Page 1

CHAPTER ONE

Grace Harlan didn’t need caffeine to feel alert. Her body ran on precision now. Predictable routines, optimized input, minimal noise. Still, she cupped the paper mug between both hands, letting the heat soak into her palms as she watched the steam rise in soft spirals toward the recessed ceiling of the NCIS Cyber Division. The overhead fluorescents, third row, second from the left, whirred faintly, always a half-second delay when they flicked on, just enough to be irritating.

This facility in the middle of the desert just outside Phoenix, Arizona, had its own kind of silence.

Not the quiet, peaceful kind that came with still mornings or slow rain. This dense silence was institutional. Measured in badge swipes and locked doors.

Grace walked the same path every morning. Past the armed checkpoint. Past the blue-and-gray corridors lined with framed insignias and grainy satellite photos. The air always smelled faintly of copier toner and reheated coffee. A security camera followed her movements with the same indifference as the people who passed her in the hall.

Inside the dead-end department they had buried her in, the light changed. Cooler. Brighter. Harsher, somehow. Rows of desks stretched under low ceilings, each workstation boxed in by partitions and silent keyboards. The sound of typing was constant. The conversations, when they happened, stayed clipped and low. The walls were clean. The monitors never slept, and no one asked questions unless they had to.

Her office was more a partitioned shadow, tucked at the far end of the floor. A forgotten corner between two overworked analysts and a cold vent that blew year-round. No nameplate, no door. Her work didn’t need visibility. That was the point.

She slid into her chair, powered up the three monitors, and opened her scripts. Lines of code blinked across the screen, familiar and silent, the only language that never asked for more than she could give.

Here, in this space, she could vanish without effort. Just another ghost in the machine.

Most days, she preferred it that way.

Across the bullpen, someone laughed too loudly, a sharp break in the usual hum of data queries and digital scans. Grace blinked once, steady, then turned back to her screen. Six open windows, two databases syncing, her own script running a checksum, a number or value generated from a block of data that helped to verify the data's integrity and detect errors or tampering, all ran in the background just to confirm the government-issued software hadn’t missed anything. It had. Twice.

Her fingers hovered above the keys, paused. Then she resumed auditing a naval drone maintenance invoice, something under a subcontractor’s subcontractor. The numbers were off. Not by much. Just enough to itch.

It wouldn’t matter.

She could flag the discrepancy, add a note, cross-reference the timestamped approval chain. But the report would be passed up, filtered, sanitized, and buried somewhere no one would touch again. That was the rhythm here.

A junior analyst leaned into her doorway. She didn’t look up.

“Morning, Grace,” he said.

“Morning,” she replied, still typing.

A pause, too long to be casual. Then the shuffle of awkward shoes stepping away. The click of his keyboard resumed a few desks down.

People liked her. They just didn’t know what to do with her. She was polite, quiet, competent, exactly the kind of person you thanked in passing but never invited to lunch. She hadn’t always been like this. There was a version of her that used to laugh without flinching. She remembered that girl sometimes, like a dream seen through glass.

Grace minimized her report and glanced at the corner of her monitor. The date flickered. It had been one year to the day since she was pulled off active field intel. One year since a breach she didn’t cause left four people dead, and her body shattered in ways no one could see unless the sleeves rode up too far or someone caught her flinch when the elevator jolted.

Before that, she had been the quiet one in the room full of guns, the field agent with a keyboard instead of a trigger, deployed alongside shadows and operators, trusted to see threats before they hit.

The mission was supposed to be a drone test. Routine.

Mouthpieces called it a malfunction. Grace knew better.

Thinking about it never helped. The body remembered enough without her mind joining in.

She touched the keyboard again, grounding herself.

The numbers made sense. They were her language now. Clean. Contained. They didn’t ask questions like How are you really? or Do you still dream about the screaming? They didn’t look at her the way her mother did the week after the tribunal with that polite, polished silence that said everything without speaking.

Grace clicked back to the checksum. Something flickered. A vendor string that shouldn’t have rerouted. Her pulse ticked higher, then evened out. She flagged the anomaly, already pulling the associated files.

Outside her glass partition, the world spun fast and wild, chaotic in a way that scraped raw against the bone. Inside, it was nothing but dry wasteland, air recycled until it tasted of paper and regret, a desert of hollow tasks that even a blindfolded monkey could have managed. Here, in her little corner of faded screens and dying light.

