I walked a few steps behind Callighan, keeping a certain distance. My eyes didn’t stay still for a second, moving across every doorway, every shadow pooled in the corners of the corridor, every armed figure standing against the walls with their weapons loose at their sides. The Golden Nugget was quieter on the inside than I’d expected. The kind of quiet that didn’t feel peaceful so much as held in place.

Gaspar. The name kept drifting back up to the surface no matter how many times I pushed it down. I hadn’t seen him outside, which meant nothing. He could be anywhere in this building. I’d given the others the sphere Kunta had given me before we left, insurance, just in case he decided to make a move on Rachel or Sydney while I was inside. It wasn’t a perfect solution but it was the best one I had. I kept my hand loose near my side and stayed alert.

"Where are you from?"

Callighan’s voice came without preamble.

"New York," I said, after a beat.

"You came rather far," he observed.

"So did you," I replied.

That landed. He went quiet for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth curved, just slightly. Almost like he’d been expecting that.

"Marlon told you," he said. It wasn’t a question. "How much did he tell you?"

"Everything," I said.

"Everything from his perspective, I’d assume," Callighan replied, unbothered.

"Does that change what you did? You took advantage of someone who trusted you," I said.

He let out a short, quiet scoff, not quite a laugh, more like the sound a person makes when they find something less funny than irritating. "Took advantage," he repeated slowly. "That depends entirely on where you’re standing. Someone who could let go of someone precious as easily as you apparently did—" he paused, "—wouldn’t understand that, I suppose."

I frowned. "What are you talking about?"

He glanced sideways at me, the look narrow. "Lucy. If you truly wanted Mei back, you wouldn’t have let your leverage simply walk away. Not if she had truly run away." The last part he added lightly, like a footnote he didn’t much need to make.

I didn’t answer.

He wasn’t wrong to be skeptical. The excuse was thin, I’d known it the moment it left my mouth outside. I hadn’t been able to come up with anything better in time, anything that explained why we were suddenly showing up empty-handed without pointing directly at Gaspar. And that was the problem. Naming Gaspar meant cracking something open inside Callighan’s group that I wasn’t prepared to deal with yet, not while Mei was still inside, not while Emily was still somewhere in the picture. Callighan might be the one running things on paper, but against a Symbiote Host he’d be just as outmatched as anyone else. Gaspar had to be handled separately, quietly, on terms we controlled.

So I said nothing, and the silence between us settled like a fine layer of dust as we moved deeper into the hotel.

The main hall of the casino opened up around us, a wide, hollow space that had once been full of light and noise and the mechanical rhythm of slot machines. Now the machines sat dark and still in their rows like monuments to something that had stopped mattering. The carpet was thick and faded, the chandeliers overhead clouded with dust but still hanging. We passed through it and stopped in front of a closed door off one of the side corridors.

Callighan stayed behind me. I could feel the weight of the armed men behind him without needing to turn around, five of them at least, positioned.

Any move I made to grab Mei and run would turn very wrong. Even with the Time Freeze, even with everything I could do, I wasn’t walking out of a building full of armed people with someone in tow. Not without someone getting hurt.

I reached out and turned the handle.

The door swung open on a modest sitting room, a sofa, a low table, thin curtains filtering the outside light into something pale and grey. My eyes moved across the room automatically and landed on the sofa.

Mei was sitting there.

She looked up the moment the door opened, those dark eyes of hers finding mine before I’d even fully stepped inside. For a second neither of us moved. The door drifted shut behind me with a soft click, and the room went quiet.

I didn’t know what to say. I stood there and I genuinely didn’t know where to begin. The relief hit first, she was here, she was upright, she looked like herself, no visible harm, no hollow look in her eyes that would’ve told me something worse had happened. That relief lasted maybe three seconds before the guilt moved in and took up the entire space.

Because I hadn’t come here to take her home.

"You came," Mei said finally.

"Yeah," I said. "Of course I came."

She looked at me for a moment longer. "But you’re not here to take me back."

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. My jaw worked once, uselessly, and I closed it again. My hands curled at my sides.

Standing here in front of her, seeing her sitting in that room that wasn’t hers, in a building full of people she hadn’t chosen, I think in that moment I came the closest I’d come to deciding I’d just hand Lucy over and deal with whatever came after. Forget the plan. Forget the careful approach. Just fix this.

"I’m sorry," I said.

