Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
The door opens without a sound.
The elevator is compact and fast, dropping one level in under seven seconds, and when the doors open again, we’re in another world. The air is cooler, climate controlled to a precise degree, and you’re immediately surrounded by a faint electrical hum of serious computing infrastructure running at sustained capacity.
Sub-Level One.
I’ve been down here hundreds of times and it still does something to my baseline when the doors open. The space is enormous relative to what the building suggests from street level. It’s a full floor carved out beneath Pioneer Square’s historic foundation, ceilinged at fourteen feet. The walls are lined with glassed-in intelligence suites that glow with the cool blue-white light of active workstations. The floors are polished black concrete with recessed lighting strips running along the baseboards, throwing clean lines of illumination upward that make the whole area feel space age.
The centerpiece is the operations wall—forty feet of seamless LED displays running the full length of the north side, currently showing a tiled array of city feeds, satellite imagery, active case maps, and real-time data streams that Josie’s systems maintain around the clock whether or not anyone is down here. In the center of the room, a curved tactical console sits on a raised platform, its surface embedded with touch interfaces and secondary screens, surrounded by a semicircle of workstations that face the main display like an amphitheater.
Josie moves to the primary console before the rest of us have fully cleared the elevator, her tablet syncing to the main system as she pulls up the internal camera grid on the operations wall. The tiled display populates instantly—every common area, corridor, and stairwell in the building above us rendered in crisp high-definition feeds. It gives us eyes on the whole building at once, except for the agents’ private quarters and bathrooms.
We come to stand behind her chair, watching as Josie moves through the feeds systematically, fast but thorough, her eyes tracking across the wall with focused intensity. My eyes are scanning too, looking for any sign of Tessa.
Lobby. Empty.
Communal kitchen. Empty.
Second-floor corridor. Empty.
Training bay, gym, receiving area, garage level.
Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty.
The cold surge of anxiety spreads in my chest.
“Door logs,” Malik says.
Josie switches screens, bringing up the access log in scrolling columns of time stamps and entry points. She scans the data, far quicker than my brain can follow, and then she stops.
“Service exit,” she says. “East corridor. One fifty-four p.m.” Her fingers tap the keyboard. “Let me pull up the camera feed.”
And there it is. The service corridor footage with a time stamp one fifty-four p.m.
And there’s Tessa in her jeans and cute blouse that I told her looked beautiful on her this morning, moving through the frame with the deliberate unhurried walk of someone who doesn’t want to appear to be hurrying. She pushes the exit door without breaking stride and then she’s gone.
“Son of a fucking bitch,” I growl, my hands curling into tight fists.
“She planned it,” Reid says in awe. “She waited for the team meeting and walked right out the service exit.”
“Where would she have gone?” Malik asks, turning to me.
I scrub a hand over my face in frustration. “Fuck if I know. But give me two minutes.”
I quickly make my way back to my apartment, which feels all kinds of wrong when I push through the front door. Her absence now carries a heavier weight than it did a mere fifteen minutes ago when I thought she was just in another room.
My eyes scan the apartment, taking in everything. Her mug on the counter. Cold. Her tennis shoes by the couch. Her novel face down on the coffee table. Her laptop open on the dining table, screen still on.
I cross the room and look at it, surprised she left the screen open. It had to have been deliberate.
I scan an email that she has pulled up, my heart leaping into my throat when I see it’s from Adrian Schwartz. I scroll the entire exchange, my blood pressure skyrocketing.
She went to fucking meet Adrian Schwartz.
I pull out my phone and open the tracker app with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be, because if I let them shake, I won’t be able to do what comes next, and what comes next is all that matters.
The signal populates on the map. It’s stationary on SR 522, which leads up to Monroe. What the fuck does that mean?
I stand at the dining table with Tessa’s laptop open in front of me and the tracker showing me a bracelet on the side of a road and I give myself exactly five seconds to feel what I’m feeling.
Absolute, utter terror.
I grab the computer and head back down to the sub-basement where I find everyone standing over Josie’s shoulders as her fingers fly across the keyboard, watching the footage of Tessa’s exit on repeat. John Sullivan, also known as “Sully” to all of us, is now here dressed in tactical gear, which tells me Malik made calls while I was upstairs. Sully has been with Jameson for over ten years, coming up from the Vegas office. He’s quiet, methodical, former marine recon with two combat deployments and the specific economy of movement that comes from spending years operating in tight spaces where efficiency isn’t optional. He nods at me as I enter. I nod back.