Page 48 of Claimed By the Wraiths

I waited for the next holding-level rotation and went down.

The pull sharpened with every level. By the eastern wing it had become specific enough to hurt.

One corridor.

One section.

One door.

I stopped on the service side of the wall and put my palm against the metal.

Warmth answered.

My hand went still.

Light threaded under the skin at my fingers, faint against the dark.

Jessa was on the other side.

Two centimeters of metal. Nearly two weeks of distance reduced to the thickness of a wall.

I could have opened it.

Not safely. Not yet.

The attack window was finally measured in hours, and one premature alarm could still turn four thousand prisoners into hostages.

So I kept my hand there long enough to know she was awake.

Long enough to feel the tremor inside me settle when the warmth pressed back.

Then I pulled away and went to wait for the last rotation before the assault.

Hours now.

Not days.

JESSA

Vain asked about the data drive his team had taken off me. What it was built to do. What would unlock it.

I told him it was storage and looked politely blank. A man holding an open book doesn’t ask you to read it to him; whatever his technicians had tried, Deyric’s encryption was holding. I banked it next to the codes.

The second interrogation was shorter. He opened with the codes. “Whatever you pulled from the routing network at Meridian, don’t imagine it’s still live. Tal’s access is revoked.”

I kept my face flat. That closed the cleanest path, not the only one. Deyric had mirrored the Meridian traffic before we left; if anyone could reconstruct a fresh handshake from the traffic and the Consortium architecture around it, he could.

Vain watched for a reaction. I gave him none.

Then he wanted specifics about the crew. Ship capabilities, combat strength, intelligence sources. I gave him what he’d already known or could verify: the Raptor’s class designation, the number of crew, the general armament.

I understated everything. Gave him the weapons complement from before Maris upgraded the targeting array. Crew roles that were technically accurate but said nothing about what the bonded pairs could do together.

Nothing about the shadow-meld. Nothing about what was forming between Serak and me. Nothing that mattered.

He thanked me politely and sent me back to my cell.

I kept building.