Semua Bab ALPHA DOM AND HIS HUMAN SURROGATE: Bab 21 - Bab 30

He's waiting at the front door when Isobel pulls through the gate.Not inside, not in the study, not being efficient somewhere with his phone and his impossible schedule. At the front door, hands in his pockets, watching the car come up the drive with an expression that goes carefully neutral the moment he thinks I can see him clearly.I see him clearly.That's the thing I'm sitting with the whole drive back. The thing Rosamund named and that I've been turning over since I left her sitting room. Every time I've looked at Dominic Sinclair and felt something I couldn't categorize, every time his presence did something to the air that I filed under stress response or proximity or the general chaos of the situation, it wasn't imagination.It was information.My blood reading his and finding something it recognized.I get out of the car. He looks at me the way he always does when I've been somewhere without him. That total, assessing look that starts at my face and works outward, checking

I don't move immediately.That's the thing about working in an ER. You learn that the first ten seconds after bad information arrives are not for action. They're for assessment. You take the information, you hold it, you look at it from every angle before you decide what it means and what comes next.Dark hair. Medium height. Private records room. Eleven forty-seven.Nora Reyes fits that description.So do approximately forty thousand other women in Chicago."Where is she now?" I ask."Study," Dominic says. "Isobel is with her.""Does Isobel know about the description?""That's who called me."I get up from the window seat. "Don't do anything yet."He looks at me. "Ella...""Don't do anything yet," I say again. "I want to talk to her.""She could be dangerous.""She could be framed," I say. "Those are two very different situations and they require two very different responses, and the only way to know which one this is, is to talk to her." I hold his gaze. "Let me talk to her."A paus

I don't put it on speaker immediately.I look at Dominic first. One look. He reads it and moves to stand beside me close enough to hear without crowding and I press the speaker button and set the phone on the desk between us."Mr. Pryce," I say. "This is a surprise.""I imagine it is." His voice fills the room easily. The kind of voice that was built for large spaces and formal occasions. "I want to begin by saying that I understand your situation is frightening and I have no wish to add to that.""That's a interesting opening from a man whose brother forged authorization documents at a fertility clinic," I say.A pause. Shorter than I expect. "My brother acted without my knowledge or my sanction. I want to be very clear about that.""Clear and true are different things, Mr. Pryce.""Yes," he says. "They are. Which is why I'm calling you rather than managing this through intermediaries." Another pause. "I know about the documents Maddox prepared. I know you have them. I'm not calling

She arrives at eleven with two bags of groceries and a rolling suitcase and the energy of a woman who has decided that a situation requires her physical presence and has rearranged her entire week accordingly.Dominic opens the door.Petra looks at him for exactly three seconds. Then she looks at me over his shoulder. Then back at him. The full inventory of Petra Navarro, conducted at eleven at night on an estate driveway, is a thing to witness."Dominic Sinclair," she says."Ms. Navarro," he says."Petra," she says. "You're going to be calling me Petra eventually so we might as well start now." She hands him one of the grocery bags with the confidence of someone who has decided he's trustworthy enough to carry things. "Where's the kitchen?"He takes the bag without a word and leads her to the kitchen and I follow behind them watching the particular thing that happens when Petra walks into a new space. She takes it in completely, the size of it, the warmth, the detail that someone act

I show Dominic the phone.He takes it and looks at the photograph for a long time. The warehouse exterior, dark, taken from across the street at an angle that catches the building number clearly. Timestamped forty minutes ago.Someone knew the location before we did.Or someone followed Rosamund's people when they went to prepare it.Either answer is bad. They point to different problems but they land in the same place. Nowhere is clean. Nowhere is ahead of whatever this is."We cancel," Dominic says."If we cancel we lose the window," I say. "Gareth is in a hospital. Orlan knows we have the documents. Hadrian knows we're moving toward a Conclave confrontation." I look at him. "Every day we don't move is a day they get further ahead of us.""Every day you're in an exposed location is a day something can happen to you and the baby.""Something is already happening," I say. "Canceling doesn't stop it. It just means we're reacting instead of moving."He looks at me.I look back."New loc