Chapter 185 CLXXXV

Chapter 185 CLXXXV
Levi's POV

They brought her in at nine in the evening. Blackwood mansion had been closed for months, the staff reduced to a skeleton crew, the rooms mostly dark. I had opened the east wing specifically for this, the section of the house that was furthest from any residential area, with thick walls and no windows facing the main grounds.

I stood in the corridor outside the room they put her in and listened to the sounds of the security team settling her, the chair being positioned, the restraints being applied.

Marcus stood beside me. He had come from the pack with two of his most experienced people. He looked at the closed door, then at me.

"Remember what Xavier said," he said.

"I remember," I said.

"Because you look like someone who has not slept in four days and who is running entirely on Lycan instinct right now and that is not the state you want to conduct this conversation in."

"I'm in control," I said.

"Levi-"

"I'm in control," I said again.

He looked at me for a moment then he stepped aside and I opened the door and went in. Vanessa was sitting in the chair they had placed in the center of the room; her wrists were restrained to the chair arms, not aggressively, but secured. 

She was still in the dark clothing she had been wearing when they found her at the side of that rural road. Her hair was down, slightly disheveled from the containment.

She looked at me when I came in and her expression did the thing it always did, the composure assembling itself automatically regardless of the circumstances. Even here, even now, the composure was her first response.

I pulled a chair and sat across from her. The room was quiet.

"You are going to tell me where Isabel is," I said. It was not a question, it was not an opening to negotiation. A statement of what was going to happen in this room.

"Levi," she said.

"Where is she?"

"I want you to understand something first," she said. "I want you to hear what I-"

"Vanessa," I said.

"I watched a six-year-old child stand alone on a pavement in the rain at four-thirty in the morning because you drove away with her mother in the back of your car.”

“I have been awake for four days. I have been searching for the woman I love while managing a sick child and an ongoing Covenant threat and my father arriving at my apartment in the middle of the night." 

I looked at her steadily. "I am not interested in what you want me to understand before you answer my question. Where is Isabel?"

Something moved through her face. "A facility northeast of the pack territory," she said. "Forty-three minutes from the pack border."

"We know about the facility," I said. 

"We have the location, what I need from you is what's inside it. How many people? Security structure. Access points. Isabel's specific location within the building."

She looked at me. "How do you know about the facility?"

"Irrelevant," I said. 

"What I don't have is the internal layout. The specific security measures. Who is running this operation and what they want from her."

Vanessa was quiet.

I looked at her for a long moment, reading her the way I had learned to read people over years of pack leadership and negotiation and dealing with individuals who had competing agendas.

She had the information she knew everything I was asking for. But something was keeping her from giving it immediately, and that something was not loyalty to the Assembly or strategic calculation.

It was fear not of me or something else.

"They stood you up," I said.

She blinked.

"You were sitting at a petrol station for two hours and then on a rural road," I said. 

"Waiting for a contact that didn't come. Someone was supposed to meet you after you delivered Isabel and they didn't."

She looked at the wall.

"Which means they used you," I said.

"You handed Isabel over and they took what they needed and they cut the contact point. Which is what organized operations do with assets they have finished using."

She said nothing.

"Vanessa," I said.

"Whatever you thought you were doing, whatever the arrangement was, they are done with you. Which means the only people in a position to matter to your situation right now are in this room."

She looked at me. The composure was still present but it had cracks in it now that had not been visible when I came in.

"You're not going to let me go regardless of what I tell you," she said.

"That depends entirely on what you tell me and how quickly you tell it," I said. "And on whether Isabel is brought back safely."

"And if she's not?"

"Then this conversation becomes a very different kind of conversation," I said quietly.

She looked at me for a long moment then she said nothing

I stood up, went to the door and opened it and looked at Marcus in the corridor. "Get Sena," I said.

Marcus looked at me. "You are sure."

"Get her," I said.

Sena was a pack member I had known for twelve years. She was compact, methodical, and possessed of a specific set of skills that she had developed over a long career in pack intelligence work. She was not cruel in the recreational sense. She was precise, which was considerably worse.

She arrived at the mansion twenty minutes later and came through the east wing corridor with the unhurried quality she always had, a bag over one shoulder, looking entirely unremarkable.