I sit on the edge of the bed with the phone in both hands, my heart hammering against my ribs, and I wait for the next message the way I have never waited for anything in my entire life, every second stretching into something unbearable, the silence of the apartment pressing in around me with nowhere left to hide from it.
34
ZANE
The building is industrial,three stories, a warehouse converted for storage somewhere on the outskirts of a city I have never had reason to visit before tonight. Our intelligence puts Lena on the second floor.
Our intelligence is right about that and wrong about everything else: the number of men inside, the layout of the stairwell, and the fact that someone on their side has a radio we didn’t account for.
The first thirty seconds go the way we planned them. The next four minutes do not.
I’m inside the building when the alarm goes up somewhere below us, shouting in a language I don’t need translated to understand, and the careful, surgical extraction we built over six hours becomes something rougher and considerably less certain.
Roman’s team moves fast.
I move faster, because somewhere past the second door on the right is a woman who has done nothing to deserve any partof what’s happening to her tonight, and every second past the alarm is a second I can’t get back if this goes wrong.
We find her in a locked room, no restraints, which tells me they were keeping her as leverage rather than treating her as a threat.
She’s pale, frightened, a bruise forming along one cheekbone where someone grabbed her harder than they should have, but she’s upright, alert, already moving toward me before I’ve fully cleared the doorway.
“Are you Zane?” she asks, which is not what I expect a frightened woman to ask first.
“Yes.”
“Took you long enough.” Her voice shakes but doesn’t break. “Get me out of here so I can tell her I finally met you.”
We move.
The stairwell down is worse than the one up. Two of Roman’s men take fire near the exit, neither seriously, but enough that we lose four minutes pressed against a wall I would rather not have needed.
I keep my body between Lena and the door the entire time, and when we finally clear the building into the cold night air, my hands are not as steady as I would like them to be.
She doesn’t ask what almost happened. I don’t tell her.
The drive back takes longer than the flight that follows it, every minute stretching with the tension of an operation that succeeded but cost more than it should have.
Two of my men are being treated for injuries that will heal. Lena sits beside me in the car, quiet, her hand occasionally going to the bruise on her cheek like she’s confirming it’s still there.
“They asked me questions,” she says, somewhere over the Atlantic, the cabin dimming around us. “About your operations. Routes, structures, things I don’t know anything about because Celine has never told me any of it.”
“You gave them nothing.”
“I had nothing to give.” She looks at me. “Is that why they took me? Because I was supposed to know something?”
“They believed you might.”
“I’m just her sister.”
“You’re the person she loves most in the world,” I say. “That made you valuable to them whether you knew anything or not.”
She’s quiet for a long time after that, looking out at the dark, and I think about the Marchetti faction’s calculation, the cold efficiency of choosing the softest target available rather than the strongest, and something in my chest hardens into a decision I haven’t fully spoken out loud yet, not even to Roman.
This ends. Completely. Soon.
The penthouse is lit when we arrive, every light on, which tells me Celine has not slept since we left.
The elevator doors open onto the foyer, and she’s already there, already moving before either of us has fully stepped through, and Lena breaks away from my side the moment she sees her sister’s face.
