Chapter Six

Damian pulls me sideways so hard my shoulder scrapes the shipping container, and then we're running, low and fast, along the fence line toward the back of the lot where the chain-link gives way to a gap somebody cut years ago and never bothered to fix.

"Through here." He goes first, holding the wire up so it doesn't catch my dress — jeans, I remind myself, not the wedding dress, that was a different night, a night that hasn't happened yet — and I duck through after him, gravel biting my palms when I catch myself on the other side.

Behind us, the dog starts barking in earnest, close, closing.

"Car," Damian says, already moving, and I follow him half a block down a side street I didn't even notice was there until we're both in the front seat of a black sedan I never saw him park, and he's pulling out onto Route 9 with his headlights off until we clear the block.

Neither of us says anything for almost a mile.

"You want to tell me," he says finally, headlights back on now, voice steadier than mine would be if I tried to use it, "why a woman engaged to the heir of Ashford Biotech is being chased off a warehouse lot at four in the morning by somebody with a dog and a very new padlock."

"You first. You said you'd tell me why you want the west parcels."

"I did say that." He glances over at me, just once, and something in his face has changed since the title office — less curiosity now, more weight. "Fine. I had a source inside Ashford Biotech feed me early data on a lab incident eight months ago. Contamination event, low-level, the kind of thing that gets buried in an internal memo and forgotten. Except the numbers on containment didn't add up, and when I pulled at it, I found projections for exactly the kind of collapse scenario you'd expect from a virus nobody managed to actually contain. I've been quietly preparing since."

"A source," I say carefully. "Who."

"I'm not telling you that. Not yet. Not until I know I can trust you with it." He says it without apology, flat, the same way he hung up on me yesterday. "Your turn."

I sit there with my hands in my lap, watching the empty road unspool in the headlights, and I think about how many ways there are to lie to this man, and how none of them feel like they'll survive very long against someone who reads society pages for information and keeps a source inside a biotech company for eight months without anyone finding out.

"I dreamed it," I say.

"You dreamed it."

"I know how that sounds."

"Try me anyway."

So I tell him. Not everything — I keep Celeste's phone call to myself, keep Tobias's name out of it, keep the exact shape of the gate and the fire and Celeste's mouth saying not yet — but I tell him about a wedding night that goes wrong, about a city that falls apart faster than anyone expects, about waking up three months earlier with dates in my head I have no way of explaining except that I already lived through them once.

He doesn't laugh. He doesn't pull the car over and ask if I need a doctor, which is what my father would do, what Julian would do, what anyone sane would do. He just drives, quiet, jaw tight, like a man recalculating an equation for the second time in twelve hours.

"You said dates," he says finally. "Plural."

"I know the week it starts. I don't know the exact day. I know the districts that go first, and I know Route 9 stays open longer than anywhere else east of the river, which is the only reason either of us is sitting in this car instead of one of us owning all four parcels outright."

"And the wedding."

"Doesn't happen the way it was supposed to." I look out the window instead of at him. "My fiancé marries someone else. On what was supposed to be my day. I find out standing outside a locked gate while the outbreak's already starting, and I don't make it through the night."

The car goes very quiet.

"Who," Damian says, low, and there's something in his voice now that wasn't there a minute ago, something sharper than curiosity.

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters if it's someone I know."

"It's not your business."

"Ivy." He says my name the second time tonight, and it lands different this time, less like an accident and more like he's decided he's allowed to use it now. "If someone in this city is capable of locking you outside a gate and watching you die, I would like to know that person's name before I end up standing next to them at a board meeting."

I turn and look at him, really look, in the gray predawn light coming through the windshield, and something about the flat certainty in his voice — not sympathy, not the careful concern people perform when they think you might be fragile, just cold, practical wariness, the same wariness I've been running on for two days — makes something in my chest come loose that's been wound tight since I woke up gasping in my old bedroom.

"Julian Ashford," I say. "And my stepsister."

Whatever I expect from him, it isn't the silence that follows, long enough that I start to wonder if I've made a mistake trusting him with a name that connects directly to the company he's apparently been quietly investigating for eight months.

"Ashford," he says finally, very carefully, like he's testing the weight of the word. "Julian Ashford marries your stepsister, and you die outside the gate, on the same night the outbreak reaches your family's estate."

"Yes."

"And the source I've been protecting for eight months," he says, slower now, something moving behind his eyes that looks less like calculation and more like dread, "works two floors below Julian Ashford's office."

The road blurs a little at the edges. "What are you saying."

"I'm saying I think we might be looking at the same conspiracy from two different doors, Ivy, and I think one of us just walked through the wrong one first." He pulls the car over, hard, onto the shoulder of an empty road with the sun just starting to come up gray behind the warehouses, and turns to face me fully for the first time since we got in the car. "Tell me your stepsister's name."

"Celeste."

Something crosses his face that I can't read at all, gone before I can name it, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped into something careful and quiet that scares me more than the dog, more than the flashlight, more than anything that's happened to me since I opened my eyes three months in the past.

"My source," he says, "is a man named Tobias. And two nights ago, he told me someone inside the Sterling family already knows exactly what he's been feeding me."