Zara's POV
"How many men does he have outside this estate right now."
Nikolai looked at Anton. Anton looked at his phone. The silence between them lasted exactly two seconds and told me everything before either of them spoke.
Too many.
I had trained for scenarios like this. My father had run drills on compromised locations since I was sixteen how to move through a building under threat, how to identify exit points under pressure, how to stay functional when the situation collapsed faster than the plan. I pulled all of that forward now and pushed everything else back. The birth record. Gregor Voss. My mother. All of it went into a box I would open later when I was alive to open it.
Right now I needed numbers and exits.
"Six confirmed on the perimeter," Anton said. "Possibly more in the tree line. Our north cameras picked up heat signatures twenty minutes ago. Three of them."
"So nine minimum," I said.
"Minimum," Nikolai said.
I looked at him. He was already thinking the same thing I was— nine men on the outside meant Pavel had called this in before tonight. Before the signal intercept. Before any of us knew the call had been made. Which meant the operation against me had been running since before I arrived at this estate and the last four nights had simply been Voss's people getting into position.
I had not walked into a trap tonight.
I had walked into one four days ago.
"Pavel is still in the estate," I said.
"East wing," Anton said. "His rooms."
"He stays there," Nikolai said. "Nobody moves on him until I say. If he disappears it signals his people outside and we lose any control we have left."
I nodded. That was right. Pavel contained was more useful than Pavel running.
"What about the gap in the north coverage," I said.
Both of them looked at me.
"I found it the first night," I said. "I assumed it was a weakness in the security layout. Now I'm wondering if it was put there deliberately. Something that looked like an escape route."
Nikolai's jaw tightened. He looked at Anton.
"Check it," he said.
Anton left the room at a pace that wasn't quite running.
I stood in the middle of the study and thought about Gregor Voss sitting in Zurich giving an order to bring me in clean and felt something cold and specific move through me. Not fear. I knew what fear felt like and this wasn't it. This was clarity. The kind that arrives when everything has been stripped away and what's left is just the truth of the situation with no softening around it.
My biological father wanted me delivered to him.
The man who had my mother killed wanted his hands on her daughter.
I didn't know yet if he wanted me because of what I could testify to or because of what I might have inherited from my mother — her documentation, her evidence, the threads she had spent fourteen months pulling that had gotten her killed before she could finish. I didn't know if he knew about Interpol or Director Hale or what exactly he thought I was carrying.
But I knew that clean meant alive. And alive meant he needed something from me.
That was the only leverage I had.
"I'm not hiding," I said.
Nikolai turned from the window. "I didn't suggest you should."
"I'm saying it because the first thing men in your position do when a woman is threatened is put her somewhere safe and handle it themselves." I held his gaze. "I am not going to a safe room while you manage this. I know more about Voss's network than anyone in this building and I am not a liability. I am an asset and I need you to treat me like one."
He looked at me for a moment.
"I know what you are, Zara," he said quietly.
It was the first time my name in someone's mouth had not felt like ownership.
Anton came back in three minutes later and his expression when he entered was the kind that preceded information nobody wanted.
"The north gap," he said. "It wasn't a weakness." He looked at Nikolai. "It was added to the security layout eight weeks ago. Someone modified the camera rotation remotely. From inside the network."
"Pavel," I said.
"Has to be." Anton crossed to the desk and pulled up something on his phone. "But that's not the problem. The problem is what's positioned in the tree line directly opposite the gap."
He held up the screen. A heat signature image pulled from the north camera. Three shapes in the trees. And positioned between them, barely visible at the edge of the frame — a vehicle. Dark. Engine off. Waiting.
"They're not here to take you by force," Nikolai said slowly. He was reading it the same way I was. "They're waiting for you to run."
I looked at the image. He was right. Six men on the perimeter made noise and drew response. Three men in the tree line opposite a gap that had been quietly built into the security layout over eight weeks was something else entirely. It was a funnel. Make enough pressure inside the estate that I felt I had no choice but to use the one exit I had found myself, the one that felt like mine, and run directly into the arms of the people waiting on the other side.
It was elegant. I hated that it was elegant.
"They knew I would find the gap," I said.
"They counted on it," Nikolai said.
I turned and looked at him directly. "Then we give them something else to count on."
He looked back at me with something shifting in his expression. Not quite a smile. The version of a smile that lives in the eyes of people who don't do it often.
"I was hoping you'd say that," he said.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Unknown number. One message.
I looked down and read it and the air left my lungs completely.
It was a photograph. Recent. Taken tonight. Inside my father's Cartagena compound.
Camila. My little sister. Sitting in a chair with her hands in her lap and her eyes terrified and a man standing behind her that I recognized as Rafael Cruz, my father's enforcer.
Beneath it, four words.
Come out or she dies.