PART 11:

He won’t take me anywhere near that server. No. Lucian looked at her. In the hard light of the working space, his face showed something it hadn’t before. The edges of a decision he’d been making and revising and making again. “I go in.” “You can’t go in,” Reva said the same moment Aurora said it.

“Ash knows your face,” Aurora continued. “Every person at that estate will know your face. You walk through the door and they don’t ask questions. They just She stopped.” Yes, Lucian said. So, we go in the way Elena went in four years ago. He picked up a photograph from the table and turned it to face her. A service entrance on the estate’s north side, accessible via a staff road that ran behind the property.

The catering company contracted for the event runs out of a kitchen in Walkegan. Reva has been building a cover identity for 6 months for exactly this kind of access scenario. 6 months, Aurora said. We anticipated a moment like this. What identity? Reva said, “Event photographer on contract to the catering firm. Goes wherever the food goes.

Documents the presentation. Has access to service corridors throughout the property. They’ll check credentials. The credentials are real. The business is real. 3 years of operating history, real clients, real portfolio.” Reva’s voice was flat with quiet pride with, “The only thing that isn’t real is the photographer.” Aurora looked at Lucian.

Lucian looked back at her. “No,” she said. “It’s the most defensible cover in that environment,” he said. “I have no training for this. I have no You have something better.” His voice was direct, stripped of anything other than the argument. You think like a journalist. You observe. You adapt. And you understand that the most dangerous thing in any room is the person who looks like they belong there and knows they don’t.

He stopped. Elena understood that. The comparison landed carefully. She understood what he was doing with it, understood the mechanism. It didn’t make it less effective. If Damian sees me, she started. Damian will be in the main hall. The service corridors don’t intersect with the guest areas except at two points, both of which Reva can monitor remotely.

He pulled a chair out, sat. The movement was deliberate, bringing himself to her eye level, removing the physical hierarchy. Aurora, I cannot go in. My team cannot go in without triggering security the moment they’re recognized. You’re the only person in this room who is unknown to Ashford’s security apparatus. A pause. You have 6 hours to decide.

But the window closes at 8:00 because that’s when the van leaves for Lake Geneva. 6 hours. She looked at the architectural drawing again, traced the service corridor with her eyes from the north entrance to the east wing, counted the distance, measured what 6 hours of preparation could plausibly accomplish. “Walk me through every step,” she said.

“All of it. No simplified version.” Lucian nodded to Reva, and they began. The van left at 8:04. Aurora sat in the back with a camera bag that contained a real camera, a real light meter, and a small hard drive device no larger than a USB stick that Reva had shown her how to use with the focus patients of a teacher who understood the student had one shot to learn. Plug in. Enter code.

Wait for green light. Copy. Remove. 11 seconds if the machine cooperated. She wore her hair differently, pulled back, professional, black clothing that read as working crew rather than guest. Reva had produced a credentials lanyard and a jacket with the catering company’s logo. And standing in the warehouse space beforehand, Aurora had looked in the mirror and seen someone she didn’t entirely recognize.

Someone with a job and a purpose and no room in her face for the fear that was doing a very thorough job of dismantling her from the inside. Daniel drove. Reva rode in front with a laptop open on her knees, monitoring feeds from three cameras she’d placed on the property during a reconnaissance run 48 hours earlier.

Lucian sat beside Aurora in the back. He didn’t speak for the first 40 minutes. Outside the van, the city thinned and gave way to the northern suburbs, and the suburbs gave way to the dark open geometry of exurban Illinois in November. flat land, bare trees, the occasional island of light from a gas station or a fast food sign.

You should eat something, Lucian said. I can’t. I know you should anyway. He produced a protein bar from somewhere. She took it, held it, didn’t open it. Tell me something about her, Aurora said. She didn’t specify. She didn’t need to. Lucian was quiet for a moment. The van moved through the dark. She couldn’t sleep before anything important.

He said she’d get up at 3:00 in the morning and make tea. She didn’t drink and sit in the kitchen writing notes she’d already written just to have something to do with her hands. A pause. She said the worst part of being afraid wasn’t the fear. It was the waiting. She was right, Aurora said. Yes. Another mile of dark. She would have liked you.

Lucian said she had no patience for people who performed bravery. She respected the ones who were clearly terrified and did it anyway. Aurora opened the protein bar, ate it without tasting it, looked out the narrow window at the dark moving past. The estate appeared at 9:47, gates lit from below, the long driveway curving toward the main house through manicured grounds gone silver and skeletal in November.

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