"No." I bend down and pick up the vial. The glass is cold against my palm. "You weren't."
Cole zip-ties her wrists, professional and efficient. Victoria doesn't fight.
"I saw the evidence," she says to me. Her voice cracks. "I saw the bank transfers. The buried cases. Isawit."
"You saw what they wanted you to see."
Cole passes her to Damian without a word.
Damian takes Victoria by the arm, steers her through the kitchen, past the laundry room to the garage.
The last thing I see before the garage door closes: Damian pulling a black bag over her face.
thirty-one
Cole
Damian's voice comes through the speakers, soft and patient. "Tell me about finding Rose."
Victoria's hands flatten against the table. The first real movement in twenty minutes.
Angelina sits beside me, close enough that her perfume reaches me, mandarin and rose underneath the professional scent she wears to court. It should not register now, not with what is happening through that glass, but my brain files it anyway. Files it with every other detail about my firefly I have collected over the years.
"Eighteen months." Victoria's voice is hollow. "Eighteen months of legal channels. Police reports. Private investigators. Embassy contacts. Nothing."
"So you found her yourself."
"A shipping container manifest. Buried in a customs database no one was supposed to access." Victoria's laugh is brittle. "She was inventory. My sister was a line item on a spreadsheet."
Inventory.The word lands like a blade between my ribs. Fourteen judges dead because one woman's sister became a line item. And somewhere in this city, my firefly has a countdown ticking toward the same fate.
Angelina's breath catches. I keep my eyes on the glass.
"I traced the route. Istanbul to Vienna to Prague. Fourteen months of following paper trails and bribing port officials and pretending to be people I'm not." Victoria's jaw tightens. "I found the basement in Prague."
Fourteen months.Victoria Lockwood spent fourteen months hunting her sister while I spent seven years watching mine through cameras. Different searches. Same useless distance.
Damian waits.
"She was alive." Victoria's voice fractures on the word. "Chained to a radiator in a room with no windows. Fourteen months in that basement. She didn't—"
Her hands curl into fists.
"She didn't recognize me. Her own twin. She looked at my face and saw a stranger."
My chest locks.What would Chesca's face look like after fourteen months in a basement?The thought surfaces before I can stop it. I shove it down. Eyes on the glass. On the woman behind it. Angelina's hand finds mine, her fingers cold.
"I tried to take her." Victoria's voice wavers. "I had a plan. Extraction route, safe house, medical contacts. I was going to save her."
I was going to save her.How many times have I said those words to myself? About Angelina. About the mission that killed Kevin and Danny and Yuki. Plans do not mean anything when the world decides to break what you love.
"What happened?"
Silence. Then, barely audible: "She begged me to let her die."
Angelina's hand locks around mine. I squeeze back. Hold on.
"I held her for three hours. Told her who I was. Who she was. Showed her photographs of us as children." Victoria's voice does not steady. It just... empties. "She didn't remember any of it. She just kept asking me to make it stop."