The day passed quickly with Grace working fast and efficiently. When she finished for the day, the lights hummed overhead, the bullpen emptying. A few goodbyes.

She stood, smoothed her blouse, and reached for the navy-blue cardigan framing the back of her chair. The fabric was soft, a barrier between skin and questions. She draped it over her arm and deleted her local logs with three quick keystrokes before locking her terminal.

She hadn’t been this far down the corridor since her transfer. Since the tribunal stripped her from the heartbeat of NCIS at the Washington Navy Yard and dropped her here in this dusty cyber forensics’ unit in the middle of Arizona. An analyst graveyard where careers went to die.

Once, she had been a rising star. Now she was a quiet problem no one wanted to deal with.

She left the facility just after sunset, the parking lot half-empty, the sky bleeding out the last of its heat in long orange smears. It was late January, but there was nothing cool about winter here. The still air was a dry slap against her skin. The asphalt radiated heat even after dark, the scent of scorched rubber and dust clinging to the back of her throat.

Grace moved on autopilot, sandals crunching against gravel as she crossed to her car. The steering wheel would be too hot to touch without sleeves. The interior would smell like sun-baked plastic and defeat.

She drove home with the windows cracked, letting the furnace blast of desert air sweep through the hollow spaces inside her.

Her apartment complex sat at the edge of a barren lot, low stucco buildings painted beige so they could blend into the dust. No grass. No trees. Just brittle scrub brush and sagging security lights trying to pretend anyone cared.

She parked in her usual spot. Shut off the engine.

Grace stepped out, the heat pressing against her like a wall, her bag heavy against her shoulder. Her sandals scraped the gritty sidewalk as she crossed toward her building.

Footsteps behind her. She turned, barely, and that was all the opening they needed. A hand clamped over her mouth. Another around her waist. Her feet left the ground for a heartbeat. She surged into fight mode, twisting hard, kicking once but catching only empty air. A sharp breath hissed past her teeth.

Then the hood dropped over her head.

Darkness. Pressure. Disorientation.

The car was already waiting. She heard the door open, felt the tug as they shoved her inside. The vibration of acceleration came a second later, tires crunching over dry gravel, then hitting smooth asphalt.

Her wrists were bound firmly in front.

She inhaled and tasted bleach. Leather. Sterile control.

Grace steadied her breathing, heart hammering but mind already pivoting. She tried to count the turns. Failed. Every shift was controlled, practiced. No sharp corners. No sudden stops. Whoever they were, they knew how to keep a trail cold.

“Who are you? What do you want? Where are you taking me? I’m a federal employee?—”

“Quiet. You’re not in danger.”

“That’s exactly what someone would say if they wanted to keep me quiet,” she said.

No response.

Her heart thudded against her ribs, steady. Fast. Alert.

The car slowed. Stopped. A hand on her elbow, guiding her forward. Then the air shifted again, cool, recycled, faintly metallic.

A door opened. Closed behind her. Then hands pulled the hood off, and Grace blinked against the sudden light, adjusting fast. Windowless room. Concrete walls painted off-white. A metal table. Two chairs. A file folder.

A woman stood at the window, sleeves cuffed, her pale blouse rolled just enough to reveal the faint imprint of a wristwatch no longer there. She looked like someone who had spent years in the field and never really left it. Her hair was short, efficient, gunmetal gray streaked with white. Not soft. Not approachable. She had the aura of someone who’d been disappointed professionally one too many times and had turned it into a permanent posture.

Grace didn’t speak. Just waited.

The woman turned, eyes sharp behind rimless glasses. “You’re still running analyses, Grace,” she said. “Even after the tribunal. Quiet. Focused. I respect that.”

“You have me at a disadvantage. Not a fan of that.” Something flared in her, a lick of anger she hadn’t felt since the tribunal. Whatever happened here, she couldn’t let it ride.

“You can call me Ma’am.” She eyed the file on the table, fingers tapping once on the manila edge.

Grace kept her voice neutral. “You’re not in my oversight chain.” Her brow lifted. “CIA?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny.” Ma’am slid the file across to Grace. “We’ve got a problem. OrdoTech Strategies.”

Grace knew them, an adaptive drone and AI systems integration defense contractor.

