Page 124 of Priest

That word mattered.

“Paid by who?” I asked.

Archangel’s mouth barely moved. “People who can’t put their names on the job.”

The room changed around that answer.

He didn’t say federal. He didn’t have to. The redacted pages in the file said enough. So did the clean satellite shots, the surveillance stills, and the kind of operational summary no outlaw club should’ve been able to put together unless someone on the other side of the law was feeding them from a very high window.

“You’re telling me you work with the feds,” I said.

“I’m telling you we take contracts from men who like clean hands and dirty results.” Archangel tapped the edge of the file once. “Most of us came from that world before we figured out the rules mattered more to them than the people caught under them.”

Nomad’s eyes narrowed. “Former agents?”

“Some.”

“And the rest?”

Archangel looked at him. “Useful.”

That one word carried more weight than a résumé would’ve. It told me plenty. Fallen Angels weren’t some club playing soldier with government scraps. They were men who’d walked out of the machine and kept the keys.

Ink leaned closer to the file without touching it. “This is classified.”

“It was,” Archangel said.

A faint, humorless smile pulled at Ink’s mouth. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting.”

For half a second, the two of them just looked at each other, intel man to intel man, both understanding exactly how much wasn’t being said.

“So this isn’t charity,” Ledger said.

Archangel’s attention shifted to him. “Nothing we do is charity.”

“Then why bring it to us?” Rook asked.

“Because Joker’s escalation just stopped being contained.” Archangel slid a photograph across the table toward me. Grainy, angled, taken from a distance. An old factory sat behind a rusted fence, half-rotten under a gray sky. “And because your Old Lady being taken there changes the timeline.”

My hand flattened on the table before I touched the picture. “Echo Road.”

Archangel nodded once. “Old manufacturing plant. Dead on paper. Busy in practice.”

He laid another photo beside the first. A truck near the loading dock. Two men by the side entrance. A third image, closer, showing a side door propped open just enough to catch a strip of light.

“That factory isn’t only a holding point,” he continued. “It’s a staging ground. We logged transport movement at odd hours, guards rotating outside normal patterns, and a spike in bodies on site after midnight.”

My pulse stayed steady, but something colder formed beneath it. “What’s inside?”

Archangel didn’t soften the answer. “Women. A few minors based on the last count. They’re prepping to move them.”

A low sound left Graves. Not loud. Worse than loud.

The word move lodged itself somewhere ugly behind my ribs. “When?”

“Soon,” Archangel said. “Forty-eight hours was our window before Joker took your woman. Now that clock’s cracked.”