All Chapters of Bred for Betrayal : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

POV: Nora Sera Ashford. My father's sister. Dead before I was born, according to every family conversation I had ever half-heard as a child, a name that existed only as a brief sadness my father would close off quickly whenever it surfaced. I had never questioned it because the grief around it had always felt genuine and finished, the kind that has been processed and put somewhere specific. Not dead. Hidden. And looking for me since he died. I had approximately four hours to sit with that information before Elias moved us into the next phase, because the Syndicate's acceleration changed the timeline and waiting was no longer an option we could afford. He explained it with the particular efficiency of someone who had been planning for this contingency and needed me functional rather than processing. I was functional. I filed Sera in the same place I'd filed everything else that was too large to fully absorb in real time, and I got ready. Marcus's office building had a security ro

POV: Nora Elias left me in the apartment. Not alone, the man from the lobby was posted outside the door, but alone in the way that mattered, which was without information or explanation. He had said he needed to manage the situation at the hospital and that I should stay put and not contact Chen until he returned. He had said it in the voice that didn't invite negotiation and I had let him go because Jade had just delivered a baby whose paternity had blown a hole in everything we thought we understood about her operation, and that required immediate handling. I sat with it for an hour. Then I made tea and sat with it for another hour. The baby was active, pushing against my ribs in the persistent way she'd developed in the last two weeks, and I put my hand on my side and breathed and thought about Jade in a hospital bed somewhere with a baby that wasn't Marcus's and what that meant for every assumption we'd built the last two months on. Jade hadn't been building an exit from Marcu

POV: Nora I showed Elias the message from Sera. He read it once and his expression did the thing it did when he was managing a response before allowing it to show. Then he set the phone down and said, "You're not going alone." "She said come alone." "She said if I come with you she won't be there. That's a different thing. I'll have someone positioned nearby who isn't me." He was already moving toward the operational register, the one where everything became logistics. "She's been compromised at her location which means whoever found her is moving and we need to extract her before the meeting regardless of her preferences." "She's been hiding for three years," I said. "She knows how to manage her own safety." "She's been hiding for three years and they just found her. That's not a safety record, that's a deadline." He picked up his phone. "I'll make the arrangements." I looked at him making arrangements. Moving pieces. Managing outcomes. And I thought about Clara, and the two p

POV: Nora I put the phone face down on the table. Not because I wanted to hide it from Marcus. Because whoever had sent that photograph had been standing outside this window in the last ten minutes, and that was a more immediate problem than anything happening inside the bar. I looked at the window. The street beyond it was ordinary, people moving, no one standing still in the way of someone who had just taken a photograph and was waiting to see the response. They were already gone. They had sent it and walked away, which meant the point wasn't surveillance. The point was to make me aware that I was being watched and by someone who knew both my location and Elias's name. Marcus was looking at my face. "What's wrong." "Nothing." I put the phone in my bag. "You were saying." He looked at the bag for a moment, then at me, and let it go. "I was saying that I know what I've done. Not the version my lawyers have constructed, not the framing that makes it a clean business arrangement.

POV: Nora I showed Elias the message from Jade before he came back inside. I texted it to him while he was still in the corridor making calls, and thirty seconds later his footsteps came back through the door faster than they'd left. He read it standing up, phone in hand, and I watched him process the double contact, Jade reaching out to him anonymously through one channel and to me directly through another, and understand what it meant. "She's splitting us," he said. "She's trying to." I kept my voice level. "She sent me a direct threat and she sent you a business proposition. Both on the same day. She wants to see which of us moves first and whether we move together or separately." He looked at the message on my phone again. "What she has for you specifically." "I don't know. Could be the bar photograph. Could be something else she's been holding." I took the phone back. "Could be nothing and the threat is the whole play." "It's not nothing." He sat across from me. "A woman r