“Someone’s ghosting code inside their procurement logs. Subcontractor-level sleight of hand. We’ve identified four black-flag incidents in the last eighteen months. All too clean to be coincidence. We tried tracing the origin. Someone’s covering their tracks. Fast.”

Black-flag, missions that never officially existed, all drone related, all ending in blood.

“Would one of these incidents be mine?” Grace asked. A drone strike that killed four and almost buried her along with them.

“Yes, and another was a SEAL operation. Two dead, one wounded, one missing.”

Ma’am paused, as if weighing how much more to give. “The other two...harder to nail down. Deeper. Messier. Someone’s cleaning up after themselves, and every trail we could follow passed through OrdoTech contracts.”

“Seven fatalities,” Grace said quietly.

“That’s the number on paper,” Ma’am replied. “We don’t know how far it goes. Might be more if someone starts asking the wrong questions.”

Someone with enough clearance was burying the aftermath.

One thread tied them all together. OrdoTech.

Grace was definitely hooked, but she had to address something first. “We’ll get to the meat of why you kidnapped me in a minute.” Her anger simmered. “I have a bone to pick first. You’re monitoring me.”

“With a light touch,” Ma’am replied, unapologetic. “You flagged something yesterday. Quietly. Most analysts wouldn’t have caught it.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Grace said.

The woman huffed out an unexpected laugh. “Still feisty. That will help.”

Grace said, firmly, “Okay, spook, I’m intrigued. Kidnapping a federal agent is a very big felony.”

Ma’am didn’t blink. “Unofficial. Off-book. I’m not here as an interagency liaison. You’re doing something for me. I’m here because one of my people died in a test op that should have never gone live.”

“Eight fatalities.” Grace exhaled through her nose. So that was it. Revenge. Not oversight. Not chain-of-command cleanup. Personal.

She met Ma’am’s gaze steadily. “I get it. I’m already chasing what you want, and I’m already ruined with nothing left to lose. That’s why you want me.”

Ma’am flipped open the file. “You have two weeks. Internal embed. On paper, it’s a compliance audit. In reality, I need someone who sees what gets lost in system noise.”

She slid the top page forward. Grace didn’t move. “This borders on criminal.”

“You have plausible deniability. If you find something, you don't need to mention me at all. If you get into trouble...you’ll have backup.” The woman was wound tight, and that meant she had just as much a personal stake as Grace. “Get what I need. Get what you need. We both win, Grace.” Ma’am nudged the file. Grace’s fingers hovered before taking it. The threat of incarceration was minimal. Proving she'd been working with the CIA would be nearly impossible, especially if she denied everything. She sighed. She was in prison anyway.

The woman smiled, a cold, knowing tilt of her mouth, as Grace focused on what she’d picked up. The first code string was familiar. Too familiar. Her pulse picked up. Not much. But enough.

Grace burned for the uninterrupted time to chase this anomaly.

Ma’am nodded. “Black Kite Integrated Security. They handle contractor audits, external reviews, counter-intel sweeps, that kind of thing. One of their field specialists flagged something weird in OrdoTech’s procurement corporate shell games. Ex-DEVGRU. Good instincts. He flagged it through audit channels quietly. Knew it would probably get buried. Someone on the inside pulled the anomaly up the chain. That’s how it landed on my desk.”

Grace didn’t look up. “Who’s the digital hunter?”

“Nashir Rahim.”

The silence in the room turned dense.

Grace knew the name. She didn’t know the man. Not personally. But the name carried weight. Former SEAL. A rare survivor of a black-file op that left more ghosts than answers. She knew exactly how much he had lost.

“I assume you’re familiar with what happened to him,” Ma’am said.

Grace’s mouth tilted, not quite a smile. “You’re slipping, Ma’am. I scrubbed those files.”

Her voice dropped. “I know what you tried to bury.”

Ma’am didn’t blink. “Then you know why he’s going to be your threat meter and your shield.” A pause. Dry as gunpowder. “Some very nice muscle, Grace.”

Grace didn’t answer. Nice or not, nowadays she preferred to work alone. But this woman was offering her something she wanted very badly. She could deal with some tech guy. But she wasn’t going to show her eagerness. Her dad told her in the fine art of negotiation, don’t give anything away. Cards played close to the vest were aces up her sleeve.

