PART 2:

The elevator was locked with a padlock through the call button panel. They took the stairs. The ping had been street level, which suggested the ground floor or the building’s exterior. But Gabriel had been moving through structures like this long enough to know that street level pings could bleed from units above, especially in buildings with deteriorating infrastructure.

He went up to the second floor on instinct and turned left in the hallway because the right side units had light coming under the doors and noise behind them, and whoever had Rowan here would not have put her somewhere with neighbors who could hear. The left hallway was dark and smelled like standing water. There were four doors, three of them sealed with industrial padlocks.

The fourth was closed, but the padlock hasp had been broken away from the door frame recently, the wood still pale and splintered around the screws. Gabriel put his hand flat against the door and stood very still. Nothing from inside. No sound at all. He opened it. The unit was a single room with a bathroom off the back. No furniture.

A sleeping bag in the corner that had been used and abandoned. A plastic bag with a torn corner near the window. The window itself was cracked open 2 in, which was why the floor near it had a thin skin of grit from the street below. The bathroom light was on. A thin yellow strip showed under the door. Gabriel crossed the room and pushed the door open with two fingers.

She was on the floor with her back against the bathtub and her left hand pressed against her side and a curved needle threaded with something dark between the fingers of her right. She’d gotten three stitches in. There were at least six more to go. The wound was on her left flank below the ribs, and it had bled considerably.

The floor around her was testament to that. The grout gone entirely dark. She’d tried to clean it at some point with what appeared to be her own jacket, which lay balled on the tub’s edge. Her shirt was cut away. Her face was a mess. Left eye swollen nearly shut, a split at the corner of her mouth that had scabbed and reopened, a bruise spreading from her jaw down her neck.

She looked up at him when the door opened. Her right hand didn’t move. Neither did her eyes. “You’re 4 hours late,” she said. Her voice was steady in the particular way that people who were burning with fever sometimes sounded steady. Flat and too deliberate. Like each word required separate construction. “I didn’t know I was coming,” Gabriel said. “You were always going to come.

” She looked back at the wound. “Hand me that.” He stepped over her legs and picked up the small bottle on the edge of the tub. Rubbing alcohol, almost empty. He handed it to her. She poured what was left into the wound without flinching, which meant she’d already moved past the point where flinching was possible.

“How long have you been here?” he said. “Since yesterday morning.” He looked at the wound, at the dried blood on the floor, at the pallor underneath the bruising on her face. “Who did this?” She ran the needle through the skin and pulled the stitch closed. Her hand was exactly as steady as it had been. “I need you to listen to something before you decide what to do next.

” She ran another stitch. “Because once you decide, you won’t be able to undecide it.” “Rowan.” “The wedding is a trap.” She ran a third stitch. Her breathing had changed, faster now, but she kept her hand flat and even. “The Pharaohs and your uncle have been coordinating for 8 months. The ceremony is the kill window.

You walk into that church and you don’t walk out.” Gabriel heard the words and felt the room compress slightly, the way spaces did when information rearranged everything within them. He stayed very still and watched her work on the wound and didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Show me.” “My jacket. She didn’t look up.

Inside pocket, there’s a drive. He retrieved it. Small, matte black, the kind that looked like nothing and held everything. He turned it in his fingers. “That’s 8 months of transactions,” she said. “43 communication intercepts, the security access codes your uncle fed them.

Your codes, Gabriel, the ones that run the estate perimeter. And the shell accounts they set up to absorb the assets once you’re gone.” She tied off the stitch and finally looked up at him. Her good eye was very dark and very direct. “Solace was the first layer. When I found the query, I pulled the thread. I didn’t know where it went until it went too far for them to let me walk.

So, they grabbed you. Delmarche runs Vantage. Vantage runs a crew that does the Pharaoh’s removal work.” She said removal with the flatness of someone who had spent 24 hours thinking about what the word meant in practice. “They put me here to wait for someone who was going to make it permanent. He didn’t come back after the first night.

I don’t know why.” Gabriel thought he knew why. He’d had two men he didn’t fully trust running an errand in Delmarche two nights ago and had told himself it was coincidence when they reported finding nothing. He filed that information next to Solace, next to the padlock clasp, next to every other receipt the last 72 hours had been generating.

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