Halo closes his laptop with a quiet click. He takes his glasses off. Cleans them. Puts them back on. It's the closest thing to a tell he has, the deliberate pause of a person organizing something they know is going to land like a grenade.
“Your phone,” he says.
The room goes still.
“The one he gave you,” Halo's voice is flat and precise, the way it always is when he's delivering something irrefutable. “It has been transmitting since before you arrived in this town. Location, continuously. Audio, triggered by calls, activated when it detected other devices close by.” He pauses. “I put it all together after the ambush.”
I pull my phone out and stare at it.
The one Xaden gave me weeks ago at the beach. He was already planning his move back then. He gave it to me knowing I would carry it everywhere and talk near it… he knows everything.
He heard the kidnapping plan. The supply run. The timeline. Harper's call. The routes. Every conversation held in this house for weeks. He heard Omen, Carn, Pope, Halo and Vatican plan the operation that just put a bullet in my friend's side.
And he heard the library.
This morning. He was there, in my pocket, against my leg, through that phone that I couldn't make myself throw away because throwing it away would have meant admitting something I wasn't ready to admit. When I stood in front of that computer screen and my world came apart, he heard Maddison's voice. I thought you knew about the cameras in here. He heard me break in the worst and most private way. He heard me sob and he heard Harper's name and he heard me say don't tell the guys, not yet, heard every terrified decision I made in the hours between the library and the rink.
He knew about the tape before I did.
The shame arrives like a wave I didn't see coming. It floods everything. And then behind it, bigger and hotter, the kind of rage that burns so cleanly it almost feels like clarity?—
I stand up. I walk to the bathroom, drop it into the toilet and flush it. I stand there with my hands on the cold edge of the sink and I breathe. Once. Twice.
I look at myself in the mirror.
I am wearing his jersey.
I pull it over my head and drop it on the floor. I am done wearing his name.
When I walk back into the bedroom, four pairs of eyes are on me. I don't offer an explanation. There isn't one that would cover it.
“He's known everything.” My voice is steady. “The operation, the plan, this house, all of it. He let the supply run go far enough that our people were out in the open and then he closed the trap.” I look at Carn on the bed and I feel the guilt of it like a blade between my ribs. “That's on me.”
“Like hell it is—” he starts.
“It is. I carried that phone. I kept it.” I hold his stare and don't let him argue me out of it. “But we don't have time for me to fall apart about it right now.”
The sound of tires on the road outside.
More than one vehicle.
Moving slowly.
Halo is back at his laptop before anyone speaks. “Movement on the south camera. Multiple vehicles. Lights off, two blocks out.” His fingers move. His face doesn't change. “I count six cars.”
Six cars.
I do the math with the speed of someone who has been living inside a war long enough to count casualties without flinching. Halo, Omen, Vatican. Pope still on the phone in the hall. Harper behind me in the doorway. Carnage on the bed with a bullet in his side and a field dressing that is already soaked through.
And Xaden Devlin with six cars worth of men who have known our exact position for weeks.
“Get Carn out.” I turn to Omen. “The gap in the east fence, he showed it to me weeks ago. Take him through there. Harper goes with him.”
“Toren—” Carnage's voice is warning.
“I need you alive, Carnage.” I face him and I let him see that I mean it, every word of it, that this is not sacrifice disguised asstrategy but the truest calculation I have. “Alive and breathing and able to stand. That's what I need from you. So I need you to go.”
The first car rolls to a stop outside.
