CHAPTER 25: [25] SOMEONE SHOULD

"Took you long enough. I was starting to think you’d actually gotten a job in there."

Pierre pulled the door shut behind him and dusted off his hands.

"Get the map?"

Pierre shook his head, watching her expression carefully. "It wasn’t in the library. Total bust."

Raven’s confident posture crumbled. Her shoulders sagged in a rare, visible moment of defeat. Her eyes, usually so sharp, went flat. Empty.

"But I got these." He pulled the folded documents from his jacket. Blueprints and scattered papers, still warm from his body, unfolded in his hands. "Base schematics, guard rotations, personnel files—the works."

Raven’s eyes widened as she examined the blueprints, her nimble fingers—the same ones that had picked countless pockets—traced the corridors and security checkpoints.

"Holy hell, Pierre. These are worth their weight in gold. How did you—" She paused mid-sentence, studying his face with newfound intensity. Those cat-like pupils contracted slightly. "You look different. What happened in there?"

Pierre flexed his fingers. An echo of Diana’s essence, hummed beneath his skin. It wasn’t his own power; it felt foreign, stolen, like a discordant note playing in the quiet symphony of his soul.

"Just Navy bureaucracy," he lied smoothly. "Nothing exciting."

Raven raised a skeptical eyebrow but didn’t press further. Instead, she leaned against the grimy alley wall and crossed her arms over her chest, the curve of her hips and chest a bold silhouette against the fading daylight.

"I found Mika’s father," she offered, changing the subject. "Third cell from the left in the basement. Poor bastard looks like he hasn’t eaten a real meal in weeks." Her voice carried an edge that hadn’t been there before. "But with the whole base on alert, there’s no way to get him out clean. Not without raising every alarm from here to Naval Headquarters."

Pierre nodded mechanically, but his mind wandered back to Diana. The way her essence had tasted different from the pirates—richer, more complex.

He’d stolen something from her. Not her life, but something deeper. A violation that left no visible mark.

I could have taken more.

The rawness of it, the sheer hunger, sent a jolt of revulsion through him. He shoved it down, but the poison was already in his veins, promising strength while it corroded him from the inside out.

"You with me?" Raven snapped her fingers directly in front of his face. "You look like you just saw a ghost. Or worse, a Navy Admiral."

"Yeah, sorry," Pierre blinked rapidly, forcing himself back to the present. "Just thinking about our next move."

She studied him for another moment, eyes narrowing slightly, then shrugged with deliberate casualness. "Well, our next move is obvious. We’ve got enough intel here to sell to any crew worth their salt. The guard schedules alone could fund a decent ship." She rolled up the blueprints and tucked them under her arm. "We can be off this rock by tomorrow morning, pockets full of Cori and nothing but wake behind us."

Pierre stared at her, the words taking a moment to register fully. "Just like that? Leave?"

"What else would we do? We came here for a map, didn’t get it, but we got something almost as good." She gestured to the documents with her free hand. "Sometimes you cut your losses and move on." She started walking toward the mouth of the alley, her sandals scraping lightly against the cobblestones. "That’s how you survive in this world."

"What about Mika’s father?"

Raven stopped mid-stride, her back stiffening slightly. "What about him?"

"We just leave him to rot? And everyone else Hardy’s got under his boot?"

"Pierre, we’re not heroes. We’re thieves who got lucky." She turned back to face him, her blue eyes glinting like steel. "You want to play savior, be my guest. But don’t expect me to stick around for the execution."

Raven was right—this was exactly the kind of noble sacrifice he would have criticized himself just a few days ago. The kind of reckless, self-righteous heroism he’d always found so irritating in stories. But standing in this dank alley, thinking about Mika’s tear-stained face and her father wasting away in a cell....

That criticism was bullshit.

"This isn’t about playing savior." Pierre pulled Hardy’s personnel file from his jacket, the papers slightly crumpled but still readable. "It’s about not being the villain."

"Since when do you care about—"

"Since I saw what happens when people like Hardy get to do whatever they want." Pierre opened the file, showing her the medical reports and complaint forms stamped with red "DISMISSED" markers. "Look at this. Years of broken careers, dismissed complaints, ’pacification actions.’ How many people has he destroyed just because he could? Just because the Navy gave him a uniform and a title?"

Raven glanced at the papers, her eyes scanning rapidly over the documents, then looked back at Pierre. "And? The world’s full of bastards with power. We can’t fix them all. That’s why the Ten Marquis and the Navy are constantly at each other’s throats—they’re all the same type wearing different flags."

"Maybe not. But we can fix this one."

"You’re talking about taking on a Navy captain. In his own territory. With his entire fleet backing him up." Raven’s voice rose incrementally with each statement, her hands gesturing with increasing agitation. "That’s suicide, Pierre. Pure suicide."

"You know what the difference is between us and the pirates who attacked that cruise ship?" He met Raven’s eyes directly. "They took what they wanted and left. Didn’t matter who got hurt, as long as they got theirs. Men, women, children—all just obstacles or opportunities."

"That’s how the world works."

"That’s how their world works. But we can choose something different." Pierre tucked the files back into his jacket. "I won’t use people and throw them away. Not Mika, not her father, not you."

Raven stared at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable. The alley fell silent except for the distant cry of seagulls and the rhythmic crash of waves against the harbor wall. Finally, she sighed deeply and raked a hand through her mismatched hair.

"You really believe that, don’t you? That we can actually make a difference here." It wasn’t quite a question.

"I have to."

"Why?"

Pierre considered telling her about his past life, about the criticism he’d hurled at Jack Steelheart for doing exactly what he was proposing now. About the power growing inside him that felt more like a curse than a gift. About how easy it would be to just take what they needed and leave, like everyone else did. Instead, he just shrugged, his lips curving into a half-smile.

"Because someone should."

Raven was quiet for another moment, her fingers absently tracing the outline of the rolled blueprints. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed.

"You know what? Fine. You want to tear down the local tyrant? I’m in." She grinned, and for the first time since Pierre had met her, it looked completely genuine, reaching all the way to those blue eyes. "But if we’re staying, we’re not just running a prison break. We’re tearing the whole house down."

Pierre smiled back and pulled out the town square blueprints from within his jacket. He unrolled them against the alley wall, revealing the detailed plans for Captain Hardy’s ostentatious bronze monument—a grotesque thirty-foot statue depicting the Navy captain standing triumphantly atop a pile of vanquished pirates.

"I know exactly where to start."