They didn't leave Caladria that night. They couldn't. The ferries had stopped running at midnight, and the airport was forty kilometers inland, accessible only by a highway that passed directly in front of Kovic's corporate headquarters. The border crossings were manned by police officers whose names were almost certainly in a red leather ledger. Every exit from the city was a door with Kovic's face on the other side.
Instead, Voss led them to a safe house in the old Jewish quarter, three blocks from his office on ulica Žrtava. It was an apartment above an abandoned synagogue, its windows boarded over with plywood, its only entrance a rusted fire escape that groaned under their weight. The interior was sparse but clean—a single room with a gas stove, a sink that dripped rust-colored water, and four cots pushed against the walls. A stack of canned food sat in one corner, alongside a first-aid kit and a shortwave radio that crackled with static.
"I've kept this place for years," Voss said, lighting the stove with a match. The blue flame cast trembling shadows on the ceiling. "After what happened to my partner, I knew I might need somewhere to disappear. I just never thought I'd be using it with guests."
Daniel was sitting on one of the cots, wrapped in a wool blanket despite the stove's warmth. He hadn't spoken much since they'd escaped the distillery. His eyes kept tracking to the boarded windows, to the door, to every shadow that moved in the corners of the room. It was the look of a man who had learned, in five days of captivity, that safety was an illusion.
The other two prisoners—the woman and the man with the swollen face—sat on adjacent cots. The woman's name was Amira. She was Syrian, a refugee who had paid a smuggler to bring her to Europe and ended up in Kovic's containers instead. The man was Ibrahim, an Egyptian construction worker who had been snatched from a job site in Cyprus and shipped back across the Mediterranean in a barrel of counterfeit olive oil. Neither of them had anywhere to go. Neither of them spoke Caladrian.
"We need to get them out too," Claire said. She was standing by the boarded window, peering through a gap in the plywood at the empty street below. "Not just Daniel. All of them."
"The same problem applies," Voss said. "Every exit is watched. Kovic may have let us walk out of the distillery, but that doesn't mean he's done with us. He's waiting to see what we do next. If we go to the police, he'll know. If we go to the consulate, he'll know. If we try to leave the city, he'll know."
"So we're trapped."
"We're in a safe house. There's a difference." Voss opened a can of beans and set it on the stove. "We have food for a week. We have water. We have time to think. And we have information Kovic doesn't know we have."
Claire turned from the window. "The USB drive."
"The manifests. The photo catalog. The shipping routes. It's not the ledger, but it's evidence. Detailed evidence. If we can get it to someone outside Caladria—someone Kovic can't reach—"
"INTERPOL," Daniel said. His voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper. "There's an INTERPOL office in Trieste. I saw it from the ferry, on the way in. Big building. Flags out front."
Voss nodded slowly. "Trieste is two hours by car, if you know the back roads. And I know the back roads. But crossing the border means passing through a checkpoint. And the border police report to Dragović, who reports to Kovic."
"There has to be another way." Claire sat down on the cot beside Daniel. "What about Daskalov? He betrayed us, but he also wanted the ledger. That means he's not allied with Kovic. He's playing his own game."
"Daskalov would sell us to the highest bidder. Right now, that's probably Kovic. But it might not always be." Voss stirred the beans absently, his pale eyes distant. "The ledger is still in Kovic's safe. Daskalov still wants it. And we're the only people who've ever gotten close enough to touch it."
"You want to use us as bait again."
"I want to use everything we have." Voss turned from the stove. "You came here to rescue your brother. You've done that. But if you leave now, if you go back to Pittsburgh and forget about Velden, Kovic will keep doing exactly what he's been doing. More people will disappear. More containers will ship. More families will get phone calls in the middle of the night."
Claire looked at Daniel, at the bruises on his face, at the hollow emptiness in his eyes. She thought about the photograph in Kovic's shipping catalog, the way Daniel had looked at the camera like a man who had already stopped believing in rescue. She thought about the other faces in that catalog—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, their names unknown, their fates unrecorded.
"We can't just leave," she said.
"I know." Daniel's voice was stronger now. "I saw things in that container. I heard things. There were children, Claire. They kept the children in a separate room. I could hear them crying at night."
Amira looked up at the word children. Her dark eyes, which had been fixed on the floor, suddenly sharpened. "The children are still there. In the distillery. In the basement below the loading bays. I heard them when they moved us. The guards call it the nursery."
Claire felt something shift inside her, a tectonic plate grinding against another. She had come to Velden to save one person. Now she was learning that the problem was bigger than Daniel, bigger than the container, bigger than anything she had imagined.
"How many children?" she asked.
"I don't know. Five. Maybe six. They keep them separate from the adults. They sell them separately too." Amira's voice was flat, the voice of someone who had learned to describe horror without feeling it. "The children are worth more."
Voss had stopped stirring the beans. His face was very still, the face of a man who was calculating odds he didn't like. "We can't assault the distillery again. Kovic will have tripled his security. The tunnel will be sealed or guarded. We'd never get close."
"Then we don't assault it," Claire said. "We burn it."
The word hung in the air like smoke. No one spoke for a long moment. The shortwave radio crackled with static, a distant voice speaking in a language none of them understood.
"Burn it," Voss repeated. "You're talking about arson. Destruction of property. Possibly murder, if there are guards inside."
"I'm talking about destroying Kovic's operation. His warehouse, his bottling line, his shipping hub. Without the distillery, he can't produce his counterfeit spirits. Without the spirits, he loses his cover. Without the cover, the trafficking operation collapses."
