Sloane’s eyes remained calm. “At the place where this began.”
Then, from the terminal, a small speaker crackled to life.
A child’s frightened breath came through it.
“Grandpa?”
Graves froze.
Ruby’s voice trembled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know where to go.”
Sloane’s hand slipped inside his jacket.
Ortiz saw it first. “General!”
Sloane pulled a compact radio, pressed one button, and the command room windows exploded inward.
The blast was not large enough to destroy the room, but it sent glass and smoke across the floor. Graves threw himself toward Ortiz as alarms screamed. When he rose through the haze, Sloane was gone.
On the terminal, a location blinked on the tactical map.
The old Northbridge apartment complex.
Eliana’s home.
Graves ran.
The rain had become a downpour by the time the convoy reached Northbridge. Red emergency lights flashed against peeling brick walls and flooded pavement. The complex stood at the edge of the city, half abandoned, its balconies sagging beneath rusted railings. In the center courtyard, a fountain had long ago gone dry.
The landlord’s office occupied the ground floor of Building C.
Its windows were dark.
Ortiz approached Graves beside the armored vehicle. “We have thermal readings inside. Four adults, one child.”
“Sloane?”
“One signal matches his height and build. The others may be private security.”
Graves stared toward the second-floor apartment where a single lamp burned behind thin curtains.
“Where is Eliana?” he asked.
Ortiz looked down. “Her phone was found at the bus station. It appears she was taken before Ruby arrived at the base.”
Graves’s hand closed around the eviction notice in his coat pocket.
He had wanted one chance to apologize.
Now Sloane had turned that chance into a weapon.
“General,” Ortiz said, “we can wait for the tactical team.”
From inside the building, a child screamed.
It was not a long scream. It was Ruby calling for her mother.
Graves was already moving.
“Cover the exits,” he said. “Get everyone out of the surrounding units. No one fires unless there is a clear shot.”
He entered through the broken glass of the landlord’s office.
The smell of wet concrete, old carpet, and dust pressed around him. A desk lamp glowed in the back room. On the wall behind the desk hung framed photographs of buildings, legal certificates, and a cheap flag mounted crookedly in a case.
The desk itself was covered in files.
Eliana Hart.
Graves opened the first folder with hands that were steady only because he forced them to be.
There were copies of her pay stubs from a grocery store. Medical bills. School records for Ruby. Notes on late rent payments. Photographs taken through windows.
And beneath them, a handwritten ledger.
Sloane had received money every month from an account named MIRIAM GRAVES FAMILY TRUST.
Graves stared.
