Page 221 of Mine Again
Relief slams through me so hard it almost hurts. My chest pulls tight, my grip locking on the edge of the console like I need something solid to anchor me.
Isa is alive.
Two days of static, of dead ends, of nothing but that red dot. And now… breath, pulse, proof.
Persistence pays. Like water grinding down stone, I kept at it, hour after hour, refusing to stop. And this is what it bought me, my Isa, right in front of me.
She lies on her side, covers to her waist, her hair loose over the pillow like a dark spill of silk. No restraints. No visible guards. Her chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm that punches the breath out of me. There’s tension in her shoulders even in sleep. I know that line better than my own reflection.
I don’t realize I’ve moved until my fingers touch the glass.
“Got you,” I whisper.
The silence holds. The feed doesn’t shutter. Nothing screams. No system flares to meet us.
I freeze the frame, isolate the route, and set a silent tag that willfollow any handoff. I take a breath, let it out slowly, and unfreeze. The picture stays.
Uberto stands at my shoulder. He doesn’t speak.
“Interior layouts confirmable,” I say, finding my voice. “Motion feeds will sync. I can get us live eyes on his patrol patterns in under a minute.”
“Do it,” Uberto says.
I work. The grid fills with other rooms in quick, patient flashes. A stairwell. A private corridor with a shuttered window. A kitchen humming at low power. A guardroom with three men half-asleep and one awake. A service elevator that opens onto a short hallway and a hidden door.
“Visuals secured,” I say.
We keep listening. Still no alarms. No countermeasure, no retaliatory worm, and no re-route to a decoy. Either Hale hasn’t noticed, or he thinks it doesn’t matter. He’s arrogant enough for the second.
Uberto finally speaks. “Trap?”
“If it were a trap,” I say, “he’d have fed us something louder. He’d have nudged us into a brittle place and closed it on our hands. He’d have tripped a bell to watch us run. This is quiet. This is real.”
“What tells you that?”
“The air.” I nod to the small audio bar at the bottom of the screen. “You can hear a low return. A room that size breathes. The light shift on the curtain is consistent with late night. The guard in the chair checked his watch, and the second hand matched the server time. That’s not a loop. That’s a man who assumes no one can see him.”
Uberto watches Isa for a long beat, then glances at me. There’s a ghost of a smile. “It’s not a trap, then.”
“No,” I say, eyes on the bed. “It was an opening.”
Uberto picks up the phone, calling Maximo.
“We’re in. We’ve got eyes on her.”
Chapter Eighty-Four
Isabella
The first thing I notice is the pillow beneath my cheek. I pry my eyes open, hoping beyond hope my view is different today, that it’s all been a bad dream.
But no.
I’m still in the same ostentatious room with marble floors, soft blush walls, and a chaise in the corner. A gilded mirror presides over an antique writing desk, and there’s a sitting area with settees overlooking the garden.
Sunlight pours through massive windows framed in sheer white curtains, but the locks are sealed tight. I know that because I tested every single one of them.
This place must’ve been modeled on Versailles or somewhere equally grand. Maybe it fits in Paris, but in Chicago, it seems pretentious.
