Page 49 of Make Them Pay

I should've seen it.

I should've realized using Margaux's account would leave a trail Serafina could follow. I was so focused on finishing the financial map, so convinced the evidence justified the risk, that I never stopped to consider the obvious. That gathering the evidence might destroy the operation it was supposed to protect.

The guilt hits like cold water—fast, sharp, and strong enough to pull me under if I let it.

I don’t let it. I can’t afford to. Render’s underground in a locked-down facility with guards converging on his position, and the only thing standing between him and Poe’s cell is an encrypted lock I have to open from two hundred yards away with a tablet, an antenna, and whatever I still have left in the part of my brain that solves impossible problems under impossible pressure.

I start breaking the encryption.

It’s layered. Three nested shells, each one protecting the next, each one requiring a different approach. The outer layer is a standard cipher that yields to brute force in about ninety seconds. The middle layer is more sophisticated. It’s a rotating key that changes every thirty seconds, forcing me to time my work exactly with the cycle.

Gunfire erupts on the radio. Knight’s channel: “BRAVO’s engaged on the perimeter. Four guards, armed, coming from the western building. We’re holding but they’re organized.”

Diaz: “Stairwell’s secure but I’ve got movement on the first underground level. Someone’s coming up.”

Render: “I’ve opened the general holding area. Arrow, Gage, Ozzy, and Lark are here. Orchid’s not.”

Lark’s there. Knight’s on the perimeter fighting to keep the exit open, and the woman he loves is one floor below him being unchained by the man I love. The mix of tenderness and violence inside that building is almost impossible to wrap my head around.

“Poe?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. Even though the reason I’m asking is the reason the lock on his corridor is still sealed.

“Second level. Behind the door I can’t open.” His voice is controlled but the edge is sharper now. “Enley. The encryption.”

“I’m through the outer layer. Working on the rotating key. Sixty seconds.”

“You have forty. The guards Sawyer flagged are going to reach the stairwell in under a minute, and when they do the extraction route is compromised.”

Forty seconds. The key changes every thirty. I need to catch it at the exact moment of transition, in the tiny gap between the old key and the new one, when the system is resetting and the shell is briefly vulnerable.

I watch the cycle. Count the interval. Twenty-nine seconds. Thirty. The key rotates. The shell flickers.

I’m through.

The innermost layer is the simplest. I crack it in eight seconds.

The new fingerprint profiles are on my screen. I load them into the rebuilt system. Reconfigure the path. Test the handshake against the updated reader.

“System is rebuilt. Deploying now.”

The signal travels through the facility’s network. Reaches the reader on the second-level corridor. The reader accepts it. The lock opens.

“Door’s open,” Render says. And then he’s moving, his radio carrying the sound of boots on concrete and controlled breathing and the particular acoustic signature of a man heading down an underground corridor toward the last locked door between him and my brother.

I sit behind the shed with the tablet on my knees and the cold night air on my face and the guilt sitting in my chest like something heavy and sharp-edged and permanent.

The system worked. The door opened. The plan—damaged, improvised, held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape—is still moving forward.

But the reason it almost failed is me. The choice I made. The access pattern I created. The gap I opened in our own security that Serafina drove a countermeasure straight through.

When this is over, Render and I are going to have a conversation. But it won’t be the conversation we planned. It’s going to be about the cost of a decision I made alone and the consequences it almost had for everyone.

The radio crackles. More gunfire. Knight’s team engaging. Diaz holding the stairwell.

And underneath it all, steady and clear, Render’s voice: “I’ve got Poe. He’s alive. We’re moving.”

My brother is alive.

The tears I’ve been holding since the container finally come. I let them fall against the tablet screen where everything almost went wrong because of me, and I keep working through them because the extraction isn’t over and the guilt can wait but the radio can’t.