I'm back at courier office, still as loud and busy as it was yesterday. Zeke's waiting for me there, sleeves rolled up, leaning over his desk with a hand-drawn map spread under his palms. He looks up when I come in, watches the hitch in my stride for a fraction of a second, then meets my gaze. No greeting. He shuts the door, cutting off the dispatch noise, and slides the map toward me.

  "I found your cargo," he says. "It's being held at a private estate on the North Ridge. The Baroness's residence."

  The name lands like cold water.

  "You're joking."

  "I'm not." He taps the map. "Heavily guarded, deeply paranoid owner. The collection is essentially a vault with better furniture."

  "Nobody has touched that collection in years, Zeke. Thieves go in-"

  "And they don't come out. I know." He leans back against the desk. "Helping you at the Guild was a calculated risk. This would just be stupid. I'm a thief, not a martyr."

  "Think about the leverage," I say, leaning over the map. "You get inside, you see her security firsthand. You find enough on her to keep her on a leash for years."

  He makes a short sound that isn't quite a laugh. "Blackmail is messy. One-time payout that tends to end with a knife in someone's back." He taps the map, right over the main gates. "No. I see something better."

  "Which is?"

  "She's paranoid, wealthy, and constantly worried about her rivals. She needs a better class of fixer - someone who can move her acquisitions quietly and keep his mouth shut." He looks at me with something predatory in the set of his mouth. "I don't want to rob the Baroness. I want to become her favorite partner. This hit is my audition."

  "And if she doesn't hire you?"

  "Then I still walked out of her mansion alive, which puts me ahead of most." He shrugs. "She'll hire me."

  He traces the perimeter wall with one finger, slow and methodical. "Main gates are out. Two-man rotation, constant sightline, secondary ward that pings the house if you're not carrying a guest token. We'd be flagged before we hit the gravel."

  "Roof?" I ask.

  "Others have tried the roof. None of them made it to the chimneys. Whatever she has up there is fast and quiet and doesn't leave witnesses to explain how it works."

  "Rear service entrance?"

  He moves his finger to the back of the property. "Waste disposal. Every mansion has a chute - the one point in the perimeter built for convenience over total lockdown. The staff dump the bins from the yard into the alley for street collection. It's narrow and it smells and nobody watches it closely because nobody wants to stand near it."

  "No," I say immediately.

  "Just wide enough for a body to-"

  "I said no. My balance is off. I can't risk getting stuck in a crawlspace with no room to maneuver."

  He looks at me. "Your balance."

  "Yes."

  "That's new."

  "It's temporary."

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  He doesn't press it. He moves his finger to the side of the building. "Delivery doors. Problem is they're built for one-way traffic - locked from the inside, no mechanism on the street side. We'd need a battering ram and about thirty seconds of goodwill we don't have. A distraction at the front would put the whole house on lockdown. And posing as new staff is out - her vetting process runs for months, she interviews everyone personally."

  He exhales slowly, looking at the map. "We need at least a week to watch the guard rotations properly. Find the gaps."

  "We don't have a week."

  Zeke's hands go flat on the map. He looks up. "The cargo isn't going anywhere, Ashley. If we rush this we're handing her our heads."

  "I'm not waiting a week."

  "Why?"

  The question sits there.

  "I took a hit on a solo job a few days ago," I say. The words come faster than I intend. "Piece of a localized trap. It's in my hand. It's migrating."

  I cross my arms, and the genuine wince that crosses my face is real enough - the arm has been aching since last night, a low, persistent throb under the seals.

  "Migrating," he repeats.

  "Yes. The item in that collection can remove it safely. If I wait a week I'll be crippled. Maybe worse."

  Silence. He's looking at me with the expression he uses when he's found the gap between what someone says and what they mean. I watch him decide how much it matters.

  "You're lying," he says. Quiet. Not accusatory.

  "I'm not-"

  "You are. But you're also scared." He looks back at the map. "So whatever the truth is, it's worse than what you just told me. Fine. We go today. But if you collapse in the middle of this, I'm leaving you behind. Understood?"

  "Understood."

  He straightens up, tapping the center of the map. "We can't plan for a layout we haven't seen. But I can get us a look inside before we go in blind."

  "How? You said the staff is vetted for months."

  "I have a contact - a man who's been talking up his consultation contract with the Baroness since the autumn. Moving art, rare acquisitions, items that need handling without documentation. He owes me for a shipment I made disappear last winter, and he's been waiting for me to collect." He glances briefly at his own reflection in the window, smooths his hair once, apparently satisfied. "I call in that favor. He introduces me as a trusted associate, a specialist for a specific retrieval she's been pursuing. It gets me through the front door with a reason to be there."

  "And if she doesn't like what she sees?"

  "I'll handle it. The point isn't the outcome of the meeting - it's what I see during it. Every room I'm shown, every guard rotation I can observe, every detail about the layout that won't be on any map." He shifts his weight. "And while I'm playing the dutiful consultant, her guards will be focused on monitoring me - every step, every door I pass. They'll pull the rotation toward the parlor to keep an eye on the stranger."

  "Leaving the rest of the grounds thin," I finish.

  "Exactly. The paranoia works for us if we use it right." He looks at me steadily. "This is the only window we're going to get. If we don't move now we spend weeks waiting for an opening that may not come, and you just told me weeks isn't something you have."

  "So what's my route?"

  I look at the map, at the rear of the estate, at the route I'd refused twenty minutes ago.

  "The waste chute," I say.

  "You said-"

  "I know what I said. But if you're drawing the guards to the parlor I can reach the disposal yard without anyone watching. It's a servant route - it shouldn't be rigged to kill."

  "Just to monitor," Zeke says. "You'll need to deal with whatever alarm is on the inner cover."

  "I'll manage." I trace the timeline in my head. "You get your audience. You're escorted out, you leave the grounds. Late evening, when the servants are moving the day's waste, I slip from the yard into the main building and find the delivery room."

  "And I come back after dark," he continues. "Different gate, different entrance - courier kit. The guards on the night rotation won't recognize the man they saw at noon."

  "I'll have the service doors unbarred from the inside. You knock, I let you in."

  "And then?"

  "Then we work with whatever you learned during the meeting."

  He leans over the desk, his shadow falling across the drawn lines of the mansion. The plan is thin - half the information we'd want, no time for proper recon, held together by whatever Zeke manages to charm out of a paranoid noblewoman in one afternoon.

  "Delivery door is the fast exit," he says. "Straight shot to the street. Visible, but quick." He pauses. "If the heat is too high, we go back through the waste yard."

  "Slow and ugly."

  "Hidden."

  He glances at my arm, then at the map, then back at me. He doesn't offer a handshake or a reassurance. Just a nod - we're committed, we both know what we're walking into, and neither of us has a better idea.

  "Get your gear," he says, straightening his cuffs. "We move within the hour."

  He turns back to the desk, already somewhere else in his head.

  "Ashley."

  I look back from the doorway.

  "If you're going to die in there," he says, "do it after we get the item. I'd hate to waste the trip."

  I genuinely can't tell if he's joking.

  "I'll do my best," I say, and walk out.