Chapter 225

Elias watches her face while he explains everything – the shell corporation, the staffing filings, the single occupied room repeated down the entire length of a logbook he had no business reading through a window. He tells her about the four guards rotating a wing built to look like nothing, and about standing in the treeline at midnight cataloguing every detail he could get without crossing a line he wasn’t ready to cross alone.

Lucia goes quiet or a while as she absorbs all the information and processes it.

“We can’t go back there,” she says finally. “At least not without some backup.”

Elias knows exactly who she means, and he knows what saying it out loud is going to cost both of them.

“You’re talking about telling your father everything.”

“I’m talking about not running this alone anymore,” she says. “You know what’s in that facility. I know what’s been happening at my house. If we keep sitting on separate halves of this and trying to solve it in