"Does he know I'm out?"
"The cartel would have contacted him immediately when they lost you. So yeah. He knows."
"And what does he do now?"
That's the question I've been dreading. "Either he runs, takes whatever money he has, and disappears. Or?—"
"Or?"
"Or he tries to make a new deal with the cartel. You're still valuable to them."
She absorbs that without flinching.
"I think he sold you once already. I don't think he'd have moral qualms about doing it again."
"Right." She nods like that's reasonable. Like her brother hunting her for a cartel is just a logical next step. "So what do we do?"
"We?" I raise an eyebrow.
"You came for me alone. Against orders. You're in this now whether you want to be or not."
"True." The words come out before I can stop them. "Was in it the second I heard those men talking in the bar."
"Why?" She crosses her arms, studying me. "Why did you come? You don't know me. You risked your career, maybe your life, for a stranger. That's not standard operating procedure."
"No. It's not."
"So why?"
FIVE
FROST
I lookat the dog tags under my shirt, feel their familiar weight. "Because five years ago, I made a choice. Follow orders or save someone. I chose to follow orders. And someone died because of it."
"Caracas." She says it like she already knew. "You mentioned it in the warehouse."
"Yeah. Caracas." I run my hand over my face, feeling the stubble, the exhaustion. "CIA operation. Cartel target. We needed local assets for intel. There was a woman—Sofia. She fed us information for three months. Good intel. Made the whole operation possible."
"What happened?"
"We got our target. Extracted him. Mission successful." The words taste like ash. "But the cartel figured out Sofia helped us. Put a price on her head. I had a choice—stay and protect her, or follow my orders and leave with the team."
"You followed orders."
"Yeah. I followed orders. Sofia was killed six hours later." I touch the dog tags through my shirt. "Her brother gave me these. Said, 'She died because you didn't choose her.'"
Maggie's quiet for a long moment. "And you've been wearing them ever since."
"Every day. Reminder of what happens when you put protocol over people."
"That's why you broke protocol for me."
"Yeah." I meet her eyes. "I heard those men talking about you in that bar, and I had the same choice. Call it in, let Guardian HRS handle it through proper channels. Or go rogue and do it myself."
"You went rogue."
"I went rogue. And this time, someone lived." I lean back in the chair, feel it creak under my weight. "That's because of you, not me. You kept pace during the extraction. You stayed tactical under fire. Most civilians would have frozen or panicked. You fought."
