She steps in. Her forehead finds my chest. My arm comes around her. We stand in the corridor while the compound moves through its night, and neither of us speaks.
Then she pulls back. The softness is already gone.
“Get Julian,” she says. “I want Alexei’s intel mapped before the compound goes down at dawn.”
Chapter
Eighteen
Julian has the facility on three screens when the full team assembles.
He and Alexei built it overnight. Hours of Alexei’s recall translated into floor plans, guard stations, room dimensions, corridor widths. A building reconstructed from one man’s memory, precise enough to plan a breach.
The decommissioned water treatment plant, forty miles southeast. When Julian pulled up Erik’s map alongside Alexei’s intel, the overlay locked into place. The third distribution hub. The one Erik’s wolves mapped at the Wax and Wane.
The contamination went out from here. The clean blood was harvested here. Same building. Same operation. Konstantin didn’t build separate infrastructure for the crisis and the solution. He ran both out of the same facility.
Julian, Alexei, and I built this overnight. Maximus was in the room for every hour of it. The briefing is for everyone else.Marcellus and the inner circle. They’re seeing it for the first time. Seraphina left with the wolves at dawn.
Julian pulls the timeline onto the secondary screen. “Dusk at seven-eighteen. At vampire speed, only minutes to the site. That gives us just under eleven hours of operational darkness.” He looks at me. “I go dormant at dawn regardless of where I am or what’s happening. If I’m still on site at five, the wolves carry the operation to completion while I’m unconscious.”
“Then don’t be on site at five.”
Maximus speaks for the first time. “The wards.”
Two words. Everyone turns.
He’s leaning against the far wall, arms crossed.
“Alexei. The ward signature. You said witch-made. How many layers?”
“Three. Outer perimeter detection. Inner barrier keyed to vampire energy. And a third layer I couldn’t identify. Deeper. Woven into the foundation.”
“Seraphina said that’s the one she needs to break first,” I say. “If the foundation layer holds, the others regenerate.”
Maximus nods.
I lay out the rest. “Seraphina travels with the wolves and breaks the wards on site. We breach the north entrance. Julian coordinates extraction from the comms position. Erik’s wolves have staged extraction vehicles a mile south of the facility. Modified vans with blackout interiors. We breach within the first hour. Humans loaded and moving by midnight. Hard abort at four a.m.”
I turn to Alexei. “You’re with me inside.”
“No.” Maximus steps forward. “We have a preliminary assessment and a story. That’s not enough to trust him with your life inside a Konstantin facility.”
“Julian cross-referenced his coordinates against Erik’s surveillance data. They match.”
“Two data points.” Maximus holds up two fingers. “That’s not a pattern. That’s a sample size.”
“I need someone who’s been inside that building. Floor plans don’t react in real time. If something doesn’t match what he described, I need the person who described it standing next to me to tell me why.”
“And if the reason it doesn’t match is because he designed the discrepancy?”
The room is quiet. Julian’s fingers have stopped on his tablet. Marcellus is watching from the secondary console. His attention moving between Maximus and me without his body shifting.
“If he’s bait,” Maximus says, “then everything he’s given us is designed to put you exactly where Konstantin wants you. The floor plan. The guard rotations. The emotional testimony. All of it constructed to get you to walk into that building with Konstantin’s asset at your shoulder.”
Alexei hasn’t moved. His eyes track between Maximus and me. The micro-movements constant, precise.
“Every asset starts with a small sample size,” I say.
