Chapter 24

"We go tonight," Weston said, already pulling his coat back on, already halfway to a decision Claire could see forming with the particular, dangerous speed of a man who'd stopped being able to separate love from recklessness. "Every hour we wait is an hour he's sitting in that chair wondering if his own son is coming for him."

"We are not driving to an address a man who spent nine years lying to me handed us on a napkin," Claire said, planting herself between Weston and the door. "Weston, listen to me. If this is real, we need more than two people and a street address. If it's a trap, we need to know that before we drive straight into it."

"And if we wait, and it's real, and something happens to him while we're being careful—"

"Then we live with that," Claire said, voice breaking despite how hard she fought to keep it steady, "the same way I've had to live with every single thing I didn't know how to prevent for the last nine years. But we are not burying him because you couldn't stand to wait four more hours for a plan that might actually work."

The silence that followed had teeth in it. Weston stared at her, breathing hard, every instinct in him clearly screaming to override her — and then, slowly, visibly, she watched him choose not to.

"Four hours," he said finally, rough. "Not a minute more."

---

Elena arrived within twenty, despite Edmund's warning, despite the particular danger of bringing anyone else into a circle that already felt dangerously small. Weston made the call himself, jaw tight, torn between Edmund's paranoia and the plain fact that none of them had the resources to do this alone.

"I trust Elena with my life," he told Claire quietly, while they waited. "I have for eleven years. If Edmund's right and someone's listening to everything, I'd rather risk that than go in blind."

Elena, for her part, didn't hesitate once she understood the shape of what they were asking. She had a private tactical consultant on the phone within the hour — a man named Harold Pierce, ex-military, the kind of quiet, serious professional whose entire manner made the danger feel, for the first time all day, like something that could actually be survived.

"Before anyone moves on this address," Harold said, spreading a printed satellite map across the table, "I want eyes on the property. Discreet. No vehicles near the perimeter, no heat signatures we can't account for. If this is a legitimate hold, we need to know exactly how many people are inside, how it's secured, and whether there's a realistic extraction route before anyone so much as drives up that road."

"How long," Weston asked.

"If I push my people, six hours. Maybe five."

Weston's jaw tightened, but he nodded, and Claire watched him fold the impatience down into something harder and more useful — the particular discipline of a man learning, in real time, that love sometimes meant surviving the waiting instead of outrunning it.

---

It was nearly midnight when Claire's phone buzzed, the familiar unknown number lighting the screen with a message that made the room go cold all over again.

**Unknown:** *Don't move on the Catskills address. It's a decoy — Edmund gave it to you because he was told to, and he doesn't know it's empty. They've already moved him again. I'm trying to find out where. Give me until morning.*

Claire read it twice before showing Weston, watching the fury and exhaustion war across his face in equal measure.

"How do we know this isn't the lie?" he said. "How do we know Edmund isn't the one telling the truth, and this is the trap?"

"We don't," Claire admitted. "That's the entire problem, Weston. Everyone in this story has lied to us at least once. I don't know how to tell anymore which lie is the dangerous one."

Harold cleared his throat carefully from across the table. "For what it's worth — my people already have partial surveillance up on that Catskills property. If your source is right, we'll know within the hour. Empty buildings don't fake heat signatures or water usage patterns. If there's nobody there, we'll see it."

They waited in a silence thick enough to choke on, the clock on the wall ticking toward one a.m., Weston's hand finding Claire's beneath the table and gripping it like it was the only thing keeping either of them upright.

Harold's phone rang at 1:14.

He listened for a long moment, expression unreadable, and when he finally lowered the phone, Claire felt her stomach drop before he said a single word.

"Your source was right," he said quietly. "Property's empty. Has been for at least a week, based on the dust patterns my team found when they got close enough to check the windows. Whoever's holding your father, Mr. Cole — they were never there to begin with."

Weston's hand tightened around Claire's until it almost hurt, and when he spoke, his voice had gone somewhere flat and terrifyingly calm.

"Then Edmund either lied to us on purpose," he said, "or he's being lied to by whoever he answers to — which means either way, we just lost six hours we didn't have, and somewhere out there, my father is sitting in a room neither of us can find, with people who just proved they're always exactly one step ahead of whatever we try next."