365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 12

365 Days, Zero Missed Calls Chapter 12 – I Can Hear Her Heartbeat

Mara found it in fifty-one minutes.

A decommissioned cold-storage facility eleven miles from the coast road, owned through four shell companies that all eventually kissed a Hallow bank account. No windows. No cell coverage. Backup generator running for the last nine days.

Nine days. He’d been ready for over a week.

We staged in a treeline at 9:40 p.m.

Marek’s twelve took the perimeter. Flora took the south vehicle gate. Enzo put a drone up at four hundred feet, and my brothers sat in the second van with their hands flat on their knees and their mouths shut, because I’d told them what would happen if they moved.

“Talk to me, Commander,” Marek said, crouched beside me.

“Give me a second.”

I closed my eyes.

I have spent a year learning to do this and I still don’t have words for it. It’s like turning a dial through static. First the wind. Then the generator. Then a bird settling in the gutter. Then footsteps – count them, place them,

hold them.

“Slower,” Echo murmured. “Go under the machines.”

I went under the machines.

Eleven heartbeats inside.

Nine of them in the main floor space, spread wide, three near the north door, patrolling.

One in a small room at the back, seated, slow and steady and arrogant.

And one-one-sitting very still in the middle of everything, going far too fast.

I know my mother’s heart. I fell asleep on her chest for the first four years of my life.

“She’s alive,” I said, and my voice did something embarrassing. “Center of the building. Eleven hostiles. Three

on the north door, six roaming, Hallow’s in the back office. Two rifles, the rest handguns.”

Marek stared at me. “How could you possibly-”

“Because I can hear the difference between a rifle sling and a belt holster,” I said. “Are we doing this or are we discussing my resume?”

That’s my girl,” said Echo.

Here’s the thing nobody in that building understood.

Cyrus Hallow had spent a hundred and eighteen years waiting for a Vale girl he could put in a chair and use as a listening device:

He had never once considered that a Vale girl might come through his door as a Vanguard Commander with twenty-five trained operatives, a drone, and the King’s warrant in her pocket.

He was waiting for a hostage.

He got an officer.

We went in at 9:58 through the south vehicle door, because at 9:58 the generator load cycles and the whole building coughs, and I could hear it coming eleven seconds before it happened.

Flora’s team took the north door in under four seconds.

Marek moved like something out of a nightmare. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I grew up around men

who kill for a living.

I went straight up the center.

Two men came around a stack of pallets at me and I heard them decide to do it a full second before they did it. That’s the whole trick, in the end. That’s the entire gift. Not power. Time. Everyone else is living in the present; I get to live half a second in front of it.

I put the first one down with his own momentum and the second with a knee he’ll be feeling at sixty.

And then there was a chair in the middle of a concrete floor, and my mother in it.

Giselle Vale looked up.

I’ve thought about what I’d do if I ever saw her again. In the boathouse I had entire speeches. Cold ones.

Perfect ones. I used to say them out loud to the ceiling.

She looked up, and she saw a Vanguard uniform, and it took her a moment.

Then she said, “Rowan?” – and it came out like a prayer from someone who’d stopped believing in God – and every single one of those speeches evaporated out of my head forever.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, and cut the zip ties. “Sorry I’m late. I was busy.”

She made a sound like she was dying.

“Don’t,” I said. “Not here. Get up. Behind me. Now.”

I got her four steps toward the south door before the back office opened.

“MOVE!” I shoved her sideways behind a pallet stack as the first shot went into the concrete where her head

had been.

Cyrus Hallow came out with a pistol in one hand, walking calmly across his own floor like a man at a garden/ party, while his men were being folded up around him.

“There she is,” he said. “The little Vale.”

“Cyrus Hallow. By the warrant of the Crown, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, conspiracy, and one hundred

and eighteen years of stupidity.”

He laughed. He actually laughed.

“You have no idea what you are,” he said. “Your family made you a servant. I’d have made you a queen.”

He raised the pistol.

And I heard him decide.

I heard him decide before his hand moved that lovely, ugly little half-second – and I was already dropping as the shot went over me, and I came up under his arm, and I broke his wrist across my forearm.

He screamed.

I put him on the floor and knelt on his spine and leaned down to his ear, and I made sure my mother heard

every word.

“Marguerite Vale,” I said. “Say her name.”

“You little-”

I leaned.

“Marguerite Vale,” he gasped.

“She’s got a stone now,” I said. “I bought it with my own money last week, before I knew she was mine.”
Then the Royal Guard came through the south door, and it was over, and my mother was on her knees ora

filthy concrete floor with both hands pressed over her mouth, sobbing my name into her palms