Page 57 of Duality

“Make it five. Liam can help cross reference the locations once we have them.”

“Roger.” Carter hung up.

“I got a hold of Danny,” Liam said. “He’s calling everyone and putting them on high alert.”

“We should evacuate the safe houses that the Ghosts have helped with,” I said, rubbing my face. Sebastian rubbed my back as Adrian tightened his grip, and my body relaxed slightly. “Just in case. I think that’s Clay and Yarlton, which we haven’t really been using, but we should at least scrub them down again and make sure there’s nothing that can be traced to us.”

“I’ll let Izzy and Grace know,” Liam said. “Maya’s still at lunch with their dad. Do you want me to tell them anything?”

I rubbed my temples. “Tell them to call as soon as they’re done. Fill them in and ask them to accelerate the timeline on the media campaign. We have to be ready to hit Citadel at the gala.”

The sooner we exposed Citadel, the sooner this whole mess could be put to bed. Over the last week, we had put together enough information about Citadel’s deeds to bury them, but we needed the publicity of the gala to make sure Citadel couldn’t sweep it under the rug. Captain Patel was clean, but that didn’t mean everyone in his precinct was.

My phone rang. Carter. “What have you got for me?”

“Keys is sending Glitch the locations,” Carter said, using Liam’s hacker handle. “He’ll coordinate with Glitch on vetting. But we have other problems.”

“Hold on.” I put the phone on speaker, then gestured at the guys to listen in. “Go ahead.”

“Keys went through Finch’s laptop. There were some hardcore protections on there, but he cracked it. Citadel has the locations of all of the Archers safe houses.”

My stomach dropped. Fuck! All of them?

“It gets worse.”

I dropped my head and barely held in a groan. Sebastian’s hand trailed up and rubbed the back of my neck. “Of course it does. What?”

“Citadel is gearing up to take them all out. Tonight.”

“Take them out, as in?” Alexander questioned.

“Destroy the safe houses and whoever is in them,” Carter said flatly. “We’ve been keeping an eye on them and found out through one of our sources. They’ve authorized collateral damages.”

Meaning they didn’t care who they killed. We had people in those houses. Those houses were a critical part of our organization. There was no point in getting people out of bad situations if you didn’t have a safe place for them to stay. If Citadel took them all out, it would cripple the Archers. We would have to start over completely, and there would be so many people we weren’t able to help.

How were we going to protect them? The Archers barely had enough people and resources to manage the network we had, and Citadel was sure to bring an army. And we still needed to find Finch and rescue Marcus, and we had no idea where they were. I felt like I was being pulled in a million different directions. I took a deep breath and lifted my head. Alexander’s eyes locked with mine, calm and reassurance radiated from his gaze, and I took a deep breath.

The Archers didn’t have to do it alone. I didn’t have to do it alone. I had help.

“Carter, if we pull everyone back to a few safe houses, can your team help protect them?”

“Yes. I’ll send Samson to your HQ to rendezvous with Danny and Grace. He’ll dispatch the rest of the team to the safe houses and recommend which ones are most defensible.”

“Ashford, Langston, and Everton are probably the most defensible,” I said, thinking about each of the safe houses. Those three were warehouses and had the most space. They were also less likely to have collateral damage from surrounding houses.Just because Citadel didn’t care about collateral damages, that didn’t mean I didn’t.

“We’ll take care of it,” Liam promised.

I looked at Alexander. “Can SDS help?”

He smiled gently at me like he was happy I asked him for help. “Always. We’ll dispatch the Alpha and Beta teams to those locations. They can help protect the people you’ll move there. We can send Charlie and Delta teams to the other locations to try to minimize the damage.”

“How many people are we talking about evacuating? We can host them at an SDS safe house instead,” Adrian offered.

I closed my eyes, trying to think about the latest numbers. “I think we have close to forty people among the eight locations.”

“Shit, my darling, that’s a lot of people.”

I shrugged. It actually wasn’t the most we ever had, but we had been forced to scale back for the last few weeks. “There’s a lot of rot in this city.”