Chapter 200: WHAT HASN'T BEEN PROTECTED

SERAPHINA'S POV

Damon came to bed late; that wasn’t unusual, but he came to bed with the stillness of a man who had been holding onto something for a number of hours without solution. A stillness distinct from the purposeful stillness of a man who has a destination for his quiet.

I was awake. I’d been awake since Marcus’s two AM feed, a state of preternatural alertness for the last several months. It was a sleep-disrupting behavior that I no longer felt the urge to conquer, more of a hyper-vigilant state native to a new mother.

"Tell me," I said, when he got into bed.

He told me about the call with Catherine. The question he'd asked her. Her answer.

What you haven't protected.

I lay there in the dark thinking about that for a moment.

"He knows about Elena as the decoy," I said. "Or he suspects it."

"Maybe."

"He knows the house might be empty."

"Possibly."

"But he doesn't know the new location," I said. "That's still only in your head."

"Yes," Damon said. "And I want it to stay there until we have no choice but to tell people. Every person who knows it is a potential channel back to him, even unintentionally, even through something as small as a phone call in a room that turns out not to be as private as expected."

"So the location is protected," I said.

"Yes."

"Catherine is positioned," I said. "Security is planned. The decoy plan exists even if he suspects it. Crane is running the counter-custody filing." I worked through it the way I work through things, one piece at a time, looking for the gap. "What's left unprotected."

"That's what I've been sitting with," he said.

We lie in the darkness a while, the bedside baby monitor still displaying the readings in Marcus's room in tiny green digits, while Damon's steady breathing beside me was too controlled, showing he hadn't sleptt yet.

"The ceremony itself," I said. "Not the location. The ceremony. The moment."

He was quiet.

"He's not going to try to breach a location he doesn't know," I said, the shape of it arriving as I said it. "He can't plan an entry if he doesn't have the address. But he doesn't need the address if he has someone on the inside. Someone who'll be there regardless of where there is." I felt the cold of it settling. "Someone who'll receive an invitation."

"The guest list is seven people," Damon said.

"Six people and their guests' knowledge," I said. "And whoever does our catering. And whoever supplies the flowers if we have any. And the officiant." I looked at the ceiling. "Every single one of those is a potential channel to someone who knows someone who talks to the wrong person."

"We've been careful about all of those," Damon said.

"As careful as Diane was with the vetting file," I said, not cruelly, just honestly.

He didn't answer. Which was its own answer.

I sat up.

"We need to tell people the wrong location," I said. "Not the decoy house. A third location. We tell each guest something slightly different about where to go. Not a lie exactly, just a version of the truth that differs by enough that if my father gets the information we can trace which guest it came through."

Damon was quiet for a long moment.

"That requires deceiving people who trust us," he said.

"It requires being careful with people we love," I said. "There's a version of those two things that overlaps and a version that doesn't. I'd rather be in the version where we tell Lyanna one address and Diane another and Catherine a third and see what our father does with the information, than be in the version where we trust everyone completely and he walks in from a direction we forgot to cover."

"Catherine," he said. "She's positioned near Marcus. We can't give her a false location."

"No," I said. "Catherine gets the truth. Catherine has earned the truth in a way nobody else in this situation has, and her position on the day depends on her actually being there."

"Who else gets the truth."

I thought about it.

"You and me," I said. "Catherine. Diane. She needs to be there early enough that a false address wouldn't work. And Roan, because the security plan falls apart if he's in the wrong place." I paused. "Everyone else gets a version. Close enough that they can find us once they're in the right general area. Different enough that if the information leaks we know from which direction."

Damon was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to push back.

Then, "There's one more thing we haven't protected."

"What?" I said.

"The moment between now and the wedding where Joel Adeyemi, who is still two streets away and still operational, figures out that we know who he is," he said. "Because the moment he figures that out, everything your father has been quietly adapting accelerates. He stops being careful. He stops being patient. And a man who has been patient for three years becoming impatient in the final two weeks is the version of this I'm most afraid of."

I lay back down staring at the ceiling in the dark.

Marcus's breathing on the monitor.

"Then we need to find a way to make Joel feel safe for two more weeks," I said. "Which means we need to give him something real to report. Something that makes my father think the plan is working, that we don't know about the adaptation, that everything is proceeding the way he expects."

"What would that be?" Damon said.

"I don't know yet," I said. "But I think I know who does."

He turned his head toward me in the dark.

"Lena," I said. "She got close enough to your world to do damage once. She knows how information moves through it and what looks credible and what doesn't. If anyone can design something that feels real to your father's network, it's someone who already knows what real looks like from the inside."

Damon was quiet for a moment.

"That's either a very good idea or a very bad one," he said.

"Yes," I said. "But the alternative is doing nothing with the two weeks we have, and I've spent enough of this year doing nothing and waiting for things to happen to me."

He reached across the dark and found my hand.

Held it.

"I'll call her in the morning," he said.

Outside the window the night was performing its usual act-. The deliberate, slow darkness of the hours that own nothing, somewhere in a flat a few doors down Joel Adeyemi was asleep and it wasn’t being paid for by him, without his yet realising the woman he had had in his sights for three weeks had chosen to turn her lens around.