MasukSERAPHINA“You’re not getting Damien,” I said.Cael looked at me from the chair.“He’s not coming down here to sit across from you,” I said. “He’s not going to be your audience or your bargaining piece or whatever you think having him in this room accomplishes.” I leaned forward. “You’re going to rot in here. And every day you don’t talk, we use Clarissa’s papers to dismantle everything you’ve built piece by piece without your help. The only thing your cooperation buys you is speed. The outcome is the same either way.”He held my gaze.Then he looked at the wall again.That was the answer. The same answer he’d been giving since we put him in the chair.I stood up and looked at Callum behind me. “Lock him in the dark room. No light, no contact, no food until he decides he wants to talk.”Callum nodded.Two of the men came forward and uncoupled Cael from the chair and walked him down the corridor to the smaller room at the end, the one with no window and a door that was sealed completel
SERAPHINAThe monitor showed Clarissa walking down the corridor and I watched every frame of it, my hand on the van door, my body already prepared for the moment.Callum was beside me, watching the same screen, his breathing even and controlled in the way it got when he was seconds from something.Clarissa reached the door at the end. It opened before she touched it.Cael stepped through and the monitor showed us his face and even on a small screen in a surveillance van it hit me somewhere physical, the wrongness of seeing my father’s face on a man who had walked through a door in my parents’ house and done what he’d done.I pressed my hand flat against the van wall and breathed through it.On the monitor, they were talking. Clarissa’s voice came through the earpiece clearly.“I got the papers,” she said. “It wasn’t easy. They were watching the building.”“But you got out,” Cael said.“Barely.”He reached for the bag. She let him take it, let him open it, let him see the papers inside.
SERAPHINAHe opened his eyes once.Just once, just long enough for them to find my face, and he grabbed my wrist and said, “Find Callum. Get to Clarissa. Whatever she knows, get it out of her.”Then he was gone again, his hand going slack, his eyes closing.“Damien.” I pressed my hand to his face. “Damien, stay with me.”He didn’t respond.The hospital staff were already coming. Someone had called it in the moment the explosion happened and now there were three of them with a stretcher moving toward us across the car park and I stood up and stepped back because the only useful thing I could do was get out of their way.They worked fast, checking his airways, his pulse, his pupils, running through the assessment with the practiced speed of people who had done this before and knew exactly what they were looking for. One of them asked me something. I looked at her. “What happened?” she said again, slower.“There was something under his car,” I said. “An explosive. He was reaching for th
SERAPHINAThe nurse at the medical desk had started recognizing me.Not warmly. In the way that people recognized someone who had been to their desk too many times with the same question.“There’s no update yet,” she said, before I opened my mouth.“I just want to know if he’s—”“The moment there’s an update, the doctor will come out and speak to you directly.” She looked at me with practiced patience. “The best thing you can do for him is sit down and let us do our jobs.”I turned away from the desk.Alan was sitting in the chairs near the window where Damien had been half an hour ago. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor, and he looked nothing like the Alan Voss who had sat in Damien’s reception room with his expensive jacket and his performance composure.He looked like a father.I sat down beside him.He looked up. “You really care about him?” he said. Not accusatory. Genuinely asking.“Yes,” I said. “He’s a good person. He’s been a good frien
DAMIENNadia arrived at the hospital forty minutes after I called her.She came through the doors already reading the situation, her eyes finding Seraphina first and then me, and she crossed the lobby without stopping and put her arms around Seraphina without a word.“Stay with her,” I said quietly to Nadia. “Don’t let her go through those doors.”Nadia nodded over Seraphina’s shoulder.I went to find the doctor.His name was Farrell, a surgeon in his fifties with the unhurried manner of someone who had learned that rushing the delivery of information didn’t improve it.“The bullet entered the upper back,” he said. “It missed the spine. That’s the good news and it’s significant good news.” He paused in the way that preceded the rest of it. “The trajectory caught the edge of his right lung. We’ve addressed the immediate damage but his body has been through a serious trauma. He’s young and his healing should work in his favour.”“Should,” I repeated. “What does should mean?”“His physio
SERAPHINAShane told me to stay in the corridor.I didn’t stay in the corridor.Clarissa’s apartment door was unlocked, the handle turning without resistance when Shane tried it, which should have told us something. We went in and she was at the desk with papers spread across it, going through them with the focused efficiency of someone on a deadline.She looked up when we came through the door.Something moved across her face. Not a surprise exactly. More of an annoyance that her timeline had been compressed. She was wearing a leather pant and jacket that made her look completely different from how I’d remembered.“Back off,” she said.“Clarissa—” Shane started.I was already moving.She came up from the chair fast, faster than anyone who spent their days teaching history and psychology had any business moving, and she met me halfway across the room. Her forearm came up and deflected my first strike cleanly, the technique automatic, no thought required.She’d been trained and defin
DAMIENThe drive back to the packhouse was forty minutes of silence which I used to think.Gregory’s men were in the basement holding room. Two of them, separated, each with one of my most reliable people sitting across from them in the specific way that communicated the conversation was going to h
SERAPHINAI woke up reaching for certainty and finding none.The chair beside my bed was empty.I stared at it for a long moment, the exact spot where Gregory had been sitting in the dark watching me sleep, asking me what I remembered, and tried to decide whether it had happened or whether my exhau
DAMIEN(HOURS EARLIERThe van smelled like cold metal and the particular tension of men who had been sitting still for too long.Eight of us, packed into the back with the lights off, the engine cold, parked on the service road that ran parallel to the Harrow location I’d invented in a stairwell tw
SERAPHINAThe bath was the first normal thing that had happened in what felt like several consecutive disasters.Hot water, proper pressure, something that smelled like eucalyptus and something sweeter that I couldn’t identify. I sat in it longer than was strictly necessary because the warmth reac







