clutched the metal case with both hands.
“What is in there?” Elias asked.
“Everything,” my father said. “Shipping manifests. Payment trails. Names of buyers. Names of officials who buried reports. Enough to put Rusk’s network and your mother’s old partners in prison if it reaches the right hands.”
“And if it doesn’t?” I asked.
My father looked beyond me.
The answer came in red dots blooming across his coat.
Snipers.
Not one this time.
Several.
From the container stacks.
Elias grabbed me and pulled me behind a forklift as the first shots cracked through the rain. Sparks flew from metal. Lila screamed. Callum returned fire from the warehouse door. The dock became chaos: shouts, ricochets, rain, the deep groan of ships tied to the pier.
My father shoved Lila behind a concrete barrier and threw the case toward me.
It skidded across wet asphalt.
“Take it!” he shouted.
I crawled from cover, fingers scraping pavement. A bullet hit the ground close enough to spray my cheek with grit. Elias moved beside me, shielding me with his body the way I had shielded him in the dining room.
“You are infuriating,” I snapped.
“You started it.”
I grabbed the case.
The lock was old-fashioned, not digital. My father, always suspicious of electronics. On the side, scratched near the hinge, was a tiny bird.
A sparrow.
My throat closed.
“Mara!” my father shouted.
He pointed to a stack of blue containers.
I understood before I wanted to.
Glass remembers angles. People announce what they want. In a trap, never take the obvious exit.
The shooters were pushing us toward the river road, where more men would be waiting. The only path they were not covering was through the containers themselves.
“This way!” I shouted to Elias.
We moved in bursts: Lila first, then me with the case, Elias and Callum covering. My father lagged behind, limping harder now. At the mouth of the blue container corridor, he stumbled.
I turned back.
“Dad!”
He looked up.
For a terrible second, I was thirteen again, standing in smoke while he pushed me through a basement window and told me not to come back.
This time I did not obey.
I ran to him.
A shot rang out. Elias fired back. My shoulder hit my father’s chest as I dragged his arm over mine. He was lighter than I remembered. Real and breakable.
“You never did listen,” he gasped.
“You never gave good instructions.”
We made it through the containers to a maintenance shed near the water. Callum barricaded the door while Elias opened the case on a workbench. Inside were folders sealed in plastic, drives wrapped in foil, and an old photograph of me at nine years old, missing a front tooth, perched on my father’s shoulders.
I picked it up with wet fingers.
My father could not look at me.
“I carried that through four countries,” he said.
“You could carry a picture but not call me?”
His face folded with pain.
“Rusk had people inside every agency that helped hide you. One contact slipped and used your first alias in a report. Two days later, a man followed you from a grocery store in Vermont. I led him away. After that, I knew any contact from me would paint a target on
