Page 126 of Nikolay

Arsenal finally spoke, his voice clipped and steady. “Direct approach gives him warning and fixes your position at the gate. Good for pressure. Bad if he’s got interior routes and disciplined security. Silent insertion gives better odds of contact with target. Bad if wards light us up or if the contractors are tighter than expected.”

Wrecker nodded once. “We know how to move quiet. Doesn’t mean quiet’s enough. Parker's working on bringing down warning systems.”

Gunner dragged a hand over the back of his neck. “Gate also tells Maddie where we are, if she can hear it.”

The room paused at that.

Because that was the piece brute force offered which strategy alone could not dismiss. Noise. Presence. A clear declaration to a trapped wolf that her pack had come.

Juliet drew a breath and let it out slowly. “If she hears Bronc, she’ll move heaven and earth to get to him.”

“She’ll move for any opening,” I said.

They all looked at me then, and I let them.

I had no right to ask to be believed after how long I had spent fighting the truth. So I did not ask. I simply gave them what I knew.

“Maddie is not passive,” I said. “Whatever else he has done, however he has attempted to isolate her, she will be looking for a weakness. A door. A hallway. A person she can manipulate. A lie she can sell. If we create an opening, if she has the ability, she will move toward it.”

Memory struck with vicious clarity: her chin lifting when challenged, her mouth sharpening around an insult, the humor she used like a blade and a shield both. Sweet, yes. Kind, deeply. But no one with that much life in her had ever been made for obedience.

Taras’s pen scratched steadily. “Then any plan must account for target initiative.”

Maksym nodded once. “Agreed.”

Bronc’s gaze had gone distant in that way it did when he looked through the map into some tactical space only he could see. “Gate demand draws eyes front. Covert team uses that to breach elsewhere.”

“A split operation,” Lucia said.

“Which increases variables,” Taras countered.

“Which also increases opportunities,” Wrecker said.

Doc uncrossed and recrossed his arms, thinking. “If he sees Bronc and believes he’s got a little time before dark assets move, he may shift inward, tighten around her, start prep. That’s bad if we’re late. Good if it fixes her to a ritual location we can target.”

Amelia made a face. “We’re forgetting part of the ritual demands the subject be restrained. We have to assume she cannot come to us. We also must assume he may drug her or ward her to make finding her more difficult.”

Every ugly possibility in the room seemed to lean closer.

Discussions continued, and contingencies were argued.

The clock on the wall gave another measured tick. Then another. We were running out of time.

I became aware that my thumb had found the paper near Ironwood’s eastern boundary and pressed there hard enough to bend the map. A line of wall. A strip of trees. One of several probable weak points. Or perhaps merely the one I needed to believe in because the bond kept tugging in that direction and I had nothing else to offer the room that would not sound like madness.

My father’s gaze dropped to my hand, then lifted to my face.

“You feel something,” he said.

It was not a question.

I swallowed once. “Not enough.”

That was the truth, and the agony of it. The bond gave me hurt, wrongness, distance, brief ghost-impressions that vanished when I tried to catch them. No clear location. No clean thread. Only a persistent pull that made my body want to turn east and begin killing until the sensation changed.

Amelia glanced at me, then at the map under my thumb. “Eastern side might matter,” she said carefully. “Or the bond’s reacting to proximity in a weird way. I’m not calling it evidence yet, but I’m not ignoring it either.”

“Nothing is ignored,” Father said at last. He looked over to Devon who’d been sitting quietly at his side, listening to everything. “We are all warriors with various skills. We will all fight to free Madelyn.”