Page 77 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

He's reading something on the tablet, scrolling with his index finger. He doesn't look up when I'm dragged into the room.

The compass—my father's compass—sits on the desk beside the coffee cup. The silver casing catches the fluorescent light.

He finishes reading. Takes a sip of coffee. Then looks at me over the wire-rimmed glasses with the assessing expression of a veterinarian examining livestock.

"Lily Masters." The English is precise, European-inflected. "Arthur's daughter. You look like him."

I don't respond. The dancer's discipline—the same composure that holds a relevé under a thousand judging eyes—locks my expression into a controlled mask. My heart is hammering. The fear is an ice cold current running beneath my skin. But the face I show this man is the face I show a hostile audience: nothing.

He lifts the compass from the desk, turning it in his fingers. "Your father was a very thorough man. His encryption held our team in Kuala Lumpur for three months. We had his files. We didn’t have the key. We’d still be working on it if your federal friends hadn't done the work for us."

They don't know.

The realization surfaces with the quiet precision of a dancer finding her mark in the dark. They intercepted the comms. They heard Cipher talking about the decryption. But they don't know the data was copied to Cipher's tablet. They think the compass is the only copy.

The data is safe. Cipher has it. The compass is a decoy now.

"The encryption requires a biometric key." The lie is out before I consciously form it—smooth, delivered with the same clarity I use to hold a stage. “A verbal passphrase. Without it, the data self-corrupts."

"That would be inconvenient." The man behind the desk tilts his head. The assessment sharpens.

"It would be permanent."

A beat. He studies me. I hold his gaze without blinking, without shifting my weight, without the slightest micro-expression that might betray the deception. The dancer's ultimate skill: performing a role so completely that the audience forgets it's a performance.

"You're composed for a woman in your situation." He sets the compass down and leans back in his chair. "Your father had that quality. The ability to appear calm while the building burned around him." A pause. "It served him well. Until it didn't."

The threat is delivered with the detachment of a man discussing supply chain logistics. No malice. No cruelty. Cruelty would require him to see me as human.

He turns to the guard at the desk. Speaks in rapid Thai. The guard nods and exits through the Cyrillic-labeled door. The satellite phone buzzes. The man picks it up, speaks briefly in a language I don't recognize—not Thai, not English, something Eastern European—then sets it down.

"The evacuation is ahead of schedule." He addresses this to no one in particular, the tone of a man narrating his efficiency. "You and the others will be transported north within the hour."

Within the hour.

I scan the room again. Three guards remaining—the one at the entry door, the one at the far door, and a third who has repositioned near the women against the wall. The man behind the desk is unarmed, or at least not visibly armed. The reinforced entry door is the only way in or out that I've seen.

The women against the wall are silent. Most stare at the floor. A few are watching me—the new arrival, the one who walked in with a ripped shirt and mud on her bare feet and the posture of someone who has not yet been broken.

Then I see her.

Third from the end. Seated on the concrete with her back against the wall, her knees drawn to her chest. Her dark hair is matted and tangled. Her wrists are zip-tied in front of her body, not behind. She's thinner than the last time I saw her—the sharp angles of her collarbones visible beneath a torn tank top—and a dark bruise runs along her left jawline.

But her eyes are clear. Alert. Fixed on me with an intensity that has nothing in common with the thousand-yard stares around her.

Andrea.

The sound that escapes my throat is involuntary—a compressed noise that carries the weight of every hour since the Solarium. Every mile of jungle road. Every bullet. Every decision that brought me from a blood-soaked stage in Bangkok to this concrete room in a Thai bunker.

I cross the floor. My bound hands make the movement awkward. I drop to my knees beside her.

"Andrea." Her name is the only word I can manage.

She presses her forehead against mine. The contact is minimal—two skulls separated by a film of sweat and dried blood—and infinite. The zip ties prevent us from embracing. Two dancers who communicate through every register of physical contact, denied the ability to hold each other.

"You're here." Andrea's voice is a raw whisper. The vocal quality of someone who has been screaming and has run out of volume but not resolve.

"I came for you.” The words crack in the middle. The composure that held against the man behind the desk fractures against the weight of this moment.