She pivoted, saw the shooter, and dove. She moved like someone trained to throw her body into danger without caring which parts would break. She should have worn a vest; she should have been behind me. Instead, she tucked and rolled, a sculpture of motion, and the bullet skittered across her shoulder, shredding the fabric, then hit the padding underneath. She hissed but didn’t go down.
I ripped across the warehouse, every step a white hot decision. My hand closed on her shoulder as I reached her, yanking her into the shadow of a stack of crates. Up close, she was smaller—smaller than the suit and the jawline, human. Blood leaked dark from the seam of her jacket where the bullet had grazed her collarbone.
Her face had gone pale, not the pale of fear but the pale of someone who keeps temperatures low so others don’t notice the collapse. Her eyes found mine, and for one awful, perfect second the rest of the world fell away: the ceased fire trucks outside, Oliver swearing, Cyclone barking coordinates into his headset. It was just her, half-breathing, the smear of blood on her collarbone, and the thought that I should have seen heras vulnerable before I’d thought of her as enemy or asset or whatever the world wanted her to be.
“You okay?” I asked. My voice was a flat thing. I touched the wound because I couldn’t not touch it. Her skin was shock-cold under my fingers.
She answered with a smile that was all teeth. “I’ll live.” Her hand came up and covered mine, fingers strong and she removed my hand. “You gonna keep staring, Cole, or are you going to shoot the guy who tried to kill us?”
I fired. The shooter went down with a wet sound. The fight lasted another thirty seconds—a minute—and then it was over. Sirens came like a promise. They’d expected us to be ghosts and we were not. We were wet and furious and alive.
When we rounded the last corner, a man tried to crawl out from under a pallet. Elara’s foot met the back of his head with a short, efficient motion that left no room for empathy. She looked at me afterwards as if she’d done nothing at all. I could see underneath all of that, I knew she wasn’t as calm as she pretended.
“You okay?” I asked again, because asking once is a superstition and asking twice is reality.
She exhaled and tucked a loose curl behind her ear with a hand that trembled, just slightly. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks to you.”
Liar. But the lie was soft.
I wanted to tell her not to disappear into the kind of silence that swallowed people whole. I wanted to tell her to lean on us, to let us hold her when the night was too much for her. Instead I said, “Med team will clear you. Don’t try to run.”
She tilted her head. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Her voice, the same as before—the knife-sharp humor. Her lips brushed my knuckles when she pulled her hand away. It was a touch that could have been nothing, and it wasn’t.
Cyclone’s voice cracked into our earpieces: “Extraction inbound. Debrief at base in one hour. Everyone keep their mouths shut and their stories straight.”
I watched Elara as she walked, shoulders pressed into the armor of someone used to standing alone. And I heard, beneath the thudding of my pulse, the thin, ridiculous thing that always started in the chest when someone important edged close: possession. Not possession like ownership—possession like a promise I hadn’t made but already felt.
She was mine to guard.
Hell.
5
Elara
They bandaged me as if I were fragile, and sometimes I almost enjoyed pretending I was. A neat strip of gauze, the medic’s thumbs pressing down, the smell of rubbing alcohol lingering on my skin. Oliver made an unhelpful joke about my fashion choices; Gage told the man to stop asking if I wanted morphine like it was a mercy I didn’t deserve.
Beckett stayed close enough to be in my personal space but far enough to be safe. He maintained this balance with his body, and I observed it like I did the rest of him: broad shoulders that could hold a man’s weight, a clenched jaw that never relaxed, hands built for both making and breaking.
When the medic left us alone for a minute, Beckett’s face folded in a way I’d seen before—only with people who bled for other people. Concern, careful, and contained. He took my hand, and it surprised me that I didn’t snatch it back.
“You don’t have to pretend for me,” he said, voice low. “If you’re on our side, be on our side. If you’re not—say so and I’ll do my job.”
There it was: the offer, wrapped in a threat like a ribbon. I felt the weight of the room in it. Results, not trust. He never asked how—because if he asked how, the world would get complicated.
I looked at the blood on the gauze, at the thin line of red that marked the gravity of what I’d done. It landed where a confession might have landed if I’d ever been brave enough to open my mouth.
“Beckett,” I said, and then stopped. I had rehearsed words for this, for the million moments in which loyalty would be tested and I’d need to answer. None of them fit the ache in my chest.
He tightened his hold, not hard. “Talk to me.”
So I told him a small truth. Not everything—never everything—but a thing that seemed necessary.
“Hydra trained me,” I said, voice small for someone used to being loud. “Not to be a politician or a socialite. They trained me to get in, get out, and make sure their money stayed clean. I used to be good at making shadows.”
Beckett’s face didn’t change much. His jaw worked. I watched the way the muscles moved and it felt like an ache behind my ribs. “Used to.”
