Chapter 194: TWO STREETS AWAY

DAMON'S POV

Two streets.

He had been sitting two streets from this house since yesterday evening. Two streets away during the discovery of the device, two blocks away during the parking garage incident, two blocks away when Marcus was taken, two blocks away when Marcus came back, two blocks away during all twelve hours of phone calls placed from this kitchen.

And he’d just been there all that time waiting for the next thing. Waiting for the next instruction from a man who made plans on a three year basis and clearly did not understand the concept of 'done.'

"How long has he been at that address?" I asked.

"Roan doesn't have any details of it," Seraphina said, flicking through a text that followed up the last as I was still trying to take it in. "Short-term let, paying cash, four days registered. But Joel's phone has been pinging around this postcode for longer than that. Three weeks minimum."

Three weeks.

Ever since he'd been inside this house.

I stood from the table and went over to the window to look out at the garden, at Osei, working with unhurried ease between the rows, and thought of the geometry we were up against.

The man two houses down who was a paid informant for a father-in-law whose ex-wife had just filed for an emergency custody application for their eight-hour-old baby and hadn't yet learned we knew about him.

The advantage was real and it was temporary and it was the only one we had.

"We don't pick him up," I said.

Seraphina looked up. "What?"

"Not yet. If we pick him up, he panics, he calls your father before we get to the phone, and everything your father currently thinks is true gets corrected in the next thirty seconds." I turned from the window. "We watch him. We let him think he's still operational. And we use him."

"Use him how?" Lyanna asked, with the tone of someone who is following the logic but has reservations about where it's going.

"He's been feeding your father information about this house," I said. "Schedule, layout, conversations if he had a device in here before the one we found, which I'm now not ruling out." I looked at Seraphina. "Which means if we feed him wrong information, your father acts on wrong information."

Seraphina put both hands flat on the table, the gesture she makes when she's thinking something all the way through before she responds.

"We'd need to be careful," she said. "He's been close enough to know what normal looks like here. If we feed him something that doesn't fit the pattern he's been watching, he'll know it's staged."

"Not staged," I said. "Just selectively true. We don't lie to him. We let him overhear the truth about things that don't matter, and we make sure the things that do matter happen in rooms he can't reach."

"The wedding location," she said, seeing where I was going.

"He has a location. Probably the house. Most people assume a private wedding happens at the family home, and we haven't told anyone anything different." I sat back down. "What if the wedding doesn't happen at the house?"

The kitchen was quiet for a moment.

"Where?" Seraphina asked.

"Somewhere your father doesn't know about. Somewhere that isn't in any conversation Joel has had access to, because it hasn't been decided yet, because we're deciding it right now, in a kitchen that was swept two hours ago and is currently clean."

Lyanna leaned forward. "You're saying you want to move the wedding location but let him think it's still here."

"Yes."

"And then when he shows up at the house-"

"He turns up at an empty house with security team on standby," I said. "The actual wedding is going on somewhere he doesn't know about with people who are waiting for him to make a play for the man he's targeting."

"Catherine," Seraphina said.

"Catherine," I agreed.

Seraphina was quiet for a long moment and I watched her thinking, the specific way she thinks things through that I've learned to not interrupt because the thought she arrives at on her own is always better than the one she'd have arrived at with me talking over the process.

"It works," she said finally. "Except for one thing. He has to believe the wedding is still at the house, which means someone has to be at the house. Not security. Someone who should plausibly be there. Someone whose presence makes sense."

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

"Roan," I said.

"Not Roan," she said. "Roan is security, he doesn't read as family. It needs to be someone Joel has seen here before, someone whose presence on the wedding day makes sense." She paused. "It needs to be someone my father would recognise as significant enough to warrant attending."

I went through the list of people who'd been in this house recently, who Joel might have clocked during his three weeks in the vicinity, who would read as a plausible guest at a small private wedding and would be willing to spend their day in an empty house acting as bait for a man with three intelligence tracks and an emergency custody claim.

The answer arrived in approximately three seconds.

"I know who," Seraphina said, at the same moment I opened my mouth.

We looked at each other.

"Elena," we both said.

And then, from the doorway, the voice of someone who had apparently been standing there long enough to hear the relevant portion of the conversation:

"I'll do it," Elena said. "I was going to suggest it myself, actually. I've been looking for a reason to stay a little longer."