"I knew it." She didn’t say it with bitterness, or with the kind of sadness that twists a face. She said it the way someone speaks about a thing they’d already made their peace with. "It seemed too good to be true. I didn’t let myself believe it from the start."

"Mei—"

"I don’t really care that much," she said, cutting me off before I could find the rest of the sentence. She looked at me steadily, hands resting in her lap. "I was never really part of your group anyway."

I stared at her. "What?"

"Rebecca said it herself." Her voice was calm, almost detached. "I had no real connections there. No friends. I just ended up pulled along into the group somehow, I was never actually in it. I don’t think my not being there changes anything for anyone."

The words landed in a way I hadn’t expected. Not because they were said in anger, they’d have been easier to answer if she were angry. But she wasn’t. She said it like it was just a fact, a thing observed and filed away, and that was somehow worse.

I didn’t move from where I stood.

She held my silence for a moment, then simply stood up and moved toward the small table near the window.

"It’s not as bad here as I thought it would be," she said, reaching for the book left on the table, flipping it open to somewhere in the middle.

"You don’t mean that," I said.

"What do you know about what I mean?" She turned a page without looking at me, her voice carrying a light scoff that somehow stung more than raised volume would have. "Instead of standing here wasting your time, you should leave this place and focus on finding Elena. You can’t win against them, against Gaspar, you’re outnumbered and you’re outmatched. I’m telling you that honestly."

"Mei. Look at me."

"Just leave," she said.

I crossed the room and reached out, my hand closing around her arm, turning her gently but firmly toward me. She let it happen, didn’t resist, just looked back at me with those dark, steady eyes that were doing everything they could to look unbothered. They weren’t. I could see it in the small tension at the corners.

"I’m not abandoning you," I said. "We are not abandoning you. You belong with us, not here, not with them. You really think I’m going to just walk away telling you okay and leave you in that place?"

"Why wouldn’t you?" She said it quietly. Her eyes shifted away from mine. "You already did."

Something in my chest pulled tight at that. My grip on her arm firmed slightly, not hard, just enough to ground us both in the moment.

"Whatever happens," I said, "I will come back for you." My free hand moved slowly, hesitantly, toward her face. I barely touched her, just my fingers brushing a loose strand of her black hair back from her cheek, the contact so slight it hardly counted. But I kept my hand there, close, hovering. "Just wait for me. I will not leave you here, Mei. I will never leave you in a place like this. You are important to us. Important to me. I need you to understand that."

I didn’t like a bit how she was trying to pull away from the group. She was already an important member of it. Everyone wanted her back, especially Rebecca.

Something shifted behind her eyes, brief and unguarded before she shut it down.

"Important to you," she said. Her gaze came back to mine slowly. "In the same way Sydney is? Rachel? Elena? Cindy?"

I blinked. The question caught me completely flat-footed. "What—"

She turned her face away from my hand, pulling back just enough that the contact broke.

"Leave," she said.

"Mei—"

I tried to step closer and she pressed her palm flat against my chest, stopping me where I stood. Her hand stayed there for just a second before she let it drop.

"Leave," she said again, and this time she looked straight at me when she said it. "And don’t come back."

"What are you—"

A knock cut through the room.

"Time’s up."

Callighan, on the other side of the door.

"Listen to me—" I started, turning back toward her.

"I don’t want to be saved!" Her voice cracked open then. She was glaring at me now, real emotion finally breaking through the surface she’d been keeping so smooth. "Don’t decide things for me. Don’t stand there and make me a project. I am fine here. I can manage on my own."

I looked at her. Opened my mouth. Nothing came.

The door swung open behind me. Callighan stood in the frame, one hand resting against the wood, watching with that same composed, unreadable expression he’d worn since the moment I’d first seen him outside the hotel.

Mei had already turned away. Arms folded across her chest, her gaze fixed somewhere past the far wall.

I stood there for a moment longer than I should have. Then I turned and walked out.

The door didn’t slam behind me. That was almost worse, just the soft, quiet click of it closing.

I stopped just outside and stood still, staring at nothing in particular.

"There is still one way to get her back."

Callighan’s voice came from just behind me. I didn’t turn immediately.

"Bring me Marlon instead," he said.

I let the words sit for a second. Then I turned my gaze forward and walked, back through the dim casino hall, past the silent rows of dead machines, toward the light coming through the front entrance.

I didn’t answer him.

And I didn’t look back.