The woman was all steel and espionage and didn’t fill the silence.

Grace kept her face still. “You’re in violation of your directive by infiltrating an NCIS agent’s files.”

Ma’am didn’t deny it. “You want to report it? Be my guest. But it won’t change what you found. Or the fact that no one else flagged it. You and I both know this isn’t noise. It’s a pattern. I’m the only one offering you the means to follow it.”

Grace held her gaze. “You’re not offering. You’re cornering.” Ma’am’s lips twitched. Not quite a smile. Grace leaned forward, quiet but deliberate. “If I do this, you get out of our systems. You scrub whatever hook you’ve left in my machine. Or I go to the director right now and burn us both.” Ma’am stilled. “I haven’t got anything to lose,” Grace continued. “But you do. You’d lose the one person on this planet who can get you what you want.” A long beat passed. Grace’s voice lowered. “I don’t betray the people I work with, Ma’am. That should mean something to you, since you don’t give up on the people you lost.”

Ma’am’s expression didn’t change. But something in her eyes flickered. Then she gave a short nod. Crisp. Controlled.

“Fair enough,” she said. “You’re in. Your terms. But you go quiet. No trace. No notes. No updates to your supervisor. You chase the thread, and when you’re done, we talk again.” Outside, the wind stirred. Inside, the air held steady. “I didn’t think you’d say no.”

Grace also didn’t like being predictable. But this was too important to her. Buried beneath all the sanitized language, wiped logs, and dead-end flags was the thing Grace hadn’t stopped chasing since the tribunal.

The truth.

The breach that shattered her career had never been just a malfunction. Somewhere, in the ghost noise no one else bothered to hear, proof still existed. Maybe, just maybe, this was her way back in.

Not to clear her name. That part was already gone. But to get justice for the men and women who had been murdered in the name of progress.

“When do I leave?” Her mind moved to packing and a little hacking.

“Tomorrow.”

Grace closed the file. Slid it back across the table. “We go in as auditors. With Mr. Rahim already an employee of Black Kite, it’s the perfect cover. No one will even bat an eye. It’s routine, easy, believable. Get me listed as one of their contract employees. Fast. Will that be a problem?”

Ma'am smiled faintly. "Not for me. You do think fast on your feet." She offered her hand across the table.

Grace didn't hesitate. She shook it once, hard, dry. No smiles. No second chances.

They had a deal.

Trust was another story. These people lied for a living, and she would know how to skew anything to make it sound beneficial.

Ma’am gave the faintest nod.

Grace rose and turned to the door, taking the necessary steps. Then paused, one hand on the knob.

“Oh, and Ma’am?”

She lifted her eyes. “Book me into first class.” With that, she walked out.

* * *

The zipper stuck halfway.

Grace didn’t force it. She drew in a slow breath, found the tension in the teeth, and guided it back an inch before easing it forward again. The bag gave in with a soft click of surrender.

She moved through the apartment in silence, steps steady over slate floors. The space was untouched. White walls. A gray rug squared to the furniture. Surfaces bare but for a lamp and a charging dock. No pictures. No art. No souvenirs from places she didn’t visit anymore. The bookshelf held exactly three rows of reference manuals, organized not by subject or author, but by height.

The last time someone brought her a gift, she thanked them. Then placed it in a drawer and never opened it again.

In the bathroom, she washed her hands slowly. Fingers to palms. Thumb to knuckle. Then straightened the towel so the hem aligned perfectly with the sink. Her reflection looked calm. Controlled. That was the truth she lived by. She didn’t need comfort. She needed order. Comfort had weight. Order had edges.

She returned to the bedroom and resumed packing. Everything had a place. Base layers on the left. Tactical wear folded tightly on the right. The boots went in last, soles down, heels aligned.

The bag was almost full, but something kept her from zipping it all the way.

In the closet, on the top shelf, the box still waited. She stared at it for a moment before reaching up and pulling it down.

Inside were the remnants of who she used to be. A cracked watch. The clipped lanyard of her old badge. A field knife. She took it out, held it in her hand for the first time in months. The weight was familiar. The grip worn smooth where her thumb used to rest. A part of her remembered how it felt to carry it like an extension of her own body.

Her sleeve slipped back as she moved.

The scar was faint in the overhead light. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t touch it. Just stared for a second too long before pulling the sleeve back into place.

