He is already here

"Show me the number," Bastien says.

I hand him the phone without argument because there is no version of this where I pretend the text isn't serious. I saw you go in. I'll be here when you come out. Eleven words and my whole body went cold reading them.

Bastien looks at the screen. His face does the thing it does, closes down, gets very still, the way water goes flat right before something heavy drops into it. He hands the phone to Nadia without a word and she reads it and her mouth presses into a thin line.

He's outside, I say.

Possibly. Bastien is already moving. He goes to the window and angles himself to look down at the street without being directly visible from below. He stands there for a few seconds, scanning. "There's a car on the south side of the building. Dark, no plates visible from here. It wasn't there an hour ago.

How do you know it wasn't there an hour ago?

Because I noticed it wasn't there when I came down to find you. He steps back from the window. I notice what's in front of this building. It's my building.

He says it simply, no arrogance in it, just fact, and that is somehow more unsettling than if he had been dramatic about it.

I look at my phone in Nadia's hand. Can they trace the number?

Already sending it to security. Bastien has his own phone out. He types fast, one handed, while he talks. The suppression dose you just received, how long before it takes full effect?

Nadia checks her watch. Another twenty minutes before the signal dampens completely. Right now she's still partially broadcasting.

So if he's outside with any kind of tracking equipment, he already has a confirmed location fix. Bastien finishes typing and pockets his phone. "We're not going out the front.

I stand up. "I'm not running through a back exit of my own building like I'm being smuggled out."

"It's not your building," he says, and then immediately something crosses his face, a recognition that the words landed wrong, and he stops. He looks at me. "That came out wrong."

No it didn't. It's accurate. I pick up my bag from the floor. "I've never had a building. I've never had anything that was mine. Which is exactly why I'm not letting someone dictate which door I use."

Lena. His voice drops, loses the operational edge. Just my name, plain and quiet. "I'm not dictating. I'm asking you not to walk into a confirmed threat because you're angry at me.

The room is very quiet.

He is not wrong. That is the problem. He is not wrong and he knows it and I know it and the fact that he said it that carefully, that honestly, without any of the authority he could have reached for, does something to the anger I have been holding like a handle all morning.

I sit back down.

"Fine," I say. "Twenty minutes."

Bastien nods and goes back to his phone. Nadia hands mine back to me and then moves quietly to her desk and begins preparing something else, a second vial, smaller than the first.

"What's that?" I ask.

"Insurance," she says. "A portable dose. If the seventy-two hours run out before we've resolved the situation, you can administer it yourself. It's a subcutaneous injection, simple enough."

She shows me how. I watch carefully, the angle of the needle, the depth, the slow press of the plunger. I have always been good at learning things that might keep me alive. My father's house was full of lessons like that.

Bastien comes back to the center of the room. "Security has the plate now. The car is registered to a shell company with ties to three different pack-neutral territories. Which means it was designed to be untraceable quickly." He looks at me. "Wolfe planned this. The call this morning wasn't a warning. It was the first move."

What's the second move? I ask.

Waiting to see if you walk out alone.

I look at him steadily. And if I do?

You won't. He says it without heat, without the Alpha command voice he uses in boardrooms. Just a quiet certainty that sits in the room like furniture. Like it has always been there.

I should argue with it. I know I should.

Instead I feel something loosen in my chest that I cannot afford to let loosen, a small treacherous warmth that has no business being there given the morning we have had.

I focus on the portable vial Nadia has placed in a small case on the desk and I put it in my bag and I breathe.

"Soren needs to know," I say.

"Already called him. He's on his way back from the east side."

"You called him before you knew I was staying."

Bastien meets my eyes. "Yes."

I don't know what to do with that so I leave it where it is.

Nadia's desk phone rings. She answers it, listens for ten seconds, and then looks up at us both.

The car outside just moved, she says. Security tracked it to the parking structure on Ninth.

He's not leaving, Bastien says. He's repositioning.

To where? I ask.

Nadia looks at her desk phone like it might answer for her. Then she looks at me with that expression she has been wearing all morning, the one that sits between apology and dread.

The structure on Ninth shares a subfloor with this building, she says. There's a maintenance corridor. It's been there since the original construction. Most of the current staff don't know about it.

The temperature in the room drops.

I look at Bastien.

He is already at the door.

"We need to move," he says. "Now."

And from somewhere below us, very distant, very deliberate, comes the sound of a door opening that should not be open.