Two months later
CELESTE'S POV
We lost eleven crates of product that should have arrived at the east warehouse on a Thursday and arrived, instead, three days late and two crates short, with a driver who couldn't account for either the delay or the discrepancy with anything resembling a straight story. Missing products are never, in this business, actually about the product. It's about who had the opportunity to make it disappear, and why, and whether that opportunity was an accident or an arrangement.
I went to the depot myself rather than sending Dax. A driver lies more carefully to a subordinate than he lies to the person who can actually end him. I had learned, over two years of running this operation, that some conversations were worth having in person even when they cost me an afternoon I didn't particularly have to spare.
I did not learn anything useful from the driver. I learned something considerably more useful from Arden, who mentioned, almost in passing, while walking me through the depot's rotation of staff, that the new one on the cameras had flagged something about the east loading bay weeks ago. Nothing anyone had taken seriously at the time, since the man barely spoke to anyone and mostly kept to himself, but worth mentioning now, given the circumstances.
"Which new one," I said, though I already suspected the answer before Arden finished giving it to me.
I found the taller captive exactly where I expected to find him, eleven screens and a logbook, and I watched him for a moment before he noticed me, doing a job that asked nothing of him except attention, out of habit rather than any expectation of being seen doing it.
"Arden tells me you've noticed something unusual with the east loading bay." I said, and watched him go carefully, deliberately blank, like he was deciding in real time how much of the truth was safe to hand over.
"A gap in the coverage. Ninety seconds, give or take; most times the heavier trucks come through." He said it evenly, without any particular emphasis, the way you'd report weather rather than a discovery. "I wasn't certain it meant anything."
"How long have you known?"
"Since my second week."
I did not raise my voice, though I understood, exactly how much time had passed. "Why didn't you tell me?"
He considered the question with more care than I expected.
"It wasn't important enough to interrupt whatever you were doing," he said finally. "You have considerably larger problems than ninety seconds of dead camera at a loading bay. I didn't think it was my place to decide otherwise."
"You decided otherwise for two months," I said. "Quietly. And you kept looking anyway, and told no one. You let a truck go missing before anyone with the authority to do something about it heard a word of it from you."
Something crossed his face at that, not quite shame, though close enough to it that I understood I'd landed somewhere true.
"I wasn't sure it mattered," he said again, quieter this time, and I understood, hearing the repetition, that this was not modesty. This was a man who had been told, that his own observations were worth exactly as much as someone else decided to value them. He had apparently never once been given a reason to believe otherwise.
"It mattered," I said. "It matters considerably more than you seem to have decided it did."
He didn't answer that right away. I let the silence sit, rather than filling the space myself out of discomfort.
"You're moving." I said finally, when he still hadn't found an answer worth giving me. Something shuttered behind his eyes, like he was bracing for a punishment he'd already decided he deserved.
"As what?" he said, and I understood, hearing it, exactly what he thought I meant.
"You're coming to the house."
"As what?" he asked again, and this time I heard the actual question underneath it. Not fear of the answer, but genuine confusion. He had spent five months learning that every reassignment in his life came dressed as an improvement right up until it wasn't one.
"House help," I said. "For now."
He studied me for a long moment, the particular careful attention I'd already come to recognize from him. "Because I found the gap?"
"Because you're useful, and I'd rather have useful people somewhere I can personally keep an eye on than scattered across a depot two miles away where anyone with a grudge and a free hour can decide to lean on them instead."
I have never seen much use in explaining more of my reasoning than a situation strictly required, and I did not, that afternoon, consider Jace's comfort important enough to change that habit. I had already suspected that Reeves had something to do with this situation. He must've threatened him to stay silent. That's how these things worked. And a man like Reeve, who had been in this field of work for so long knew how to save his ass. I made a mental note to deal with Reeve later.
"Thank you," he said, and I heard, underneath it, the particular flatness of someone who did not yet fully believe the ground beneath the offer. Yet he was thanking me anyway.
I did not tell him, walking out of that depot, that I had already decided in the last ten minutes that I intended to keep him considerably closer than a housekeeping assignment would strictly require. This was strategy.
JACE'S POV
I packed the little I owned into a single bag that evening, which did not take long, since five months of captivity leaves a man with remarkably little worth carrying. I understood, walking out of that depot for the last time, that I had just survived something I hadn't fully understood the shape of until it was already over.
I have wondered, since, whether Celeste's arrival that afternoon was accident or instinct, and I have never quite settled on an answer I trust completely. I only knew, riding back toward the house in the passenger seat of a car I hadn't been asked to drive, that I had been moved again, reassigned again, handed off from one set of hands to another the way I had been my entire life. This time, however, for reasons I did not yet have the vocabulary to name, it had not felt the same as any of the times before it.
~
Alec found me in the east cottage that evening. They hadn't shown me which room was to be mine yet, so I was asked to stay here with Alec for the night. The security was a lot tighter around this room than it was back where I'd been sleeping the past 5 months.
Alec stood in the doorway for a long moment just looking at me, as if he was confirming for himself that I was actually still in one piece. "They told me you found something at the depot," he finally said. "Nobody would tell me what."
"A gap in a camera feed," I told him. "It turned out to matter more than I expected it to."
"You could have told me you were sitting on something like that."
"I didn't have any means to contact you. Even if I did, I wouldn't want you carrying it too," I said, which was true, and which he seemed to understand as true, because he didn't push further, only crossed the room and sat heavily on the edge of the bed that would be mine for the night.
He rubbed a hand over his face in the specific tired way he did when he'd spent a day buried in numbers that refused to cooperate. "We're actually going to survive this," he said, not quite a question, more like a fact he was testing out loud to see whether it held its shape once spoken.
"I don't know," I told him honestly. "But I think we're both, somehow, becoming useful enough that they might let us try."
He laughed at that, short and disbelieving, the same sound I remembered from a warehouse floor five months earlier, before either of us understood how much further there still was to fall.
"Useful," he said. "My father used to say that was the only insurance men like us ever really had. I used to think it sounded exhausting. I'm starting to understand he might have simply been right."
We sat with that a while. In a room neither of us had chosen, in a house that had taken everything from us and was, in its own strange and complicated fashion, beginning to give a small measure of it back.