Page 235 of Fractured Loyalties
“You’ve been sitting on something,” I say. Not a question.
Her jaw flickers. “You’re not going to like it.”
“I rarely like anything,” I reply. “Show me.”
She exhales through her nose, a sharp, almost reluctant sound, and turns the tablet toward me. The feeds collapse to a log window. A chat thread. Masked header. Unfamiliar routing. She taps a single line.
Kinley:Rotation confirmed. He’s moving her. Same pattern as last time. You’ll have a window.
My teeth grind. “When?”
“An hour ago. He routed it through enough layers to bury it, but the signature is his. I checked twice.”
The image of Kinley flashes through my mind—the facility raid, his timing, the way he slipped in after the smoke cleared like he belonged there. Too convenient. Too practiced.
My conversation with Dom comes to mind, everything tying back to Kinley.
“He wasn’t dropped into our laps,” I say. “He placed himself.”
Mara stiffens beside the counter. She understands enough to go still. Her hand finds the edge of the stone top. She doesn’t speak.
My pulse hardens. “Source.”
“Courier relay. No subscriber info. Bounced through four shells, two local, two offshore.” Lydia angles the tablet closer to me. “The phrase ‘window’ has been in three messages over the last week. All tied to Kinley’s device. Same grammar tick. Same punctuation. Proof enough?” Lydia asks.
I make myself breathe once. “Yes.”
Mara’s eyes lift to mine. There’s no triumph there. Just an ache that says betrayal tastes the same no matter who serves it. “What does he get for it?” she asks, voice thin. “Money? Leverage? A second life?”
“None of that matters,” I say.
“It matters to me,” she says.
I hear it. I ignore it. I reach for the phone on the console and scroll to Kinley’s name. I hit call. He picks up on the second ring.
“Elias.”
I listen to the air around his word. Too bright. Traffic. He’s near the river or a highway.
“Dock Nine,” I say. “Twenty minutes.”
A pause. “Copy.”
I hang up. Lydia is already moving. She tosses a small black fob to me. “New key to the other SUV. I want mine where it is, in case we need a second exit. I’ll stay with her.”
Mara steps in front of me before I reach the door. She looks like she did when I came in from the kill. Fragile and burning at the same time. “If you’re wrong,” she says, “and you kill him, can you live with it?”
I cup her jaw. My thumb finds the smear of blood I left there and clears it with one stroke. “I am not wrong.”
Her eyes search mine. There’s a plea hiding behind the anger. Not for mercy. For certainty. I give her what I have.
“I’ll come back,” I say. “You’ll be here.”
She nods once. It looks like surrender. It feels like a promise.
I leave before I put my hands on her again and lose the thread.
The hall is cold. The elevator moves too slow. The garage lights smear against metal. Lydia’s fob unlocks the second SUV with a blink. I slide in and start the engine. The city opens and I cut through it, eating lanes, every light a signal to move faster.
