With her colleagues’ fates still uncertain, Rita once again found herself in Dublinn’s custody—though “house arrest” would be far too kind a term. The room they’d given her was little more than a cell, its stone walls cold and bare save for a small table. Her captors had offered her a tattered copy of Don Quixote and a few sheets of paper, as if the weight of words might dull the echo of distant gunfire.

Night settled over the compound, and Rita had just begun to lose herself in Cervantes’ prose when she heard it—a faint clatter, metal against metal, coming from the door. The sound grew sharper, deliberate, like fingers working a lock. Her heart tightened.

“Who goes there!?” She called out, her voice cutting through the silence like steel on glass.