She tucked it into the corner of her checked bag, out of sight but not out of reach, closed the box, and slid it back onto the shelf.

When she zipped the bag closed, it felt heavier than it should have. She sat on the edge of the bed and placed her hands on the fabric, fingers spread. The room was quiet.

But that was how she liked it.

No mess. No noise. No reminders.

Nothing to pull her out of herself.

* * *

The plane began its descent over Colorado Springs Headquarters for OrdoTech Strategies, her home for the next two weeks. She lifted the window lid just as the sun dipped behind the snow-covered Rockies, staining the clouds in bruised purples and burnt copper. There was light snow, and the glass was cold. Grace looked out the window, her tablet dark on her tray, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Below, the city sprawled in organized lines, low buildings framed by rugged peaks and red earth that glowed strangely soft in the fading light. It didn’t look like Phoenix. It didn’t look like anywhere she had lived, really.

It looked raw. Unpolished.

The kind of place where the sky could swallow you if you weren’t careful.

Fifteen minutes after she got home, she hacked the CIA. They never even detected her. She found Ma’am ten minutes after that. Director Lynne Caspari, Senior CIA Operations Officer Black Tech Division. She had indeed lost a man, and his picture burned into her brain. He was a casualty, and Grace had survived. She’d do this for him, too. Justice. Not revenge.

She stepped off the plane into crisp, thinner air that caught in her lungs like a challenge. Prepared with her dark pea coat, she slipped into it, wrapped a matching scarf around her neck, but left her gloves in the pockets.

Her ride was waiting, a plain sedan, government plates. The driver was efficient, quiet, exactly the type of man who would forget her face the second she stepped out.

They drove west, past blocky industrial parks and shuttered gas stations, past strip malls and chain restaurants, the kind of suburban sprawl that blurred into itself. But in the distance, always, the mountains. Immovable. Watching.

Along the empty lots and drainage ditches, tall dead sunflower stalks still stood, brown and skeletal against the snow, their faces long since stripped of petals but still tilted stubbornly toward the sunless sky.

Her hotel sat just outside the city, tucked near the edge of a bluff where the buildings gave way to trees and open scrub. Clean lines, polished wood floors in the lobby, the faint scent of lemon and old pine cleaner in the air. Someone had set a pot of cut sunflowers at the check-in desk, bright, forced blooms out of season, leaning toward the glass doors like they still believed in spring. The clerk checked her in and handed her a keycard without looking up from his screen.

Room 217. Second floor. Corner unit.

The space was simple. Two beds. Beige walls. A window that looked out over a darkening ridge lined with pines. A small desk. A coffee pot she wouldn’t use, and a connecting door. She set her bag down on the chair and moved to the window, fingers brushing the curtain aside. The silence in the room felt thinner than the air outside. Like it could tear if she breathed wrong.

She unpacked slowly, methodically. Clothes in the dresser. Laptop and hard drive on the desk. Toothbrush lined up exactly with the edge of the sink. She checked the closet for extra hangers, counted three, and used only one. The knife went into her pea coat’s pocket.

She sat on the edge of the bed, smoothing her palms against the coverlet.

Nashir Rahim. Callsign Prophet. Something about that name made her shiver.

She’d read the file. What hadn’t been redacted was clinical enough. Former SEAL, medically discharged, injury sustained during a black operation she had only glimpsed through shell code and buried approvals. The name had come up more than once in field chatter before she was reassigned. The kind of man who left a mark even when no one was allowed to talk about him.

She had met men like him before. Not many, but enough.

Special operator types came in with the same blueprint. Alpha under pressure. Wound too tight, always moving. Command voice in every conversation. Hyper-competent and fully aware of it. Confidence weaponized. The kind of body that looked like it could run on rage and protein powder alone, the kind that was hard-won muscle, and made you feel guilty for even thinking about dessert.

Grace didn’t like unpredictable variables. Men like Nash tended to walk, talk, and breathe them.

She didn’t need him to be pleasant. She just hoped he wasn’t difficult. Or loud. Or the kind of charming that made everyone underestimate him until it was too late.

She preferred her work silent. She could handle arrogance if it didn’t get in the way.

