Chapter 136: Static

Chapter 136: Chapter 136: Static

Silver moved through the ruined study with quick, efficient steps, sweeping aside a collapsed bookshelf to reach the safe built into the wall behind it. The combination gave under his fingers on the third try, hands still not entirely steady, and he pulled the black satellite phone free the moment the door swung open.

"This still work?" Victor asked, watching him power it on.

"It should. Independent battery, independent signal. I had it built specifically so nothing about this house’s failures could take it down with it." Silver’s thumb moved over the keypad, dialing from memory rather than any stored contact list, and he lifted the phone to his ear.

It rang. And rang.

Victor watched Silver’s jaw tighten with every unanswered cycle, the particular stillness of a man refusing to let his face show what his chest was already bracing for.

Nothing. No voicemail, no click of connection, just the same hollow ringing until the call finally dropped on its own.

"Persephone doesn’t carry hers on her at all times," Silver said, more to himself than to Victor, the explanation arriving too fast to be anything but a man trying to talk himself out of panic. "She leaves it charging. It’s a habit her mother would’ve hated."

He dialed again anyway. Same result.

"Try someone else," Victor said quietly. "If she’s not answering, maybe someone near her is."

Silver’s expression shifted, something calculating replacing the raw fear for a moment. "Penelope, or Mary."

Victor nodded, though the names stayed mostly abstract to him — voices in Dahlia’s stories, a cousin she spoke of with warmth and exasperation in equal measure, a family friend Silver’s tone always softened around without him ever explaining exactly why.

Silver dialed a second number, this one longer, and lifted the phone to his ear again.

Ringing. Longer this time before it dropped, as though something on the other end had at least tried and failed to connect rather than simply not existing at all.

"No answer." Silver lowered the phone slowly, staring at it like it had personally betrayed him. "They’d be at the Ryker estate. Mary keeps that phone within arm’s reach at all times, and Penny would answer before the second ring out of pure stubbornness if nothing else. If neither of them are picking up—"

"It doesn’t mean the worst," Victor said, though he heard how thin the reassurance sounded even as he offered it. "Signal’s unreliable everywhere right now. I drove across half the city to get here and half my own radio traffic dropped mid-sentence the entire way."

Silver’s eyes cut toward him sharply. "You had radio traffic. Before you got here."

Victor hesitated, weighing exactly how much of the last several hours he was prepared to explain, and how much needed to stay buried where it couldn’t put anyone else at risk.

"I did, sir."

"Tell me."

Victor exhaled slowly, choosing his words the way he chose every word in front of Silver Azar — carefully, respectfully, never more than the situation required. "Two days ago, I got a call. Someone I trust — someone who’s never once wasted my time with something that wasn’t real — told me to get out of headquarters immediately. Said something was coming. Something worse than anything on the news."

"Did they say what?"

"Not clearly. Not at first." Victor’s jaw tightened, the memory of that phone call still sharp enough to feel physical. "I posted an anonymous warning before I left, in case there was any truth to it. I didn’t fully believe it myself until I was already driving and saw what was happening on the streets firsthand."

"Who was it?" Silver’s voice had gone low, precise, the tone of a man cataloguing every variable he could get his hands on. "The contact."

Victor met his eyes without flinching. "I’d rather not say, sir. Not because I don’t trust you. Because the fewer people who know his name right now, the safer he stays, and I owe him that much for the warning."

Silver studied him for a long moment, the same appraising look Victor remembered from years ago, back when Silver had first decided whether the half-dead soldier bleeding out in front of him was worth the risk of saving.

"Fair enough," Silver said finally, something almost like respect threading through the words. "I won’t press it. Not today."

Victor nodded once, grateful, though he knew the reprieve was likely temporary rather than permanent.

Silver looked back down at the satellite phone in his hand, thumb hovering over the dial again before he finally set it down on the desk, forcing himself, visibly, to move past the silence it had given him.

"We can’t wait on a phone that isn’t answering," he said. "We move. Persephone’s building first, since we know exactly where she is."

"Once Dahlia’s awake," Victor said, and it wasn’t a question.

"Once Dahlia’s awake," Silver agreed. "I’m not leaving this house with her still unconscious, no matter how much time it costs us."

Victor nodded, though something practical was already working its way through him, the soldier surfacing over the fiancé long enough to think past the immediate fear. "Sir, before we go anywhere, we need supplies. I saw what’s happening out there. It’s not a riot, it’s not looting gone wrong — the whole city’s falling apart, and it’s not going to put itself back together in a day. If we’re moving across town to reach Persephone, we need to be prepared to not come straight back here afterward."

Silver’s eyes sharpened, some of the raw grief from moments ago folding itself back beneath the surface as the calculating version of him reasserted control. "You’re talking about a siege footing."

"I’m talking about survival footing, sir. Food, water, medical supplies, ammunition, fuel. Whatever this house still has intact, we inventory it before we leave. Whatever we can carry with us, we take. And when we reach Persephone, we don’t assume we’re coming straight back — we plan for the possibility that we’re not."

Silver was quiet for a moment, processing, and Victor watched three decades of running a criminal empire reassert itself in the set of his shoulders — a man who had built an entire career on contingency planning, simply redirecting that same discipline toward a different kind of war.

"You’re right." Silver’s voice had steadied, some of the earlier panic burned away by having something concrete to organize around. "The pantry, the armory, whatever’s left of the medical supplies in the security office. We inventory everything within the hour."

"And a vehicle that can handle whatever’s left of the roads," Victor added. "Something that isn’t going to draw attention we don’t need."

Silver nodded, already turning toward the door, mentally cataloguing the house’s remaining resources with the same efficiency he’d have once applied to planning a shipment or securing a territory dispute. "There’s a reinforced SUV in the east garage. It survived whatever happened here — I saw it through the window on my way down."

They moved together back toward the hallway, the plan taking shape between them in short, clipped exchanges — what to take, what to leave, how long the inventory should reasonably take before it became a liability instead of a precaution.

They were halfway across the ruined front hall when a low, broken groan echoed down from the second floor.

Both men froze.

It came again — softer this time, unmistakably human, threaded through with the particular disoriented confusion of someone surfacing from somewhere far too deep to have simply been sleeping.

Victor’s chest seized.

"Doll?"

He was already moving, taking the stairs three at a time, Silver right behind him, both of them abandoning every careful, measured plan they’d just built in the space of a single sound.

Dahlia was waking up.