Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58377 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
RIGGS: Eyes on 4B. “Bane” present—ball cap, ear nick, same build. He’s packing a duffel. Rae got warrants hot from Dean’s guy. SPPD is two out. You sure you don’t want to play?
I look at Cam’s doorway and think of what she needs, not what I want.
ME: Bring him breathing.
RIGGS: Always.
I text Rae separately: Don’t let SPPD burn the door. He’ll badge at a window if they spook him. Quiet, surgical.
She thumbs a and adds: Hatcher just sent me “Bane’s” preferred coffee—there’s a cart on the corner. I’m having the vendor call building security about a “spill” in the lobby to clear civilians. Don’t say I never give you gifts.
I almost smile. Almost.
The hall quiets in a way that isn’t silence—it’s the absence of footsteps that don’t matter. Two Orange operators I posted at either end of the corridor trade a look with me that says we’ve got this slice of earth. A phlebotomist slips past, humming something that sounds like an old Motown track under her breath. The fourth light doesn’t flicker on time. I notice and then it flickers anyway. Forty-eight seconds. Nothing is perfect. We move anyway.
Vanessa returns with enough coffee for a platoon and sets one beside my chair without comment. “Black, no sugar,” she says. She doesn’t ask how I like it; somehow she knows. Or she’s watched me long enough to guess. “Tell her I’m here,” she says again. Then she curls in a seat down the hall, legs folded, phone face-down, for once silent.
At 18:12 my satphone rings with Dean’s brand of weary triumph. “Vale’s phones are in a Faraday bag and he’s discovering he’s not half as clever as he thought,” he says. “He’s at the SPPD building with counsel, which means we have him in a box. Kestrel’s P.O. box is a dead end with a live wire attached: a clerk saw a guy matching ‘Bane’ pick up mail twice this month. We’re sending that across.”
“And Rourke?”
“Riggs will tell you, but early word is that he’s got a front row seat to the man discovering that his apartment door can be opened with a master key and a slapped warrant. Officers on scene say he was mid-duffel and not half as brave without a mask and a van.”
I close my eyes.
Dean huffs out a, “You did good, Sawyer.”
“Not good enough,” I say. “Not yet.”
“Then keep going,” he says, and hangs up.
I text Riggs: Status? He sends a photo I will never show Cam—a blurred still of a bruise of a man face-down on rough carpet, cuffs on, the notch in his ear proof of identity. Another text follows: Phone seized. SIMs. Two throwaways. One still warm. We’ll get him to talk.
I let my head hit the wall again, close my eyes, and for the first time since the van door slammed in my imagination and then in the world, I let my breath out all the way. The sound it makes is a rough thing. Vanessa hears it and pretends she didn’t. One of the Orange operators looks away pointedly. The nurse smiles like a small moon.
Through the door I hear a rustle and the faintest click of a bed control. I don’t move. I put my palm flat to the wood one more time and say nothing again.
A text glows on my screen. Cam: I need time.
My fingers hover. Then I type: Take it. I’m outside.
The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again. Don’t go far, comes back.
Never, I send.
I pocket the phone, sit back down in the ugly chair, and let the antiseptic and time do what they do while we do what we do better: hunt, build, close. Because this is the part of war nobody likes to put in recruitment videos—waiting while the net tightens, while the warrants are served, while the man with the ear nick sits in a room under fluorescent hell and tells us where he hid the rest of the rot.
And when it’s done—when Vale signs the last paper that names his sin, when Rourke points to the last locker—we’ll walk out of here. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But we’ll leave, and when we do, we won’t be going back to the world we had before.
We’ll build a new one. With doors that hold. With walls that don’t need to be this thick to make us feel safe. With a table permanently stained with blue and copper and a laugh in a kitchen where the coffee doesn’t taste like waiting.
But for now: I keep watch.
Forty-seven seconds. Flicker.
I’m here.
24
Camille
Hospitals measure time in drips and beeps. Back at the house, time is paint drying—slow at the edges, fast where you need it to last. Since they discharged me, I keep catching myself staring at ordinary things like they’re evidence: a bread knife lying too close to the counter’s edge, the way a shadow slices a doorway, the exact click of a lock I’ve heard a thousand times. My brain tags everything threat/not threat, the way Sawyer taught me, except now the sorting happens without permission.