Page 314 of Black Reign

Bare legs.

My shirt.

My Vesper.

My Juliet.

Still here.

“Probably.”

Then I go make my future maybe-wife tea.

Eight days after someone tied Sabine Beaumont to a chair and demanded a key she swears she has never seen, I put her on an airplane.

It takes nearly all eight days.

Not because of the investigation.

That part moves quickly once I stop allowing Blackwell to control the information.

The men who took her were contractors. Former military, Eastern European, expensive enough to understand compartmentalization and disposable enough that whoever hired them never expected them to know much.

They don't.

What they do give me is useful.

Money moved through three shell companies before reaching them.

One of those companies touched the same offshore infrastructure used during the deeper ARGUS penetration.

Not Sabine's breach.

The other one.

Someone else has been inside Blackwell.

Someone who knew about Adrien Beaumont.

Someone who knew about a second key.

And someone willing to kidnap his daughter to find it.

That is enough for me.

The marriage idea stops being something I threw at my father in anger.

It becomes strategy.

A dangerous one.

Possibly insane.

Still strategy.

Marriage won't erase anything Sabine has done. It won't make her immune from investigators or magically grant her access to Blackwell systems.

What it does is make one fact extraordinarily clear.