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He gets an elbow into Miller's jaw that sounds worse than it probably is, and he twists hard enough to create a problem before Grave's hand closes around the back of his collar and drives him into the refrigerator with enough force that the door swings open on impact. Reyes hits the floor on his knees and stays there, breathing in the hard, involuntary way of someone whose body has just processed a significant amount of information at once.

Grave stands behind him and does not move.

He doesn't need to. He has been carrying something in him since the parking lot tonight, a fury that is more frightening than the open kind because you can feel the weight of it and cannot see where the edge is.

He is not touching Reyes, he doesn’t have to. His presence in the room is doing the work on its own, and Reyes can feel it on the back of his neck.

I crouch down to his eye level.

He is breathing hard, one hand flat on the kitchen floor, and his eyes when they find mine are running the specific calculation of a man trying to determine which version of this ends better for him. I let him run it. I have found that men are more honest when they arrive at conclusions themselves than when they are pushed toward them.

"The concrete plant," I say. Quiet, even. "How many?"

His jaw works.

"Reyes." I do not raise my voice. "You're going to tell me, and you're going to tell me everything, because you understand that if the number you give me is wrong, I come back here. And the second visit will not look like this one."

Behind him, Grave shifts his weight. The floor creaks under it. Reyes's shoulders tighten.

"Three," he says. Then, after a breath: "Maybe four. One outside, three in."

"Where is she?"

He hesitates and I watch Grave's hand move to the back of the chair beside him, closing around the top rail.

"East corridor," he says. "Second passage in." His throat moves. "Last check-in was forty, forty-five minutes ago. She was —" He stops.

I wait.

"She wasn't hurt," he says. "They weren't told to hurt her."

I look at him for a moment. The kitchen light hums above us. Somewhere in the house a clock ticks through the silence.

"Who made the call to take her?" I say.

He exhales through his nose, the last of the resistance going out of it. When a man makes peace with the fact that one consequence is more certain than another, the body registers it before the voice does. His shoulders drop a fraction.

"Dr. Drake. It came from him directly." He looks at the floor between his hands. "He knew it was ending, he wanted something to negotiate with."

I stand.

Grave steps back from the chair, and the air in the kitchen redistributes around his movement. Miller is already at the door.

I look at Reyes on the floor one last time. He is not looking back at me. He is looking at the tile, processing what he has just done.

"Stay in the house," I say. "Don't make calls. Don't open the door."

He says nothing.

We leave the way we came in.

The ride to the quarry takes fourteen minutes. The snow is coming in heavy now, angled by the wind, and my headlight cuts maybe ten feet into it before the dark swallows the rest.

I ride at the front and feel the cold in every joint the jacket does not fully reach, the tires reading the road through my hands on the bars.

Behind me the column runs without lights where the road allows, engines low, the sound of the Night Wolves moving with intent bleeding into the frozen air and disappearing behind us.

I do not usually allow myself much interior space during an operation, thinking about outcomes before you are standing in them is how you make mistakes, but the drive is long enough and the night is quiet enough that she moves into my head before I can close the door on it.