Chapter 108 I Dare Them

Chapter 108 I Dare Them
I walk straight into the war room without knocking, and every head in the room turns toward the door at once – my father, Marcus, and three men I don’t recognize, all of them mid conversation over a table covered in maps and printouts I don’t have time to fully take in before Marcus is already crossing toward me.
“This isn’t a place for you,” he tells me lowly, not unkind, but final in the way he clearly intends it to be.
I don’t move.
“I want in.”
My father, standing at the head of the table, doesn’t even look up from whatever he’s reading as he answers, “No.”
I grit my teeth and stand my ground.
“I’m tired of being protected while everyone else in this house decides what happens to my own life.” Dad still doesn’t look up. “I’ve spent all my life being handled. Managed. Kept safe by people who won’t tell me the whole truth about anything. I am done with that.”
“This isn’t a conversation about handling you,” Marcus speaks up. “This is about the fact that revenge isn’t something you get to participate in because you’re grieving, Lucia.”
“Zeke spent five months training me,” I insist, my voice sharpening now, “precisely because he wanted me capable of protecting myself. He didn’t teach me hip throws and counter grips so I could sit upstairs crying into his old jacket while the rest of you decide how to avenge him without me in the room.”
Nobody answers that right away, so I decide to press.
“I was the one who grew up with him,” I continue, and I feel something in my chest crack open as I say it. “I was the one who watched him die. If anyone in this room has the right to be part of avenging him, it’s me.”
The room goes quiet.
My father finally looks up from the table, studying me for a long moment, something calculating moving behind his eyes. The silence stretches as father and daughter stare each other down, none willing to blink first. After a while he speaks.
“What do you think Ghost wants?”
I blink, thrown for a second by the sudden shift, and then I understand he’s actually testing me, and I force myself to think it through properly instead of answering on instinct.
“He doesn’t just want us dead,” I say slowly, working through it out loud. “If he wanted that, he’d have done it already, without all the surveillance, the videos, etcetera. Everything he did including killing–” I pause for a moment as my throat tightens, then I clear it and continue, “including killing Zeke is designed to isolate us first. Frighten us. Make us react instead of think. He wants us scrambling. Which means the opposite of scrambling is probably the last thing he’s prepared for.”
My father’s expression doesn’t change, but something behind it sharpens with interest.
“My suggestion is let him believe we’re still exactly where he left us,” I continue. “Feed him false information. Make him think the family’s rattled and unguarded, make him move first instead of us chasing him around the city for another two weeks. If he thinks we’re weak, he’ll get careless.”
Marcus glances at my father.
My father looks at me for a long, hard moment, and then he nods to one of his men.
“Do it.”
Twenty minutes later, two of his men bring a man in from what they call a flagged shell property, wrists zip tied behind his back, and set him down hard in the chair at the center of the room.
The questioning that follows isn’t cruel, exactly. That’s the word I keep reaching for and it never quite fits what I’m actually watching. It’s precise. Cold in a way that turns my stomach more than shouting would have, my father letting silence do most of the work, long stretches where nobody says anything at all and the man in the chair grows visibly more unraveled with every second of it, until Marcus finally steps forward and applies exactly enough pressure, and not an ounce more, to make the silence break.
I have to look away once, when a particularly brutal hit sends blood dripping onto the floor beside the chair. My stomach lurches, and for one full half second I want nothing more than to walk straight back out of this room and lock myself behind my own door voluntarily, the way I’ve been avoiding for the last several hours.
I don’t leave.
Leaving now would mean admitting I wasn’t actually ready for the seat I just demanded, and some harder, newer version of myself, one that didn’t exist before that warehouse floor, refuses to let that happen. I stay with my jaw locked, watching, because Zeke would have stayed. Because Zeke did stay, every single time, for me.
By the time the man finally gives up a partial address through blood-stained teeth, gasping it out between labored breaths, I’m steady enough to actually process it properly instead of just absorbing the fear in the room.
I catch something the others miss.
“Wait,” I say, stepping forward. “That delivery route. The pattern he just described, the timing of it, the streets he named.”
My father looks at me. “What about it.”
“Zeke flagged a property with almost that exact pattern weeks ago,” I say, my mind racing to piece it together properly. “He never got to follow up on it, we got pulled into the Mayfield lead instead and it fell off everyone’s radar. But I remember him mentioning it during one of our sessions, complaining about how the delivery schedule didn’t match the building’s supposed use.”
Marcus’s head snaps up.
“Pull his notes,” my father instructs immediately, already moving toward the door himself. “Now.”
The room empties fast after that, everyone scattering to their assigned tasks, until it’s just my father and me left standing among the maps and the empty chair still faintly marked with someone else’s blood.
He looks at the chair for a long moment. Then at me.
“You did well today.”
I stay quiet for a while, still not entirely sure how to hold the version of myself that just sat through all of that without breaking. “It’s nothing Zeke wouldn’t have done for me.”
My father’s mouth curves, something almost like pride settling into it as he leans back against the edge of the table.
“Spoken like a true Reid.”
I don’t say anything to that, and he studies me for a moment longer, something more serious moving behind his expression now.
“I never wanted you to witness any of this,” he says. “That’s the entire reason I sent you to that private school. The reason I had you adopt your mother’s last name when you were small and kept you as far from this world as I possibly could.” He pauses, considering. “I’d understand completely if you wanted your name changed officially.”
I’m quiet for a moment, turning the offer over, feeling the weight of everything sitting underneath it.
Then I look up at him, certain in a way I haven’t felt since before the warehouse.
“Lucia Ellis was weak,” I tell him. “Protected. A little pompous, if I’m being honest with myself. That girl died on a warehouse floor beside the man who was sworn to protect her. It’s about time I introduced the world to Lucia Reid.” I hold his gaze. “Let them all come for me. I fucking dare them.”