What she wasn’t prepared for was the way her thoughts hovered longer than necessary on the last page of his file. The photo. Cropped. Grainy. But sharp enough to catch the edge of something in his eyes. Something that hadn’t been broken yet. Or maybe something that had never healed right.

She got the call from the front desk that her car was ready to take her to OrdoTech.

Tomorrow, she would meet Nash. Today, she would breathe and hope that whatever force of nature Nash Rahim turned out to be, he wouldn’t blow her careful world apart.

Fifteen minutes later, Grace stepped out of the black government SUV and into the sharp glare of late-afternoon sun. The air smelled different here, cleaner somehow, edged with pine and something dry and industrial in the wind. The OrdoTech Strategies compound sat at the base of a long ridge, tucked behind a row of low, sharp-angled buildings that all looked identical from a distance. The architecture was smooth steel and matte glass, corporate money poured into sleek lines and security-grade tinting.

Officially, OrdoTech specialized in drone warfare, adaptive surveillance, artificial intelligence, and autonomous tactical systems, the future of battlefield intelligence, according to every glossy Pentagon brochure.

On the outside, it looked like a think tank.

On the inside, she knew better.

Somewhere inside, she would find her answers even if she had to dig right into their profit line.

She adjusted the strap of her bag and followed the driver into the front building. The lobby was colder than she expected both in temperature and tone. A long reception desk curved around a minimalist sculpture of brushed metal blades rising from a marble base. It was probably meant to represent innovation. It looked like a weapon.

Behind the desk, embossed in muted steel lettering against the marble wall, a corporate motto read: Quiet Solutions for a Complex World.

Grace’s mouth tightened. Translation: we make problems disappear.

Something whirred past her ear with a high-pitched hum. She flinched, her breath catching in her throat. Her eyes followed the sharp zigzag of motion until it landed on a small platform embedded in the wall.

“It’s just a security drone, ma’am,” her escort said, standing with her in the lobby. “Nothing to worry about.”

She gave him a tight nod as he turned to leave, but her pulse kept climbing.

She knew better. Drones were tools, useful in the right hands, deadly in the wrong ones. Sometimes… those hands worked for the government. Sometimes they had her kind of clearance.

She swallowed, the taste of metal rising in her throat. The memory surged unbidden, white heat, twisted metal, blood on the screen. Then real blood, later, too close. She'd awoken half-buried under rubble to the heavy, cloying smell of it, one of the operators still beside her. Or what was left of him. His hand had been touching hers.

Someone decided Grace Harlan would take the fall. That was criminal. What she was doing would be justice. She hadn’t failed. She’d been used.

Her fingers curled tighter around the strap of her bag as she crossed the polished floor.

Audits were their cover story, but this went so much deeper.

A young woman with a slick ponytail and a badge checked Grace in without fanfare. No eye contact. Just clipboard efficiency and the click of keys that never slowed.

Grace’s temporary credentials were on a lanyard, already printed. Her photo was two years old. Auditor was beneath her name and Black Kite below it. They bought their cover story. Of course they did. Fighting a government audit flagged you faster than failing one.

Uniformed security walked her past two checkpoints and down a hall that narrowed the deeper they went. No windows. Just walls that absorbed sound and lights that murmured just off frequency. Her breathing stayed steady, but her pulse didn’t.

Her assigned workspace was a glass-fronted office tucked behind a secondary operations cluster, the side walls and back sealed in blank white. Perfect for projection.

The space was isolated vulnerability, boxed in transparency, and felt familiar. It was clean but not sterile, with scuffs on the desk legs, a slight dent in the edge of the filing cabinet. The chair was ergonomic but worn.

One of the checkpoint guards handed her a keycard, murmured something about operations access, then walked off without looking back.

There was a desk, a monitor, and a small cabinet that vibrated too loudly for its size.

Even the bare minimum was too much.

Inside, she shrugged out of her cold-weather coat and scarf and hung them on a rack near the door. After extracting her laptop, she walked to the desk, plugging it in with movements sharper than necessary. The machine hummed to life. That sound, at least, was soothing.

Grace pulled her sleeves down past her wrists and stared at the screen as the network synced. Her partner wouldn’t be here until tomorrow. She was grateful for that. For the moment of stillness. For the time to adjust. He would come. When he did, everything about this fragile quiet would shift. She didn’t know what kind of man Nashir Rahim was, but regardless, she was trapped in this place with him.