Page 68 of Make Them Cry
“Carefully,” Juno adds. “On her terms.”
“She wants in,” I say. “She hates feeling like this is happening to her. Today she took down a troll in under ten minutes and smiled like she remembered how.”
Juno’s smile goes soft. “That’s our girl.”
I jerk my chin at the screen. “We still don’t have Regent. And Tasha…”
Arrow’s expression tightens. “Yeah.”
I brace. “River doesn’t know about Tasha. And we’re not a hundred percent. I’m not telling her until we are.”
“Agreed,” Arrow says immediately. “We don’t accuse a friend on a hunch.”
Juno worries her bottom lip between her teeth. “Then we make it not-a-hunch. We need Tasha in a room where she drops a thread we can follow. Somewhere she thinks she’s safe.”
“HR,” I say. “Her turf.”
Juno shakes her head. “Too obvious. Too many variables. And if she suspects, she’ll sanitize before she even leaves her desk.”
Arrow swivels toward her. “What are you thinking?”
“A girls’ night,” Juno says, like it’s the most obvious op in the world. “At my place. Low-stakes. Wine, face masks, zero men allowed. I invite River because she needs a soft landing. I invite Tasha because she won’t say no to being the supportive friend. And—” she glances at me “—we invite Lark.”
My brain stutters. “My sister?”
“She’s funny as hell, people tell her things, and she can read a room like she coded it,” Juno says. “She won’t know the op details—no one will except us—but she’ll keep the energy right. River will relax. Tasha will relax. We’ll see what falls out.”
Arrow is already nodding. “Juno runs point inside. We run point outside.”
I can see it—Juno pouring wine, Lark telling some ridiculous story about me falling off a skateboard when I was twelve, River laughing until her shoulders lift and drop and stay dropped. Tasha watching, calculating. The places in the conversation where HR policy knowledge leaks into bathroom gossip. The names she shouldn’t know, the timestamps she shouldn’t have.
“Clues,” I say slowly. “Not a gotcha. Just enough to anchor a warrant. Or to justify an internal audit so thorough Regent gets heat rash.”
“Exactly,” Juno says.
Arrow taps keys, new boxes popping on the screen like a constellation. “I’ll set an RF sniffer in the hallway outside your place and on your fire escape. If she uses her phone, we’ll get MACs, signal strength, app chatter. If she’s on a work device, even better.”
“Render can float the building with a passive cam in a plant across the hall,” I add. “Time stamps on comings and goings. He loves pretending to be David Attenborough for urban fauna.”
Juno laughs. “He does. It’s unsettling.”
“And Knight?” Arrow asks.
“He’ll shadow the route to and from Juno’s,” I say. “If Tasha detours, we follow. If she meets someone, we meet them too.”
Juno’s phone buzzes. She glances and grins. “Speak of chaos: Lark just texted me a cursed meme. She’s in for Friday if there’s pizza.”
“Of course there’s pizza,” I say automatically, already texting my sister.Friday. Juno’s. Girls’ night. Bring your gremlin charm. Be kind to River.
Three dots. Then:Was born kind. Will deploy gremlin charm at 20% unless escalation warranted. Proud of u, idiot.
I exhale through a laugh I didn’t know I had left.
Arrow sobers. “We keep River out of any sharp edges. Juno asks soft questions: How’s HR handling the fallout? Who triages reports? Has compliance changed policy? Watch for tells.”
Juno nods. “No traps. No corners. I’m not trying to break her. I’m trying to see who she is when she thinks she’s not being watched.”
“She’s been watching River,” I say flatly, rage surfacing like a dorsal fin. “From the inside.”
