Page 6 of Prey

Ezra quietly slides a printed schedule across the table toward me. Rest rotations.

I look at it. Then at him.

He shrugs, already looking back at his screen. “Sleep deprivation degrades decision quality by an average of?—”

“Thank you, Ezra.”

He nods, satisfied.

From the kitchen, something hits a pan hard enough to echo down the hall, followed by Darius’s voice: “Nobody worry. I know what I’m doing.”

“You set off the fire suppression system in March,” Theon calls back.

The decision is simple, because it has to be.

We don’t have enough. We never move on incomplete intelligence—not after everything it cost us to learn that lesson—and what we have right now is a pattern without a source. Smoke without a fire we can locate.

“Keep pulling,” I say. “Everyone works their own angles. Ezra, I want updated probability models when Weiss gives us something new. Dominic, whoever’s being funded needs infrastructure. Find the connective tissue.” I look at Marcus. “Your contacts—figure out if the silence is fear or if they’ve been removed.”

Heads move. Nobody writes anything down. We stopped doing that years ago.

“We don’t consolidate until we have clear intel.” I close the folder in front of me. “Meeting’s done.”

Chairs scrape back. The room exhales.

The common area is through the east corridor and up half a level, where Ezra rerouted the ventilation properly, and the air doesn’t carry the same cold bite as the lower floors. Someone, years back, dragged a long dining table down here from a restaurant closure. It seats twelve uncomfortably or nine just fine, and it’s scarred across one end from an incident involving Theon’s work that nobody discusses at meals.

Darius has commandeered the kitchen. He moves with the focused energy of someone running a one-man operation and resents any implication he might need assistance, which meansDominic is leaning in the doorway watching him with quiet amusement.

The smell permeates the air—garlic, something with butter, bread that’s been in the oven long enough to go golden.

Lucien drops into his usual chair without ceremony and steals a piece of bread from the basket already on the table, Theon sits beside him.

Raphael pours wine and distributes glasses down the table without asking who wants it. Ezra accepts his without looking up from his phone, realizes what he’s doing, and sets the phone face down.

Damon takes the seat across from me and says nothing, which is entirely normal.

Darius emerges from the kitchen carrying a pan that’s still spitting faintly and sets it in the center of the table with the expression of a man who has proven something.

Lucien leans over the pan and breathes in. “Huh. You didn’t burn it this time.”

“I have never burned anything in my life.”

“The fish,” Marcus says, eyes half-closed. “March. You set off the smoke detector.”

“The fish was a controlled sear.”

“It was on fire, brother,” Ezra says, reaching for the bread without looking up.

Darius levels the serving spoon at the table like a man laying down terms. “Eat it or starve.”

“It’s good,” I say.

He points the spoon at me, vindicated. “See. Someone here has a palate.”

For a few minutes, the table sounds like a table should—forks against ceramic, Lucien asking Marcus to move his elbow, Marcus not moving it.

Nobody talks about Weiss. Nobody talks about the meeting, or the restructuring, or the name we don’t have yet. There’s an unspoken agreement that lasts exactly as long as the meal, and everyone honors it without reminder.