"Or he rebuilds somewhere else. Or he retaliates. Or innocent people die in the fire." Voss shook his head. "Fire isn't a scalpel, Claire. It's a hammer. It destroys everything it touches, not just the things you want to destroy."
"Then we give him a choice. Give us the ledger, release the children, or watch his empire burn. We have the manifests. We have the evidence. We can make copies, send them to INTERPOL, send them to journalists, send them to every consulate in Velden. Even if the police won't act, the publicity will destroy him."
Voss was silent, but Claire saw something flicker in his pale eyes—something that might have been respect, or might have been fear. "You've thought about this."
"I've been thinking about it since we walked out of his office. He let us go because he thought we were broken. He thought we'd run home and hide. But we're not broken. We're just getting started."
Daniel reached out and took Claire's hand. His grip was weak, but his voice was steady. "I'm with you. Whatever you decide."
Amira nodded. Ibrahim, who had been silent the entire time, raised his swollen hand in a gesture that needed no translation.
Voss looked at them—the American law student, the rescued brother, the Syrian refugee, the Egyptian laborer. An unlikely army, assembled by accident, united by nothing except their refusal to let Kovic win.
"There's an old warehouse on the southern docks," Voss said finally. "Daskalov uses it for storage. He keeps industrial equipment there—generators, fuel drums, chemicals for cleaning ship hulls. If you're serious about burning the distillery, that's where we'd get the materials."
"You're agreeing to this?"
"I'm agreeing that something has to be done. And I've spent eight years doing nothing." Voss turned back to the stove and spooned the beans into chipped ceramic bowls. "Eat. Rest. We move at dawn. We'll need to contact Daskalov, and that means walking into another trap. But this time, we'll be the ones setting it."
They ate in silence. The beans were tasteless, but Claire forced herself to finish them. Her body needed fuel, even if her mind was too full of fire to notice the hunger.
After the meal, Daniel fell asleep on his cot, his breathing finally steady after days of terror. Amira and Ibrahim followed, their exhausted bodies surrendering to the safety of the locked room. Claire lay awake, staring at the ceiling, listening to the distant sound of church bells tolling across the city.
Voss sat by the window, keeping watch, his pistol on his knee. In the dim glow of the stove, his face looked older than it had in daylight—the lines deeper, the shadows heavier.
"Your partner," Claire said quietly. "The one Kovic killed. What was his name?"
Voss didn't look at her. "Stefan. Stefan Novak."
"Novak. Like Inspector Novak."
"Her brother. She was a patrol officer then, just out of the academy. She looked up to him. When he died, something in her died too. She's been careful ever since. Too careful to cross Kovic. Too careful to help us." Voss's voice was barely a whisper. "She's not a bad cop. She's just a survivor. In Velden, that's sometimes the only thing left to be."
Claire thought about Inspector Novak, the woman with the severe bun and the exhausted eyes, who had warned her to go home. She thought about the warning, and the fear behind it, and the brother who had died trying to do the right thing.
"When this is over," Claire said, "maybe she'll be able to stop surviving and start living again."
"Maybe. Or maybe we'll all be dead, and Kovic will still be standing in his office, looking at his hunting paintings, counting his money." Voss turned from the window, and his pale eyes caught the stove's blue flame. "Justice is a strange thing, Claire. It doesn't always arrive on time. Sometimes it doesn't arrive at all. And sometimes it arrives with a cost so high you wish you'd never asked for it."
"I'm not asking for justice. I'm asking for an end to this."
"That's the same thing." Voss turned back to the window. "Sleep. We have a long day tomorrow."
Claire closed her eyes, but sleep was a long time coming. When it finally arrived, it brought dreams of fire—fire spreading through the distillery's corridors, fire consuming the Bad Spaniel labels, fire licking at the edges of a red leather ledger. And in the dream, she was not running from the flames. She was standing in the center of them, and she was not afraid.
She woke at dawn to the sound of the shortwave radio, its static resolving into a voice speaking English with a heavy Caladrian accent. The voice was reading the morning news, and the news was about her.
"—American woman, Claire Harper, is wanted for questioning in connection with a break-in at a private distillery on the Velden waterfront. Authorities warn that she may be armed and dangerous. Anyone with information about her whereabouts is urged to contact the Velden Municipal Police immediately."
Voss was already on his feet, his face grim. "Kovic has activated his network. The police, the media, probably the border guards too. We're not just fugitives now. We're public enemies."
"Can we still reach Daskalov?"
"There's a way. But it's riskier now. Much riskier." Voss pulled on his coat. "Wake the others. We need to move before the city fully wakes up."
Claire shook Daniel awake. Amira and Ibrahim were already sitting up, their eyes alert despite their exhaustion. The room was cold—the stove had gone out during the night—and the boarded windows glowed faintly with the gray light of another overcast morning.
"Where are we going?" Daniel asked.
"To see a man who betrayed us," Claire said. "And this time, we're not leaving without what we came for."
They descended the fire escape into the alley, six figures moving through the predawn mist like ghosts. The city was waking around them—bakers opening their shops, fishermen hauling their catches to market, church bells calling the faithful to morning mass. But the streets of ulica Žrtava remained empty, as if the neighborhood itself was holding its breath.
And somewhere above them, in his oak-paneled office, Zarek Kovic was watching the news broadcast on a flat-screen television, his cold eyes reflecting the image of Claire Harper's passport photo. He smiled, and the smile was the same smile he had worn when they'd walked out of his office—the smile of a man who knew that the trap was still closing, and that the prey was still inside.
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