KaSandra stayed for two hours.
She told them everything she knew about the assassination clan, which was more than anyone else in the room knew and less than any of them wanted. An organization that predated Victor by centuries, operating outside any allegiance, available to anyone with the means and the gravity of purpose to hire them. Not mercenaries, she was careful to make that distinction, mercenaries worked for money and could be outbid. The assassination clan worked for something older than money, a code that had to do with the purity of the contract, the completion of the thing once begun.
Once dispatched they did not stop.
They did not negotiate.
They did not make mistakes.
When she left the basement felt different from how it had felt before she arrived, heavier and more awake at the same time, the specific alertness of people who have been reminded that the world they are operating in has real edges.
Thomas immediately restructured the watch schedule.
Nobody argued.
The days that followed had a different texture. Training continued but with an added layer of urgency underneath it, the combination work that Niall had suggested moving faster now because fast had stopped being a preference and become a necessity. Katherine and Samantha refined their combined ability until they could produce it on demand and with control. Jasper worked with Courtney on something quieter and stranger that Thomas watched with focused attention and said nothing about yet, which meant he was still figuring out what it was.
Dean added perimeter checks to his window watching.
Engel began sleeping with a weapon under his pillow, which Katherine only knew because she heard him tell Grace and Grace had said I already do in a tone that suggested she had been doing it for years.
On the fourth day after KaSandra's visit the phones rang.
Not one phone. Three.
Within the same hour.
It started with Niall.
He was in the kitchen when his phone went off and Katherine was at the table and she saw his face change when he looked at the screen, a change that was small and fast and then very controlled, the face of someone receiving information and choosing immediately to manage the receiving of it.
He answered.
Katherine watched him listen.
His hand on the counter tightened slowly, the knuckles going pale, and his jaw set in the particular way it set when he was holding something in that needed to be held in until he understood it completely.
He said very little. A few words. Then he hung up and stood with his hand still on the counter and looked at the wall.
"Niall," Katherine said quietly.
He looked at her.
His eyes were bright and very controlled and the control was costing him.
"My mother is dead," he said. "Her neck was sliced." A pause that was doing an enormous amount of work. "My father is in a coma. They found him this morning."
The kitchen held this.
Katherine stood up from the table.
She didn't say anything. She crossed the kitchen and stood beside him and put her hand on his arm, solid and present, because there was nothing to say that would be anything other than inadequate and she knew it and he knew it and being there was the only honest thing.
Niall looked at the wall for a moment longer.
Then he looked at the ceiling briefly in the way he had, the way people look at ceilings when they are deciding something about their face.
He looked back down.
"I'm okay," he said.
Katherine held his gaze.
"You don't have to be," she said.
"I know," he said. "I'm okay anyway."
It was true and it wasn't true and both of those things were allowed to exist at the same time and Katherine didn't push on either of them.
Kristen's phone rang twenty minutes later.
She was in the hallway and Katherine heard it from the kitchen and heard the change in Kristen's voice within the first few seconds of the call, that shift from normal to braced that happens when a voice on the other end of a line says something that requires bracing for.
The call was short.
Kristen came into the kitchen with her phone in her hand and her face composed with the specific composure that was different from her usual composure, tighter at the edges, held in place by effort rather than ease.
She looked at Niall.
Something passed between them in that look, the particular recognition of two people who have just received the same kind of news.
"My father is dead," Kristen said. Her voice was even and flat and completely controlled. "My mother is missing."
The words sat in the kitchen.
Niall crossed to her and put his arms around her without saying anything and Kristen stood in it for exactly two seconds and then stepped back and held herself upright with both hands at her sides.
"I'm going to find her," she said. Not to anyone in particular. Just as a statement of fact, a thing she was telling herself as much as anyone else.
"We'll find her," Katherine said. "Together."
Kristen looked at her with those green eyes that were bright and hard and full of something that was grief and fury held in careful check and she nodded once.
The third phone rang while they were still standing there.
Courtney's.
She was upstairs and they heard it distantly and then heard her voice, and the quality of it even muffled by the floor and the ceiling above them told them what they needed to know before she came downstairs.
She came into the kitchen pale and very still, her long brown hair falling forward, her light brown eyes carrying the particular expression of someone who has received a blow that has not fully landed yet.
She looked at Niall and Kristen and she already knew, the way they already knew about her.
"My mother passed away," she said. "She never recovered." Her voice was very quiet. "My father is still in a coma." She stopped. "They said he's stable. They said he might still—" She stopped again.
Kristen moved first, crossing to Courtney and taking both her hands, and then Niall was there too and the three of them stood together in the kitchen in a cluster that had no room for anyone else in it and wasn't meant to.
Katherine stepped back.
She stood in the doorway and watched them hold each other up and felt something in her chest that was grief and fury of her own, slow burning and deep, the kind that doesn't announce itself loudly but settles in and stays.
The assassination clan.
One assassin. Already moving. And this was what moving looked like.
Not a frontal attack. Not a fight they could prepare for and meet with weapons drawn. This was something colder and more precise, an attack on the things that couldn't be defended by training or power or any amount of preparation, the people on the outside of the circle who couldn't protect themselves because they didn't know what they needed protecting from.
Thomas appeared in the doorway behind Katherine.
He looked at the three of them in the kitchen and his face went through something swift and dark and then settled into the expression he wore when he had decided what needed to be done and was moving toward doing it.
He looked at Katherine.
She looked back at him.
"Canada," he said quietly. Just to her.
She nodded.
He meant they couldn't wait any longer. The assassin was already working and every day they weren't moving toward the last piece of what they were building was a day the thing they were building remained incomplete, and incomplete meant vulnerable in ways they couldn't afford.
But not today.
Today the kitchen belonged to Niall and Kristen and Courtney and the space they needed that nobody else could fill.
Katherine turned and walked down the hall and found Carlyle sitting on the stairs, his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands.
She sat beside him.
He looked up. His eyes were wet and he didn't do anything about it.
"This is the assassin," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"They went after the parents because they couldn't get to us."
"Yes."
Carlyle looked at the front door. "We have to end this."
"We will," Katherine said.
"When?"
She looked at the door too.
"Soon," she said. And the word came out quiet and certain and carrying every ounce of what she meant by it, which was not a comfort or a reassurance but a promise, the kind you make when you have decided something completely and there is nothing left to decide.
Carlyle nodded.
From the kitchen the sound of the three of them, low voices and the particular quiet of shared grief, continued.
Outside the house the world went about its business the way the world always did, indifferent and ongoing, and inside it something had shifted in the group that could not be unshifted, a line that had been crossed that changed the nature of what they were fighting and why and what it was going to cost.
Katherine sat on the stairs with her brother and looked at the front door and thought about an assassin already moving toward them and a boy in Canada surrounded by suits and a fire that had been burning in a confined space too long and needed somewhere larger to go.
She thought about Niall's mother who had called him baby and told him to call home every few days.
She thought about Kristen's father who had said yeah she would with rough warmth in his voice.
She thought about Courtney's mother who had held her daughter's face in both hands and said you come back like it was a requirement.
The fury settled deeper.
The promise held.