The intel was good.
Better than good. Seth had spent four months in that warehouse, and he'd used every second of it. While other captives had retreated into themselves, the survival mechanismthat trafficking experts would recognize, the dissociation that made the unbearable bearable. Seth had done the opposite. He'd watched. Listened. Cataloged.
Names. Six guards, rotations mapped by day and shift. A woman named Lucia who managed the labor assignments with the clinical detachment of a middle manager at a Fortune 500 company. A man named Kemp who handled transport, moving workers between Mercer's sites in unmarked vans with blacked-out windows.
And above them all, whispered but never confirmed, the name that mattered: Clayton Mercer.
"I never saw him," Seth said. "Not at the warehouse. But the guards talked. Complained, mostly, about schedules, about pay. Mercer's name came up when things went wrong. 'Mercer won't be happy.' 'Mercer's sending someone to check.' Like he was god and the warehouse was church."
Ghost was typing furiously now. "Mercer hosts a gala every spring," he said, his voice barely above a murmur. "Trafficking awareness. Anti-exploitation charity. Raises about two million a year."
The irony sat in the room like a live grenade.
"He runs trafficking and raises money to fight trafficking," Seth said flatly.
"The charity funnels clean money into his legitimate businesses." Ghost pulled up something on his screen, turned it to face the room. "Tax shelters within tax shelters. The donations launder the operation's profits."
"How long have you known this?" Seth asked.
"Known? Three months. Been able to prove? That's what we're working on."
Seth leaned back in his chair. His jaw was working. Zain could see the muscle jumping. The anger wasn't hot. It was cold. Calculated. The kind that sharpened instead of shattered.
"Then let me help," Seth said.
Marcus studied him. That deep, measuring look that had kept Lakefront alive for eight years, the ability to see what a person was capable of, and more importantly, what they were willing to become.
"You're a civilian," Marcus said. "You've been through what would break most people. What you need is recovery, not to be shoved into a street level war."
"What I need is to feel like a person again." Seth didn't raise his voice. Didn't need to. The words hit like bullets. "Four months. Four months of being nobody. Being nothing. A pair of hands on an assembly line. You want to help me? Don't put me in another cage and call it protection."
Silence.
Zain felt something in his chest crack, not break, but shift, like tectonic plates adjusting to a new reality. He knew that need. Had felt it himself, years ago, when the badge had been taken and the system had closed ranks and he'd been left standing outside everything he'd believed in with nothing but his skills and his rage.
Purpose was the only antidote to powerlessness. He'd learned that. He wouldn't deny it to someone else.
"He stays in the room," Zain said.
Marcus looked at him.
"He has intel we need. He's motivated. And he's right, we don't cage people." Zain met Marcus's eyes. "That's the line. That's always been the line."
Marcus held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded, once.
"You're responsible for him," Marcus said to Zain. "If he's in, he's yours."
The words landed different than Marcus intended. Or maybe exactly as he intended. With Marcus, you could never tell
After the meeting, Seth found Zain in the gym.
It wasn't much of a gym, the safehouse basement, sectioned off from Ghost's server room by a drywall partition, with a heavy bag, a speed bag, a rack of free weights, and a set of rubber mats that smelled like they'd been salvaged from a closed-down boxing club. Zain was working the heavy bag, and he'd been at it long enough that his shirt was soaked through and his knuckles were raw under the wraps.
He heard Seth on the stairs. Didn't stop.
"Teach me," Seth said.
Zain hit the bag. Cross, hook, cross. The chain rattled. "Teach you what?"
