Chapter 13
Chapter 13
Elara, Kael, and Tobias arrive at Declan's new safe house where a medical contact treats Tobias's worsening injuries. While Tobias rests, Elara and Kael meet with Declan's tech specialist, Yuki, who extracts data from the chip embedded in Tobias's forged badge. The files reveal the identity of Nina's case facilitator—a former crime scene cleaner named Marcus Liddell—and partial financial records linking him to Desmond Crane. Soren Marsh's fragments also expose a Collectors meeting scheduled in three days at a private estate outside the city. As Kael and Elara review the data together, their physical proximity and shared purpose intensify the charged tension between them. The chapter ends with Elara recognizing Marcus Liddell's name from one of her own old case files—she had encountered him years ago without knowing his connection to Nina.
The safe house was a basement apartment beneath a laundromat on Greer Street—Declan's territory, or at least close enough to it that nobody asked questions. The entrance was through a steel door marked STAFF ONLY, down a flight of narrow concrete steps that smelled of detergent and mildew. Kael carried Tobias the entire way without breaking stride, and I walked ahead with my hand on the wall, feeling for light switches that weren't there.
At the bottom, motion-activated fluorescents snapped on one by one, revealing a space that had been converted from storage to something almost livable. Two cots. A camp stove. A first aid kit mounted on the wall that looked military-grade. No windows. One exit. Defensible, if not comfortable.
Kael set Tobias on the nearer cot with the kind of controlled gentleness that always caught me off guard—the same hands that could break a man's jaw lowering someone onto a thin mattress like he was made of wet paper. Tobias groaned but didn't wake fully. His face had gone grey under the bruising, and the wound on his side was seeping through the makeshift bandage I'd applied in the car.
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