She thought about what it meant to be in a war you didn’t know you were in. You lost all the early battles. You lost them by accident, by trust, by the ordinary human failure of believing the shape of your life matched what you were being shown. You lost them without knowing you were losing. And then you woke up on a wet road at midnight with nothing in your hands and you had to decide well, right there in the rain with the damage already done, who you were going to be when you got back up.
Her phone, Ronan’s staff had sourced her a clean phone that morning, buzzed on the bed. Unknown number. She stared at it. It buzzed again. She picked it up, answered without speaking. A voice she recognized said, “Don’t get in that car.” She stopped breathing. The voice was Dr. Ewen’s. “Listen to me carefully,” Ewen said.
Her voice was stripped of its clinical quality. Raw underneath, tight. The voice of someone who has been carrying something too long and has reached the limit. “The meet with Prater, it’s not real. He didn’t reach out. The message came from Vey’s side. They built it to move you.” A fractured pause. “They know Ronan will take a convoy.
They know the route options out of this property. They’ve been planning this since last night.” Violetta stood very still. Her hand was on her stomach. The baby was moving. “How do you know this?” she said. Her voice came out almost steady. The pause on the other end of the line was 2 seconds long.
2 seconds that told her everything she didn’t want to know about the answer. “Because they contacted me first,” Dr. Ewen said, “3 weeks ago, before you arrived.” Her voice fractured on the last word, caught itself, held. “Ronan doesn’t know. I need you to understand, but I didn’t give them anything. I refused. But they know I refused, and they’ve been watching this facility since then, and Marcus’s information confirmed what they already “How did they contact you?” Violetta said.
Another pause. “Through Dr. Marsh.” UEN said. The room went very quiet. Marsh. The careful hands, the too long look at the chart, the prenatal practice that had been administering a slow-burning toxin for 3 months. Not just a bribed physician, a connecting tissue. A person who moved between the world Celeste controlled and the world.
She had 40 seconds before Ronan came back through that door. She knew this because she’d heard his footsteps go down the corridor toward the east office, heard the door open, heard the brief exchange with Sergey. Two voices, low and rapid. And she knew from 2 days of living inside the acoustic structure of this building that the east office was 60 ft away, and that Ronan moved with the unhurried deliberation of someone who didn’t rush unless the situation demanded it.
And right now, he didn’t know the situation demanded it. 40 seconds. “UEN?” she said into the phone. Her voice was very quiet. “Is Prater real? Is there an actual accountant? Yes. Cole Prater is real. He did go into hiding, but the message Ronan received did not come from him.” A pause, tight and thin. “I don’t know if Prater is still alive.
Who else in this facility do they have contact with?” “I don’t know. Marsh gave them my name. I don’t know who else he gave them.” “Where are you right now?” “My office, ground floor, east wing. Same wing as Ronan. She did the math. Stay there. Don’t move. Don’t call anyone else. She hesitated. Did you tell Ronan any of this? Not yet.
I called you first because Ewan stopped. Because you weren’t sure how he’d respond. Yes. Violetta understood that. She also understood that Ewan had made a choice by calling her first, and that choice meant something, and she didn’t have time to figure out exactly what it meant, but she filed it. I’m going to tell him, Violetta said. Stay in your office.
She ended the call. She stood in the center of the room for exactly 3 seconds. 3 seconds where she let herself feel the full weight of what she was holding. The compound terror of it. The baby moving slowly inside her. The facility potentially compromised at a level that went beyond Marcus. The fake convoy route waiting to be activated the moment Ronan gave the order to move.
3 seconds. Then she walked out of the room. She came through the east office door without knocking. Ronan and Sergey both turned. The room had the dense, focused atmosphere of two people who had been moving fast through information and were not accustomed to interruption. The Prater meet is a trap, she said.
Neither of them spoke. Ewan just called me. She was contacted 3 weeks ago by Marsh, the same physician who administered the toxin. They asked her to cooperate. She refused, but they’ve been watching her since. She thinks the message about Prater came from Vae’s side, designed to get us moving in a convoy on a known route.
Ronan looked at her for one long, still moment. Then he looked at Sergey. Kill the convoy order. Sergey was already on the phone. Ewan is in her office, Violetta continued. She’s not compromised. She refused them, but she’s scared, and she’s been holding this for 3 weeks, and she needs to be in this room. Get her, Ronan said to the man standing near the door.
She didn’t know his name, didn’t know most of their names, but he moved immediately. Ronan walked to the desk. His jaw was set in a way she hadn’t seen before. Not the controlled stillness she’d come to associate with him, but something tighter. The expression of a man recalibrating under pressure and doing it fast.
