Page 114 of The ARC Unit: Breach

The last sentence carried no judgment, and I lowered myself beside the doorway rather than walking into the room.

“My name is Mia. No one needs to touch you unless you say it’s okay.”

She looked at me.

“H-hospital?” she whispered.

“A doctor needs to check you, but you can tell us if you need a woman to stay with you.”

She glanced toward the male medic beside the bed, and Jackal caught it immediately. He stepped back without making her ask, giving her a little more space.

“We can leave,” he said. “You choose.”

The medic stepped into the hall and the woman watched Jackal for another few seconds.

His voice softened in a way I had never heard from him before. “Nobody’s moving you unless you’re ready. Take your time.”

He put unusual care into the way he spoke to her, and I thought of the red ribbon in his hand from the night before, then let the connection go before it became a question I had no right to ask. Jackal stood only after she nodded that it was okay, then left the room.

I followed him into the corridor.

“Jackal.”

He looked back and for a second I almost thanked him, which felt strange considering I had done nothing worth thanking him for and neither had he. He had simply behaved like the frightened woman in that room was a human being.

“You okay?” I asked instead.

His expression changed by a fraction.

“Ask me when we’re not standing in this fucking place.” He went downstairs before I could ask anything else, which was probably the only answer I needed.

The rear structure was worse than the farmhouse because nobody had bothered making it look respectable. The lower floor held stacked mattresses, towels, sealed boxes of clothing and a row of lockers containing confiscated phones. Upstairs, Bear found a locked medical cabinet with injectable sedatives and blister packs, plus syringes and sealed medical supplies that made the word rehabilitation feel obscene. Dosage sheets used the same alphanumeric codes as the photographs downstairs.

Matthias Keller, the German investigator coordinating the local side of the raid, opened one folder while Raven photographed the table beside him.

“These are incident reports,” he said.

The phrase sounded bureaucratic enough until we read them.

One woman had been marked for correction after trying to leave through a bathroom window. Another entry recorded a broken wrist after “physical intervention” and charged the cost of the clinic visit back to the holding account. Two codes were labeled family contact risk after attempted phone calls. A fourth file ended with a single status, closed, and unlike the surrounding transfer records there was no destination attached to it and no later transport entry anywhere in the system.

I felt the back of my throat tighten.

“What does closed mean?” I asked.

Raven looked through the associated movement records before answering.

“I don’t know.” His face said he had an idea and hated it enough not to turn it into fact without evidence.

Wolf entered the room while we were going through the files with mud marked on one knee of his tactical pants and a tear on his shirt beneath the carrier. He looked toward the table, then at the cabinet of sedatives.

“How bad?”

Raven gave him the answer without dressing it up. “Twenty-eight names or codes tied to this property. Eleven recovered here. Seventeen moved yesterday. Documents and medication logs match the movement schedules and punishment records.”

Raven pulled up the transfer records beside the count. Out of the seventeen women who had already been moved out of Haus Eberhardt, four of those transfers ran through people or locations we had seen connected to the same circle Kade had walked into at the party. We still did not know his real name, so the records could not put him directly on the transfers, but the overlap was getting harder to ignore.

Another file showed what happened when one of the women tried to run. She had been brought back here, restrained more heavily and given a larger dose of sedatives before the next transfer.