Chapter 15 15

Chapter 15 15
Chapter Fifteen
Xavier

Thursday came faster than I wanted it to.

Fabrizio arrived at noon in a car that cost more than some pack houses, stepped out looking like he'd slept twelve hours and ironed his shirt twice, and handed me a folder before he even said hello.

"Eleven locations," he said. "Same network. What you shut down the other night was one node. Not even the largest one."

We went inside. Bruno was already at the table with maps spread across it, and Fabrizio sat down and opened his folder and started talking and I stood at the head of the table and listened and felt the familiar cold clarity that came when a problem had a shape you could finally see.

"The operation runs across four territories," Fabrizio said. "Two of them belong to alphas who are either complicit or afraid. One of them I suspect is actively profiting." He tapped a point on the map. "This is their primary holding location. Three times the size of the one you hit. Better guarded. They've already relocated twice since your operation, which means they have someone watching."

"Watching us," Bruno said.

"Watching the aftermath. Someone local who reported back." Fabrizio looked at me. "You have a leak. Small, probably opportunistic rather than embedded, but it's there."

I looked at the map. "How many people are they holding."

"Minimum forty. Possibly more." He paused. "Humans, mostly. Some rogues. A few wolves who tried to run from packs that didn't want them running."

Bruno leaned forward. "Timeline."

"They'll move again within two weeks. When they move they split the inventory, as they call it, and once it's split recovery becomes close to impossible. Different buyers, different territories, everything散. You have a window." Fabrizio folded his hands on the table. "A narrow one."

The door opened.

I looked up expecting Rosaria and found Carmen instead, stopping short in the doorway with a cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands that was almost certainly the lunch Rosaria sent down when she thought I was forgetting to eat. She took in the table, the maps, Fabrizio, and started to back out.

"Sorry," she said. "Rosaria asked me to—"

"Come in," I said.

She hesitated one beat then crossed to the table and set the bundle down at the far end and turned to go and Fabrizio said, "You're Carmen," with the particular tone he used when something had confirmed a theory.

She turned. "Yes."

"Fabrizio." He stood and offered his hand with a precision that managed to be both courtly and genuine. "I've heard a great deal about you in the last four days, though Xavier has been characteristically sparse with the details."

"I haven't heard anything about you," she said, shaking his hand.

"Better for my reputation." He smiled. She didn't quite smile back but something in her face unlocked slightly.

She looked at the map on the table. I watched her eyes move across it, reading it, and something in her expression shifted. She looked at the cluster of marked locations and the connecting lines between them and I could see her understanding the shape of it faster than most people in this room had.

"Is this the same network," she said quietly. "As the place I was taken."

The room went still.

"Yes," I said.

She stood there looking at the map for a long moment. Her jaw was set and her hands were loose at her sides and she looked the way she had looked in the garden with Hannibal, that particular quality of someone processing something real without the luxury of falling apart.

"How many people," she said.

"Forty minimum," Bruno said, watching her.

Her eyes moved to the primary location marker. "What do you need."

"Carmen—" I started.

"I'm not asking to come with you." She looked at me directly. "I'm asking what you need. I was inside that network for four days. I know how it moves, how they talk to each other, where the guards were laziest, what the holding spaces looked like." Her voice was steady. "Mari is still in there. The woman who helped me. She's still in there."

No one spoke.

Fabrizio looked at me with an expression I recognized, the one that meant he was recalibrating.

"Tell me about Mari," I said.

She pulled out a chair and sat down and for the next twenty minutes she talked and I listened and Bruno took notes and Fabrizio asked precise questions that she answered precisely, and I watched her reconstruct four days of captivity with the methodical accuracy of someone who had survived by paying close attention to everything around them. Guard rotations. Shift changes. The particular door in the basement that stuck. The way the perimeter was thinner on the east side because there was a drainage issue that nobody had fixed.

When she finished Fabrizio sat back and looked at his folder and then at her. "You should have been an intelligence operative," he said.

"I was a person trying not to die," she said. "It's the same skill set."

Bruno made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh.

I looked at the map and then at Carmen and thought about Rosaria saying she's something else, and Bruno's face when she'd walked in and started reading the map, and Apollo going very quiet inside me in the particular way he went quiet when something was true.

"We move in eight days," I said. "We need a smaller team, no leaks, and we need the east approach."

"I can get you credentials for the border crossing two miles south," Fabrizio said, already writing.

"And Mari," Carmen said. She wasn't asking. She was making sure.

"And Mari," I said.

She stood up, pushed the chair back, and walked out without drama, leaving Rosaria's lunch bundle at the end of the table and the room slightly rearranged by her having been in it.

Bruno looked at me. I looked at the map.

"Eight days," I said. "Let's work."