Chapter 1085
Alistair was sitting in a chair between them, asleep, his head resting on his hand. He had changed his shirt, but his tactical pants were still on. He looked exhausted — the dark circles beneath his eyes as deep as bruises.
“Hey,” Skye whispered. Her throat felt like sandpaper.
Alistair’s eyes snapped open. He was instantly alert, scanning her face and then the monitor above her.
“You’re awake,” he breathed. He stood, poured a cup of water, and held the straw to her lips.
She drank greedily. “Lucian?”
“Stable,” Alistair said, brushing the hair from her forehead. “Because of you. The doctors said another ten minutes and he would have been gone.”
“We saved him,” Skye corrected.
Lucian stirred. One eye opened — the other was swollen shut — and slowly focused on Skye.
“Boss,” he rasped. “You look terrible.”
“You look worse,” Skye said, managing a weak smile. “Where are my glasses?”
Alistair reached into his pocket and produced the wire-rimmed glasses he had recovered from the apartment floor. He had cleaned the blood from the frames, though one lens was still cracked. He unfolded them carefully and placed them on Lucian’s nose.
“Better?” Alistair asked.
Lucian blinked. “Much. Now I can see how ugly this wallpaper is.”
He tried to sit up and winced sharply. “The chip — did you get the chip?”
“The doctors removed it,” Alistair said, holding up a small plastic bag containing the microchip. “Felix decrypted it while you were out. Lucian… what you found is radioactive.”
“It connects Harper Cole to the top,” Lucian said, his voice dropping into something serious. “Not just to the Cleaners. To the client.”
“Who?” Skye asked, pushing herself upright.
“Marcus Cain,” Alistair said. He pulled out his phone and held up a photo.
Skye recognized the face immediately. The Deputy Mayor. A man who had been all over the news as a reformer — Sea City’s so-called White Knight.
“Marcus Cain is Harper Cole’s backer?” Skye breathed. “But he runs on an anti-corruption platform.”
“It’s the perfect cover,” Lucian said. “Cain isn’t the owner of the Trident Platform — he’s the front man. The rig belongs to a holding company buried deep within the Syndicate’s old assets. He’s using Syndicate resources to build his own kingdom. If he controls us, he controls the city’s data infrastructure. He controls the vote. He becomes the new Kingpin.”
“He’s coming for us,” Alistair said. “This wasn’t just a kidnapping. It was a hostile takeover, and it started with blood.”
The doctors said Lucian would need at least a week to recover. Skye knew they didn’t have a week. But she also knew he couldn’t fight from a gurney.
“We wait three days,” she told Alistair. “No more.”
The revelation settled over the room like a weight. Marcus Cain. A political heavyweight with a private army of assassins.
“We need to go public,” Skye said. “Release the data.”
“We can’t,” Lucian said. “The data is encrypted with a rolling key that only Cain holds. We have the lock but not the key — if we release it now, it looks like gibberish. We need to get close to him.”
A knock at the door cut through the silence.