They took James out through a private exit, not the front doors.
The corridor was too clean and too quiet, the kind of quiet that came from money and control. Bureau guards stood at every turn, and the suppression seals were still live along the walls, humming low enough that he felt them more than heard them.
He could hear the rest of it through the concrete. Reporters and protestors out front, his own name coming through the wall in broken pieces, drones buzzing somewhere above, every camera in the city waiting for one frame of the necromancer who had killed Langford on stream.
He did not give them the frame. O'Shea's people walked him straight into a Bureau vehicle in a covered bay before anyone outside saw him move.
The door shut.
Thunk.
The seal around his wrist pulsed once, cold against his skin, and that was the whole truth of it. He was out of the cell. He was not free.
