Page 52 of Claimed By the Wraiths

He got neither.

I came back to the cell and counted the next patrol.

Sometime during the thirteenth day, the air changed.

Not literally.

Something in me went taut.

Close.

Not a direction anymore. A location.

Here.

I stood so fast the edge of the bunk caught the back of my knees.

My hand went to the wall.

Cold metal first.

Then warmth.

Specific. Immediate. On the other side.

“Serak,” I whispered.

The warmth pressed back.

My hands had been trembling on and off since Meridian. I’d learned how to hide it by curling my fingers into my palms, by moving before anyone could look too closely, by giving my body another job.

The tremor stopped under my hands.

Not because I controlled it.

Because for the first time in nearly two weeks, something held me back.

The thing he wouldn’t name. The connection we’d been building through years of late watches and silence and every moment we’d both pretended was ordinary.

I stood there until my head cleared.

Then I stepped away and looked at the plan again.

Four guards between my cell and the comm hub. Three routes through the service corridors.

Narev’s containment code. Rynn’s security-feed map and message route. Kovac with the maintenance terminal. Patel with one door he could make fail open.

Serak was here.

Which meant the Raptor was close enough that the waiting had become a clock again.

Patel would come for the next escort in nineteen minutes.

SERAK

At what the station’s lighting suggested was the middle of the nightcycle, the guard rotation thinned to a single patrol. When it crossed to the western junction, the eastern corridor opened up. Forty minutes before the coverage rebuilt.

The nearest corridor camera was visual. Under the surface meld, it showed an empty hall.