Beckett
First missions with new assets usually went one of two ways: smooth and clean, or bloody and sideways.
I was betting on sideways.
We were wheels up at dawn, heading toward a Hydra-owned warehouse that Elara swore held proof of Roger Grand’s laundering network. Oliver and Gage flanked the rear. Cyclone was glued to his laptop. And Elara? She was sitting across from me in the transport, legs crossed, calm as if she wasn’t flying straight into the mouth of hell.
Her eyes flicked to mine once, steady, unwavering. “You keep staring, Cole. Something you’d like to say?”
Yeah. Plenty. Like how I didn’t trust her, how the sight of her on this op made my instincts scream. How her cool composure made me want to shake her—or kiss her until that mask cracked.
Instead, I leaned forward, elbows on my knees. “One wrong move, Voss, and you’ll be the first body on the floor. Don’t test me.”
Her lips curved, not a smile—something sharper. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Damn it. She was fearless. Or reckless. Either way, she was under my skin, and I hated it.
River’s voice crackled over comms:“Two minutes out.”
I checked my rifle, chambered a round, and glanced back at her. She sat serene, like she’d already made peace with whatever waited.
And me? I swore under my breath.
Because no matter how much I didn’t trust her, I already knew—I’d take a bullet for Elara Voss.
4
Beckett
We were two blocks from the back dock, boots silent on wet asphalt. Dawn was still a bruise in the sky; steam curled up from storm drains, and the warehouse loomed like a sleeping beast, dark windows reflecting a crooked moon. Cyclone whispered coordinates into my earpiece, but the sound blurred—everything narrowed until the mission became the only thing that mattered.
Oliver took point, Gage on his left, and me on the right. River took the back. We moved smoothly as we always did: relying on trained muscle memory rather than overthinking. Elara stayed in the middle, hands held ready to fight, her face unreadable. Up close, the scar along her wrist looked like a pale line dragged across porcelain. I wanted to reach out and trace it, see if it trembled. Instead, I kept my hand on the stock of my gun, feeling the familiar calm of readiness pulse through me.
“Three breaches,” Oliver breathed. “Two on the east. Cyclone, you hit their comms now.”
“On it.” Static, then a strangled string of noise. For a second, the building felt thinner—its ears and eyes gagged. We moved.
The first door jammed; I shoved shoulder-first and felt the wood stick, the kind of old growing pain that means someone’sbeen propping it from the inside. Gage went through like thunder, then a flash of bodies and the sick metallic smell of adrenaline and sweat. Men swore, a lamp smashed, we heard that women and children were held here.
I should have expected the man with the gun in his hand. I should have expected the flinch that comes with a live target. But I hadn’t expected Elara.
She moved like someone leading a double life—economical and precise in her motions. One step, a hook to the man’s wrist, a tug that sent his weapon tumbling. She didn’t scream. She didn’t beg. She disarmed him and, with a single twist, had him flat on his back, eyes wide and suddenly very ordinary.
For the first time since she walked into the briefing, I saw her without the mask. There was a flash of something: iron, and exhaustion, and an animal curiosity that set my teeth on edge.
“Wow, good job,” Gage muttered—walking past her. I wanted to punch something for the casualness of it, for the way men tried to make everything small with a phrase.
We pushed through the middle of their network: shipping crates, stacked pallets, a maze of forklifts like iron teeth. Men in the compound fought back with the kind of sloppy, panicked violence that made them dangerous. Someone screamed in Spanish; someone else tried to bolt. I fired twice—one clean hit—then ducked as a shadow lunged with a cleaver.
Elara was next to me before I registered she’d moved, shoulder brushing mine in a way that should have been intimate and wasn’t. She kicked the cleaver out of the man’s hand and shoved him into a stack of crates. He collapsed like a broken puppet.
“Cole,” she said, breath close enough that I felt it against my ear. “Left stack. Two down, one behind the crates.”
Cold and hot at once. Her voice wasn’t a mask; it was a weapon. She was untrained from my perspective, yet trained inways that made me sick with jealousy. Who had taught her? What she’d done. How many lives had she taken and called necessary?
A shot cracked from above. The ceiling lights trembled. Dust fell like confetti. A man on the crates had a rifle and was aiming at us. I dove forward, the world a slow-spinning cylinder. My body moved before my brain did—instinct, muscle, and the memory of a thousand drills. The bullet kissed the wall where my head had been a heartbeat earlier; plaster erupted into my face. Pain bloomed behind my ear, and I tasted metal.
“Elara!” I heard my own shout, raw and stupid, something divisible only by adrenaline.
