Chapter 75 Sophia's Last Card

Chapter 75 Sophia's Last Card
Nico found the message at six in the morning.

He brought it to Dante without reading it himself, which was Nico's way of saying he already knew what it contained and had decided that some things needed to be delivered intact rather than summarized. He placed it on the desk and stepped back and stood by the window and looked at the garden.

Dante read it.

His face did nothing for a long moment. Then he set the page down with the careful precision of a man placing something he intended to deal with completely and looked at Nico.

"How long ago," he said.

"The timestamp puts it at midnight," Nico said. "She used a relay. Took us until now to trace it back."

"But you traced it."

"Yes," Nico said.

"And the information she passed."

"The Thursday timeline," Nico said. "The compound approach route. The coalition contact names."

The study was very quiet.

I was in the doorway because I had been passing on my way to the library and had seen Nico's face when he came through the front door and followed him without being asked. Neither of them had told me to leave so I stayed and listened and understood from the quality of the silence that something significant had just changed shape.

"She gave him the Thursday timeline," I said.

Both of them looked at me.

"Viktor now knows when we're moving," I said. "He knows the approach to the compound and he has the coalition names."

"Yes," Dante said.

"So Thursday is compromised," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"Which means we move differently," I said. "Different day. Different approach. Smaller circle of people who know the real plan."

Dante looked at me for a long moment.

Then he looked at Nico. "Get me Marco and the three senior leads. Nobody else. Nothing written down."

Nico left immediately.

Dante stood up from the desk and walked to the window and stood with his back to me and I waited because I had learned that this particular stillness was not emptiness but the opposite of it, a man running very fast inside a very composed exterior.

"She planned this," I said. "She didn't do it in a panic. She's been sitting on this access point for weeks waiting for the moment it would do the most damage."

"Yes," he said to the window.

"She timed it for the night before we were going to move," I said. "She knew about Thursday specifically which means she's had someone feeding her information since before we assembled the coalition."

He turned from the window.

His face was doing something I had not seen before. Not the cold fury of the betrayal chapter. Not the quiet devastation of the Giulia conversation. Something more contained and more final than either of those, the expression of a man who had arrived at the last place he intended to arrive with someone and was entirely certain of what happened next.

"She wanted to watch it fall apart," I said. "From a distance. She wanted Viktor to win and she wanted to know she helped him do it."

"Yes," Dante said.

"She underestimated the timeline," I said. "She thought Thursday was fixed. She didn't know we had already built in contingencies."

He looked at me. "We hadn't," he said.

"We do now," I said.

He was very still.

"We rebuild the plan tonight," I said. "New timeline. New approach route to the compound. The coalition contacts she burned we replace with the secondary names from the reserve list that nobody outside this room knows exists." I held his gaze. "Viktor thinks he has Thursday. We give him something else entirely."

Dante looked at me across the study.

"You've been thinking about contingencies," he said. Not a question.

"Since the moment you told me the plan," I said. "You taught me that."

Something moved through his expression.

"The secondary contact list," he said. "Three people. Nico knows them."

"Then start there," I said.

He crossed to the desk and picked up his phone and stopped and looked at me.

"Sophia," he said. "What do you want me to do about Sophia."

I looked at him steadily. "What does she actually want," I said. "Not what she's been doing. What does she actually want at the center of all of it."

He was quiet.

"She wants to matter," I said. "She wants to have changed something. To have been significant to the outcome." I paused. "Don't give her that. Handle Viktor. Win this completely. And let her spend the rest of her life knowing she gave Viktor information that made no difference at all."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"That," he said quietly, "is considerably more devastating than anything I would have done."

"I know," I said.

He almost smiled. Just barely. The shadow of it at the corner of his mouth.

Then he made the call.

I left the study and went to the library and sat in the armchair and held my book and stared at the freesia painting and thought about Sophia at midnight sending a message she believed would burn everything down.

She had handed us the thing we needed most.

Proof that Viktor believed Thursday was real.

Now we gave him a Thursday that was nothing but a door opening onto something he had never seen coming.

The plan was already changing shape in the next room.

By morning it would be something entirely different from what Sophia had tried to destroy.

By morning it would be better.