Chapter 127 -
Rosa's sewing kit wasn't just a sewing kit.
Nia sat on the edge of the bed in Rosa's small room off the kitchen, watching the older woman lay out components on the folded cloth with the practiced hands of someone who had done this before. Small flat devices, no larger than a coat button. A panel the size of a matchbook. A length of thin wire.
"You've done this before," Nia said.
"Many times," Rosa said without looking up. "For Leo's people. Before they go into places where no one should know they're going in."
"Did it work?"
Rosa glanced up. "Mostly."
"That's reassuring," Nia said.
"Would you prefer I lied to you?"
Nia considered this. "No," she said.
Rosa reached for Nia's jacket, which she had draped over the chair. She turned it inside out and began working with quick, precise stitches along the inner lining. The first tracker went in at the hem. The second went into the collar. The third she pressed flat along the inner seam of the jacket's right sleeve.
"The panic button," Rosa said, holding up the matchbook panel. "This goes inside the waistband of your trousers. Here." She pointed. "If you press it, you hold it for three seconds. That's the signal. Everyone moves."
"And if they disable the trackers?" Nia asked.
"Then the panic button is mechanical," Rosa said. "No signal or frequency. Just a switch. Santiago can scan you all he likes. He won't find it unless he takes your clothes apart."
"You're frightening," Nia said.
"I'm practical," Rosa said. "There's a difference."
She handed the jacket back. Nia put it on.
"Rosa," Nia said quietly. "Do you think this will work?"
Rosa folded the cloth she had been working on and set it in the kit. She didn't answer immediately, and Nia had learned by now that Rosa's pauses were never empty.
"I think," Rosa said carefully, "that you're walking into that building because someone you love needs you. And I think that's the kind of reason that makes people do things they shouldn't be able to do." She looked at Nia directly. "That's not the same as a guarantee. But it's something."
Nia nodded.
When she came back to the meeting room, the team was already in motion. Leo stood at the table with Micheal and two of his best men. He had changed into darker clothes, and the bandage under his shirt was fresh.
"The plan," he said as she entered, "is unchanged from what we discussed. You go in first. You walk to the east-side door, not the main entrance. You make contact with Santiago. You buy time."
"How much time?" Nia asked.
"Enough for the extraction teams to get into position through the south tunnel and to get down to the third sublevel. Fifteen minutes at minimum."
"And if Santiago moves faster than that?"
"You slow him down," Leo said.
"How?"
"Talk to him," Leo said. "He's been waiting for this. He wants to perform. Let him."
Micheal looked up from the laptop. "Three extraction teams confirmed. Two in position at the south tunnel, one on the roof. Comms are live."
Nia looked at the map. The warehouse on Solari Street. The third sublevel where Isadora was. The distance from the east-side door to the stairwell. She had been studying this layout for two hours and it was starting to live behind her eyes the way a nightmare did.
"Let's go," she said.
The drive was twenty minutes. Leo sat beside her in the back of the lead vehicle. He didn't speak for the first ten minutes and neither did she. The city moved past the windows, mostly dark at this hour, a few lit windows high up in buildings, the occasional car passing in the other direction. Micheal was in the front passenger seat. He didn't turn around once. He had an earpiece in and he kept his eyes forward, monitoring the comms.
"When you get inside," Leo said eventually, "and you see her, don't react visibly."
"Isadora?" Nia said.
"Yes. If Santiago sees how much she means to you, he'll use it immediately. He'll put a gun to her head before you finish your first sentence."
"He already knows she means everything to me," Nia said. "He took her because of that."
"Knowing it and seeing it in your face are different things to a man like Santiago," Leo said. "He feeds on reaction. Don't give it to him until you're ready."
Nia looked out the window.
"What if she's hurt?" she said quietly.
"Then she's hurt," Leo said. "And we'll deal with it when she's out." He paused. "But she'll be hurt a lot worse if you lose control in that room."
"I know that," she said.
Leo reached over and took her hand the same way he had the night before. Steady. No performance in it.
"You're ready," he said.
"You don't know that," she said.
"You've been ready since the first night I put you in a car and you screamed at me for twenty minutes straight."
Despite herself, Nia almost smiled. "I did, didn't I."
"You were terrifying," he said.
"Good," she said.
The car stopped a block from the warehouse. Everyone moved without speaking now. Comms going in. Teams splitting off. The plan spreading out into the dark city like water filling the shape of a container.
Leo walked with her to the edge of the block. She stopped and turned to him.
He looked at her face for a moment. The lines around his eyes. The bruise along his jaw. The weight of everything he hadn't put into words.
"Go," he said simply.
She turned and walked toward the warehouse alone. She could feel Leo watching her from behind. She didn't look back. Looking back would have made it harder.
The east-side door was exactly where Jordan said it would be. Battered steel frame, no lock on the outside. She pushed it open.
The interior swallowed the sound of the city immediately, the smell of old grain and cold concrete filling the air.
She stood still and let her eyes adjust. The space was large. She could feel the size of it in the way sound moved. Old machinery somewhere to the left. The grain smell was heavy and stale. She counted her own breaths.
Then a light came on above her suddenly. At the far end of the space, Santiago stepped forward out of the dark with both hands in his pockets and a small smile she could see from twenty feet away.
"You actually came," he said. He sounded genuinely pleased. "I was starting to think Leonardo would make you stay home."
Nia looked past him, into the shadows behind him.
Isadora was there sitting on a chair, wrists bound to the armrests, a bruise along her left jaw, pale from hours in the dark, but she was awake. Her eyes found Nia immediately, and the relief that moved across her face was so raw it was almost unbearable to see.
Nia looked back at Santiago.
"Here I am," she said.