“Careful people don’t keep the murder evidence at home and carry the clean phone in their boot. That’s backward.” I lean forward. “And here’s what finishes it. The Syndicate sent two men to erase her in daylight, with a backup team on wheels behind them. I was right there. They called her a liability. Now hold that against your phone. The agent who owns that traffic—someone inside your restricted wing, someone who could hand them Samien—is worth more than fifty field men. You don’t cut an asset like that in an alley. You pull them out and keep them producing. You cut couriers.” I let it land. “They cut her.”
Viktor is quiet a long moment.
“Then what was she?”
“I don’t know yet. What I do have is that they didn’t recruit a professional; they found someone they could squeeze.”
“But she did the drops. That’s not nothing.” He’s frowning. I can see the wheels turning.
“She’s no operative, Viktor. Couple months after Grace landed here, someone made contact. Used her sister as leverage.”
“Serenity,” he says, things falling into place.
“Exactly,” I say. “They fed Grace details. Proof of life: a photograph, her sister’s handwriting, later a recording. The deal was simple. She passes what she hears, the sister stays breathing. What she passed was useless scraps. She’s nooperative, but she knew enough to do as little harm as she could. She ran that alone, for months, because the one time she trusted people to find her sister, nothing came of it.”
“We were looking.”
“I know. She didn’t. All she had was a voice on a phone holding her sister over her head.” I keep my eyes on his. “She’s guilty of the drops, Viktor. She’ll answer for that, and she knows it. But she’s not your mole, and she didn’t kill Samien.”
He stands. Walks to the window. I wait while he stands there.
“You want me to bring her into protection while we work it,” he says. “That’s where this goes.”
“No. That’s where it doesn’t go. We did protection already. I drove Rafael to his protected room myself. You told me on the phone you knew that was a mistake. I’m holding you to it.”
His shoulders shift. Not much. On Viktor, it’s a lot.
“How were you so sure?” he says, still facing the glass. “From the first call, you read like a man defending her. What did you see that my people didn’t?”
“I…” I stop, because I don’t have an answer for him. Not one that fits anything he’d expect from me. “I just knew,” I say eventually.
He looks at me for a moment, then decides not to push.
“The fact remains that she still managed to gather the intel she sent to them. Got past people who should have seen her.”
“It’s her magic. A glamour. It slides attention off her—eyes, cameras, memory. People look straight at her and don’t see her. That’s how she picked up scraps unseen—the gossip and old news she actually passed. It’s not how anyone pulls comms traffic and rotation tables. That took clearance she’s never had, and whoever owns that phone does.” I pause.
Viktor turns around slowly.
“A glamour.”
“Runs in her blood. The line’s called Sangrey. Her sister’s magic sits closer to the surface—harder to hide. That’s why the Syndicate took the sister first. It’s also how she got out.”
He comes back to the desk, but he doesn’t sit. Something is moving behind his face, and I wait for it.
“You were at the meeting when the Nocturne contingent came,” he says. “The trade Ysabelle Faine described. Rare blood. Shifters, witches, humans with something unusual in their veins. No pattern anyone could hold, she said.”
“The pattern is market value.”
“The pattern is market value.” He says it back. “Faine’s suspicions are sound. The Syndicate isn’t just experimenting on magic-bloods. They’re supplying the blood trade.”
“Some bloodlines are more valuable, and those go into the supply chain.” I hate how I’m saying it makes it sound like a logistical issue.
“Yes. I’m willing to bet there’s something special about the Sangrey line that they just found out about.” He nods. “A courier they’d already written off just turned into something worth a great deal more.” He taps the desk once. “The Syndicate doesn’t spend a dragon on a woman they’ve already cut loose. They were taking her back.”
The thought makes my teeth grind. “To put into the pipeline.”
“Most likely. And if blood is what they’re keeping the sister for, she’s not in a holding cell. She’s in the trade Faine described.” He looks at me straight. “Which changes how we hunt. If anyone in that pipeline hears that someone’s asking after one girl by name, she’ll disappear. It won’t matter if her blood is valuable; they have a replacement lined up.”
