.”
Ozzy leans to his mic. “Pulling IP… bouncing… gotcha. It resolves to a VPN endpoint in—” She blinks. “NovaPlay HQ.”
I choke out a laugh with no humor in it. “Of course it does.”
Rae keeps reading. “There’s also a DM chain between Vainglory and an admin-level handle. Timestamped five minutes ago.” She flicks the text on the central screen.
Vainglory: van delivered. she’s secure.
Regent: accelerate protocol.
Vainglory: confirmed.
My hands curl. “They’ve got her in there.”
Dean: “We move.”
The gear-up is daunting, and needed. I’m not military, so this is new to me, but I’ll do anything for River. Ranger throws me a plate carrier and a comm bud, Sawyer a breaching kit shaped like a backpack but heavier with purpose. Arrow checks my straps and smacks my shoulder plate—a ritual more than correction. “Breathe, Dawson.”
“I’ll breathe when she’s in my arms.”
He doesn’t argue.
We roll out in two vehicles: Dean up front with Knight, Ozzy and Sawyer, Ranger driving me, Poe, and Render with a trunk full of toys. Rae’s voice fills our ears—cool, professional, threaded with something like care.
“Units, be advised—marina guard just sat down to watch a baseball replay. Fire panel false failure in progress. Two patrol units heading north to investigate a ghost alarm.”
“Copy,” Dean says. “Time to door?”
“Four minutes,” Rae answers. “Lark, you’ve got the grid?”
Lark’s voice is bright but tight. “On the breaker board. I can give you thirty seconds of darkness or a flicker to cover a cut.”
Dean says, “Hold it till I say.”
I stare out at the river as we swing onto the dock road, the water black and unknowable. Somewhere under that same sky, River is there. The thought tries to rip my ribs open. I keep breathing because Arrow told me to. Because Dean expects me to. Because River needs me to.
“Eyes up,” Render says softly. “We’re almost there.”
We cut our lights a block out and drift into a side lane. The warehouse rises out of the dark, a hulking rectangle with a roll-up door pitted from decades of weather and a personnel entrance hidden in the building’s crease. One lone light burns above the side door.
“Positions,” Dean says.
We fan out, bootfalls silent. Ranger ghosts left. Knight peels to the personnel door, hand on the jamb, head tipped like he’s listening to the building breathe. Arrow floats, out of everyone’s sight and somehow in all our pockets at once. I stack behind Dean and Sawyer at the roll-up, breath slow. I’m nervous as fuck, and I don’t know what to expect.
Rae whispers in our ears. “Motion ping inside—two signatures. One stationary, one active. Stationary is mid-warehouse, could be a chair. Active moving perimeter loop, slow. No audio.”
My throat closes. Stationary. River.
Dean’s voice is a current. “Rae, give us the flicker.”
The alley light stutters, twice. Sawyer takes that heartbeat of dark to slide the cutter’s cable under the roll-up seam, a garrote for steel. The blade whirrs through corrugated like it remembers every time it’s done this and enjoys it. On the second pass, he palms the cut, braces, and lifts. The door rises soundlessly, six inches, eight, enough for us to roll under on knees and hands.
We slip inside and become ghosts.
It smells like dust and old oil and the faint citrus of a cleaner some bored manager once used to look busy. I hear a footstep. Not ours. Ranger points. Sawyer melts that direction. Dean signals me to his hip and we move, slow, deliberate, toward the shadow of a chair and the glint of a cheap metal table under the skylight’s gray smudge.
She’s there.
River.
Hands bound. Head tipped. Breathing—I see the small lift of her shoulders, and something like prayer stutters in my chest. Dean’s palm says wait. I wait because waiting is how we get to her.
A silhouette unfolds from a stack of pallets on the far side—tall, carrying his boredom like a weapon. His shoulders pass a beam of weak light, and I catch the crescent scratch marks raked across his cheek. She fought. Pride detonates under my sternum.
Dean’s hand flicks. A whisper-soft glide. A hand around a mouth, a forearm press, the sigh of a body going down without a sound. He becomes a neat new shape on the floor. Sawyer’s already cinching wrists.
Rae in my ear: “One down. Second heat signature just appeared farther back. Coming around the forklift.”
Ranger says, “On it.”
There’s the faintest rattle and then Ranger is a shadow filling the path, moving like a lesson. The second guard goes quiet, fast. Arrow’s voice: “Perimeter’s clear.”
Dean gives me a nod I feel in my bones. Go.
I put my hands on River before my knees hit the concrete. “River.” It’s not a sound so much as a shaking exhale. Her head jerks up. Her eyes find mine and flood, then harden. She swallows a sob like she refuses to give this building even that.