LOGINCeline's POVThe footage played on a loop.The first time I watched it, my hand pressed flat against the table with fingers spread wide as though the wood under my palm was the only thing keeping me from collapsing. Then I watched it again. And again. Every time the timestamp in the corner ticked forward, every time Victoria’s figure moved down that corridor we hadn’t gone down before, every time she crouched at the base of that wall with something in her hands — something cold and specific and deliberate — I could feel the rage inside me climbing another rung.Three devices. Not one. Three.Hope stirred against my chest and made a soft sound in her sleep, and I shifted her weight instinctively without looking away from the screen. My jaw was clenched enough to hurt.Victoria was standing across the room, and I could sense her watching me as I watched the footage. She hadn’t moved since the phones had started blaring. At the time, she had just sat there with her hands folded on the ta
Caelum's POVI looked at the card for a moment and did not speak.The words stared back at me in crisp black type, and my mind shuffled through the images lodged there over the past seventy two hours, setting pieces against one another like a game of Scrabble or Chess, trying to find the image that was already present whether I wanted to see it –or not.Victoria. Who had insisted on going to Switzerland. Who had made the biometric cast, who’d been first into the vault and onto the terminal. Who had informed us that the self-destruct was linked to the files not the scan, information she’d only known after the alarm had been raised. Who had found the air vent. And who was waiting in a penthouse suite sipping wine when we landed hours later in Seattle.Who had known how to find my wife.I called Kent.He answered on the first ring. "Boss.""Find Victoria," I said. "Where is she?"A silence that spoke before he did. "We lost her when we left the fortress. She said she had something to dea
Celine's POVThe forests were not merciful.I began to run then, because I smelled Elena who was up there in front of me somewhere and the cars were behind us now, humming down low and mechanical, inscribing that stretch of darkness like something patient and inevitable. Hope was strapped to my chest, her weight so familiar at this point, the heat of her tiny body warm against me. My lungs burned. It was as if someone had taken out the muscles in my legs and replaced them with wet concrete.Elena halted at the brink of a break in the level, where a dry ravine yawned further into shadow, and seized my arm.“We need to get something together on this situation,” she said.No." Mine was out before I realised that hers wasn't finished yet."Dogs." She cocked her head toward the sound and then I heard it. A soft, far-off baying that chilled me to the bone. "And drones. They're covering too much ground. Two targets is better than one.”"Elena—""Your daughter needs you alive." Her hand gripp
Caelum's POVThe fortress appeared to be something that should no longer have existed in the current century.It jutted out from the mountainside high above us: hewn into rock as if its creator had thought minimalism beneath them. The real, Gothic kind of thing, you know—sharp edges and studied menace; a form that spoke of power not in elegance but in blunt, immovable mass. The sort of place Vivienne would have adored.The four of us had hiked in the dark, walking across ground that was all ice and scree and the special hell of altitude. Vehicles would have been detected. We left those three kilometers back which means — coldly, silently — four kilometers of this.Victoria moved ahead of us. She was 71, and she hadn’t complained once.She took us to a service entrance that was carved into the rock face, half buried by decades of ice and alpine scrub. She bent and touched the frame with her fingertips, face unreadable.“It should be here, I mean.”"Should," Kent repeated flatly."It is
Celine's POVThe black SUV turned the curve in the road, and that was it; Caelum was gone.I watched it drive down the street out of the window of the safe house, holding my hand flat on the cold glass, Hope snuggled up against my chest in her wrap carrier. She was asleep, her mouth open slightly and looking with an innocence unknown to her of the terror that walked in behind this man who had become her father — unaware that he had just stepped into something that would at least leave him limping. I envied her that peace. I hadn’t experienced anything even resembling peace in days.“You need to move back from the window.The voice belonged to Elena. She said it the way she said everything, without warmth, without apology, as if words were nothing more than tools she wielded to achieve an end. She was in her mid-forties, lean-jawed, with silver running through her dark hair and eyes that never stopped for long upon anything. She had been identified by Victoria as ex-Mossad. And it seem
CAELUM'S POVWithout waiting, without a word exchanged we just ran. Victoria was behind us, pretty fast and nimble for being over fifty. I am carrying Hope in this car seat carrier, pressing it into my chest and holding on to keep it steady, with Celine close behind me, reaching back over my shoulder to press her hand against my back so no one gets lost or separated in the madness.Kent and Ryker provided a direct distraction, as they took on the shooters who turned away from our escape route to face them. All over the library building, there were gunshots and people screaming in terror. I detested putting innocents in the line of fire, but we really had no choice.We poured out of a back door Kent had identified while scouting the place, and into an alleyway where Amaya was parked behind the wheel of a stolen SUV with its engine running.Frantic, we dove in last second, barely able to get the doors shut before Amaya hit the gas. We burned rubber, screeching against the highway paveme
CAELUM'S POVThe first sensation I experienced, when awareness hauled me back into the land of the living was pain. Intense, searing pain that swept through my ribs as fire. My skull pounded with a low ache that somehow even seemed to make thinking more of an effort. I attempted to shift and insta
Caelum's POV*Six Hours Earlier*A blast threw me back into darkness.Debris rained down. The tunnel was caveing in - just as I'd wanted it to. But I wasn’t where Celine thought I was.There was a second exit. One of the maintenance shafts I had found when I first laid claim to this place. Only I k
Celine's POVThe morgue was cold. Sterile. And deeply disturbing.I waited in the hall while Kent stepped inside with forms which I really didn’t need to hear about. False documents. Bribes. At least it would be two bodies that had belonged to people who died with no next of kin.Two men whose deat
Caelum's POVVivienne was attempting to disconnect me. Change public opinion, make Celine seem like an innocent victim. If I died in the “rescue” of her from my wicked clutches, no one would think twice about it. She'd be a hero. I'd be a monster.It was brilliant strategy. Exactly the type of mane







