Chapter 6: The Interrogation Begins
The damp cellar air clung to everything, thick with the smell of wet stone and the faint, expensive ghost of decades-old burgundy. Vera sat perfectly still in the steel chair, her wrists secured to its arms with polymer cuffs that clicked softly if she shifted. The single skylight above cast a hazy, grayish beam that cut through the gloom, illuminating motes of dust and the sharp planes of her face.
Hutch leaned against a support pillar, arms crossed, his expression that of a man watching a live grenade. Celine stood by the reinforced door, her posture relaxed but her eyes never leaving Vera. Nadia was a statue three feet to Mason’s left, arms tightly folded, the knuckles of her right hand white where they gripped her elbow. Bernard tapped away at a laptop on a barrel-top, the clicking of the keys excessively loud in the quiet.
Only Mason seemed at ease, seated on a simple wooden chair directly across from Vera, his forearms resting on his knees. The cut on his cheek was a dark, precise line. He watched her, his blue eyes giving away nothing.
Vera’s gaze toured the room slowly, a curator assessing a mediocre collection. It landed on Hutch. A smile, warm and conspiratorial, touched her lips. “You have nice hands,” she said, her voice a low purr that seemed to vibrate in the cold air. “Calloused. Practical. Are you single, or does that come later?”
Hutch’s jaw worked. “Save it.”
“Just making conversation.” Her eyes slid to Nadia, and the smile turned knife-edged. “You look tense, darling. All that coiled energy. Did Mason not tell you about our nights in Minsk?” She leaned forward as far as the cuffs allowed, her voice dropping to a intimate murmur. “He used to be so… thorough. A perfectionist. It was exhausting, in the best way.”
Nadia didn’t flinch, but a vein pulsed in her temple. Her silence was a wall.
Vera’s attention drifted to Bernard, who was stubbornly staring at his screen. Her expression softened into something that looked like pity. It was far more dangerous than the smirk. “Bernard,” she said, his name a gentle sigh. “How is little Elara? She must be, what, seven now? I heard she’s taken up the piano. Schumann’s ‘Träumerei,’ is it? Such a vulnerable age for a child. All that feeling. So open.”
The tapping stopped. Bernard’s hands went completely still on the keyboard. The blood drained from his face, leaving a waxy, shocked pallor. He didn’t look up, but the rage that radiated from him was a tangible heat in the damp chill.
“Enough.”
Mason’s voice was calm, flat, a sheet of ice over a dark river. He didn’t raise it. He simply stated a fact.
Vera turned back to him, all her feline focus settling on his face. “I was just catching up. It’s been years.”
“You’re stalling,” Mason said, leaning back slightly. He held her green gaze. “We both know you want Paulo Braga dismantled as much as we do. More. He promised you a kingdom and gave you a broom closet. He used your network, then cut you out of the data stream. Left you scrambling for scraps. You had to resort to stealing from Level Nine. That must have stung.”
Her smile remained, but it stiffened at the corners. A faint acknowledgement flickered in her eyes.
“I’m offering you a way back in,” Mason continued. “Not to Citadel. To the game. To the board where you matter.”
“And why,” Vera asked, tilting her head, “would I help you, Mason? Sentiment is a currency I spent a long time ago.”
He reached into his jacket pocket. Not with a flourish, but with the deliberate slowness of a chess move. He placed a small, black data chip on the stone floor between them. It gleamed dully in the slanted light.
“Because I have the access codes to Braga’s private server farm in Rio. The ghost layer even his own techs don’t see. The one that controls the fail-safe protocols for his entire financial architecture.” Mason’s voice was matter-of-fact. “You lock him out of that, he’s not just compromised. He’s naked. Everything he has, every dollar, every identity, every piece of leverage, becomes a publicly posted file. You want that kind of burn? Help us get to the main terminal.”
The cellar was utterly silent. The hum of the distant dehumidifier faded into the background.
Vera looked at the chip, then at Mason’s impassive face. Her expression cycled through evaluation, suspicion, and a dawning, fierce appreciation. A soft laugh escaped her, not mocking this time, but genuine. “You always knew which lever to pull. Even when you were Kyle Conroy, you were still Mason Kane underneath. You just hid him from yourself.” She leaned back, the chair creaking. “Fine. I’m in. I can’t wait to join the team again.”
“You’re not joining the team,” Nadia said, the words cracking out like a whip. “You’re a asset. A compromised, temporary tool.”
“Semantics, sweetheart.” Vera’s grin was all teeth.
Mason stood up, the sound of his chair scraping on stone final. He looked at Bernard. “Get her outfitted. Restricted kit. Tracker in everything, including her shoes. She doesn’t get a weapon until I say so.”
Bernard stood, finally looking at Vera. The raw hurt in his eyes had been packed down under a layer of glacial hatred. He gave a single, sharp nod.
Upstairs, the ambiance shifted to worn leather and cheap coffee. The main room of the safehouse was cluttered with maps and gear. Nadia watched through a one-way monitor as Bernard, with Hutch’s oversight, began processing Vera.
“We can’t trust her,” Nadia said, not turning from the screen. Her voice was flat, definitive.
“No one is suggesting we do,” Celine offered, pouring three fingers of whiskey into a tumbler. She didn’t ask if anyone else wanted any.
Mason stood by the fireplace, staring at the cold ashes. “She doesn’t want Braga to win. That’s the only alignment that matters. Her self-interest is our temporary guarantee.”
“It’s not a guarantee, it’s a time bomb.” Nadia turned now, her dark eyes blazing. “She looked at Bernard and used his daughter as a verbal knife. She’ll do worse to us the second it’s useful.”
“I know.” Mason finally looked at her, his face etched with a deep weariness that had nothing to do with physical fatigue. “So we don’t give her the chance. We use the tool for the one job it’s built for, then we lock it back in the box. We compartmentalize. She gets no intel on our secondary objectives, no access to comms, no alone time. Hutch, you’re her shadow. You breathe when she breathes.”
Hutch nodded, his expression grim. “With pleasure.”
“Bernard will rig her tracker with a neural inhibitor,” Mason continued, his mind already several steps ahead. “Any elevated stress signs, any attempt to remove it, it delivers a short-term paralytic. She’ll know it’s there. It’s the point.”
Nadia walked over to him, her voice dropping, meant for him alone. “And what about you, Mason? She looks at you and she doesn’t see an handler. She sees a man she once had. A man who, from the sound of it, wasn’t pretending.”
He met her gaze, and the conflict there was naked for a second—the ghost of Kyle’s love for Nadia warring with Mason’s history with Vera, a history written in a language of fire and shadows. “That man is what she’ll try to use. And I’ll use her expectation of him to keep her off balance.” He paused, his voice dropping even lower. “As long as we don’t trust her, no issues will happen. The second we slip, we’re dead.”
From the monitor, they saw Vera stand, the cuffs off. Bernard handed her a plain black duffel bag of clothing. She took it, then said something to Bernard they couldn’t hear. Bernard flinched, turning away sharply.
Down in the cellar, Vera hefted the bag and looked directly up at the camera hidden in the ceiling corner. As if she could see through the lens to Mason standing in the room above. She smiled, a small, private thing, and gave a faint, almost imperceptible shake of her head.
It wasn’t defiance. It was an invitation to a game she was certain she still knew how to win.
Mason turned his back on the screen. “Wheels up in ninety. Rio’s waiting.”