"I don't have much time; if he finds out, I’m dead!" she whispers.
I freeze. The jar of cashews is heavy in my hand. My finance brain, the one that detects anomalies in a dataset, immediately clicks into high alert.
"He changed the schedule," the woman says. Her English is perfect, but her accent is slightly Spanish. I recognize the tone. It's Carlotta, one of the housemaids. The one who spent yesterday dusting my suite and pretending she didn't understand when I asked her for the Wi-Fi password.
"No," Carlotta continues, her voice trembling. "He didn't tell the Senator. He's meeting him on Thursday, not Friday. The route is the North Pass. He's taking the armored convoy, but he's only bringing four men."
A long pause. She’s listening to someone on the other end of a phone.
"Yes," she whispers, her voice sounding frantic. "I got the routing slip from the desk in the West Wing. The security desk was empty for two minutes while Sean was... while he was dealing with the girl."
My heart stops.
Sean was dealing with the girl. That was me. That was this morning, when I was being dragged kicking and screaming in my nightdress. The commotion I caused created the two-minute window Carlotta needed to steal a routing slip.
"I have to go," Carlotta says, her breath hitching. "If he finds out... Silas, please. My brother—"
The line clicks.
The silence is deafening. I can hear my own heartbeat against my ribs.
Carlotta is a mole.
She’s feeding Lorcan’s routes, his schedules, his security layouts directly to someone— maybe it’s Silas? The man who shot up the resort in Ireland. The man who wants to peel my skin off. The man who wants Lorcan dead.
Oh lord, we are officially dead.
I hear the heavy, metallic creak of the service door closing. Carlotta is moving back toward the kitchens.
I shrink back behind a shelf of olive oil, my breath coming in short, shallow gasps. My mind is racing, throwing out equations, risks, and probabilities.
Option A: Run to the young guard, go straight to Lorcan’s office, and tell him everything.
What happens then? Lorcan deals with Carlotta. He probably puts a bullet in her head, or whatever it is he does to people who betray him. He fixes the leak. The compound goes on red alert.
And I?
I’m still locked in the East Wing. I’m still the captive girl with the ruined phone, waiting for the monster to decide when I’m safe enough to leave. I have no bargaining power. I’m just cargo he has to protect.
Option B: Keep quiet.
If I keep quiet, I have a piece of data that Lorcan doesn't. In the world of finance, information is the only currency that matters. If I can investigate Carlotta myself, find out how she’s transmitting the data, or get actual proof of Silas’s next move, I can hand Lorcan the leak on a silver platter.
But I won't give it to him for free, of course.
A week ago, I'd have bartered it for the obvious thing: a plane ticket, a new phone, a door held open while I walked back to my old life and never looked back. Except I've run the numbers on that life now, and they come out to a body bag. Go home, and Silas finds me; the men parked outside my mother's house and refreshing Tania's feed don't need me to do a single thing but exist within reach. "Set me free" isn't leverage. It's just a slower way to get all of us killed.
So, I price what's actually worth buying. Real protection for my mom and Tania, the kind that doesn't evaporate the second Lorcan's in a mood. A seat at the table instead of a cell with a mountain view. An actual say in the war that's going to decide whether I see twenty-four. I don't want him to let me go anymore. I want to stop being cargo he relocates, and start being a party he has to deal with. You don't survive a war by sprinting into it unarmed, you make yourself the one asset both sides can't afford to lose.
It's a massive risk, and not the kind I get to be cute about. If Silas's men hit that convoy on the North Pass because I sat on what I know, Lorcan could bleed out on a stretch of red rock, and Maeve could lose the only parent she has left, the messy-handedwall who keeps the ghosts off her bedroom floor. I'd be spending their lives to buy my leverage.
But Carlotta said the meeting is on Thursday. Today is Wednesday. I have twenty-four hours to find the proof, to build my file, and to make my move. Lorcan is a brilliant tactician, but he’s blinded by his own anger and his obsession with me. He’s looking for leaks in his inner circle, his lieutenants, his guards. He’s not looking at the woman dusting his shelves.
I stand up, my knuckles white around the jar of cashews.
The sensible girl in me is screaming that this is wrong. That I should protect the grumpy man who held me in the dark. But the stubborn, sassy woman who just got her life dismantled by Mark and then kidnapped by a mob boss is done being a victim.
I'm going to map this system. And then I'm going to buy my way out of being a hostage and into a position where no man, not Silas, not Lorcan, gets to decide my fate for me again.
