“I know that, too.”
She pressed her palm flat against my ribs. “When this place falls apart, you’ll get us out. Promise me.”
I covered her hand with mine. “I promise.”
She’d fallen asleep like that, her body curved into mine, trusting me to keep watch while she finally let go. I’d stayed until just before dawn, then slipped out before anyone could see.
We’d never spoken of that night again, but something had changed between us. An unspoken understanding that we’d crossed a line we couldn’t uncross, and that we couldn’t cross ever again.
By the time the mass suicide order came down, I’d already made my choice. Tectra-X be damned. I was getting them out.
The night it happened still played in my head sometimes. The compound in chaos. People drinking the poisoned mixture, lying down in the gardens to die. Hopeful screaming about transformation and rebirth while his followers convulsed and bled. Tectra-X already gone, smuggled out by someone I hadn’t identified in time.
I’d found Evelyn in the schoolhouse, Sophia wrapped in her arms. The child had been crying, terrified by the screaming outside.
“You promised,” Evelyn had whispered.
“That’s why I’m here. Can you run?”
“Yes.”
And she had. No hesitation, no looking back. Just grabbed her daughter and followed me into the night while people died behind us.
We lost Sophia’s stuffed rabbit somewhere in the woods that night, but I got them safely to Montana. Set them up in the little blue house in Garnett, a random town I had picked off a map at a truck stop. Made sure they had what they needed, including a replacement rabbit for Sophia. Then I’d left to hunt Tectra-X with the team because that was the mission, and the mission was all that mattered. At least, that was what I told myself.
But we’d failed.
Three weeks later, the seismic weapon was deployed, triggering a 7.2-magnitude earthquake. Hundreds dead, my teammate Maya among them. Rafe still walked with a limp. Leo needed surgery on his shoulder. Gage nearly died—he would have if not for his super-human healing ability, courtesy of the bio-engineering experiments he’d been subjected to in the military. And I’d spent every day since wondering if I’d made the right call, leaving Evelyn and Sophia alone while I chased a weapon I never found in time anyway.
Through the thermal imager, I watched as Evelyn bent down, presumably to hug her daughter. The two heat signatures merged briefly, then separated as the smaller one left the kitchen. Bedtime routine starting.
I shifted my position, stretching stiff muscles. Six months of staying away, telling myself they were safer without me around. Six months of mission after mission, trying not to think about the woman with watchful eyes and her serious little daughter with the stuffed rabbit.
Then, Flynn and Lyric’s mission to infiltrate a black market weapons auction had brought back a file with Evelyn’s name on it. Someone had used her real name—Evelyn Winslow—to buy mind control tech.
It couldn’t be anything but a message.
A warning.
A threat.
I’d been on a plane to Montana within the hour.
I switched on the directional microphone, pointing it at the bedroom window where a soft glow filtered through the curtains. Sophia’s room. I adjusted the gain, catching the distant murmur of Evelyn’s voice. Reading a bedtime story, probably the knight one that Sophia loved so much.
Something twisted in my chest. A feeling I couldn’t name, wouldn’t name.
The voice faded as Evelyn presumably left the room, and I tracked her heat signature moving through the house. Alone now, her silhouette paused in the hallway. Her posture changed, shoulders dropping slightly. Letting down her guard, just for a moment, when no one was watching.
Except me.
I pulled back from the eyepiece, uncomfortable with witnessing this private moment of vulnerability. Who was I to watch her like this, to invade the life she’d built without me? But someone had used her name at that auction, and I needed to be sure they were safe, that her ex-husband hadn’t found them.
The thought of her ex-husband sent a wave of cold anger through me. Langston Winslow. A man who treated his wife and child as possessions. A man who wouldn’t stop looking for what he considered his property. During my time at the compound, Evelyn had never talked about him directly. She’d never talked about much of anything directly, keeping herself carefully distant from everyone except her daughter. But I’d pieced together enough.
Langston was dangerous. Wealthy. Connected.
And still out there.
