"I was special ops. My team's been hunting the people who are after your son." This is make or break. "Right now, I'm the only thing standing between you and people who will kill Lucas to protect their secrets. So you can call the police and explain why a man showed up claiming your son witnessed a murder. Or you can give me a few minutes to explain why staying alive depends on trusting someone you have every reason to hate."
The phone stays raised, but she doesn't press call.
Silence stretches between us, heavy and loaded with years of anger and hurt. A car passes behind me. Someone's sprinkler system kicks on two houses down.
"I'm listening," she says finally. "And if I don't like what I hear, you leave and never come back. Or I make sure the police know you were threatening my family."
I'm making progress, not earning trust, but at least she's listening.
"Deal." I spread my hands wider. "Can we talk inside? Less chance of surveillance from the street."
Rachel's eyes scan the neighborhood, looking for surveillance and checking for threats. Her gaze tracks every parked car and every window.
"You get one chance," she corrects while lowering the phone. "And Colton? I'm not the woman you left behind. I survived things that would break most people. So don't test me."
She turns and walks into the house, leaving the door open behind her in what could be an invitation or a trap. Either way, it's the only chance I'm getting.
I follow her inside. The door closes behind me.
The last time I walked through a door Rachel held open, she asked me to stay. Asked me to be something other than a weapon with a pulse. I'd just come back from a mission I couldn't talk about, carrying things I couldn't share, and she wanted normal. Wanted a future. Wanted me to choose her over the job.
I walked away instead. Told myself it was the right call, that operators like me don't get happy endings, that keeping her close would paint a target on her back. Told myself a lot of things that felt true in the moment and hollow every day after.
Turns out the cartel painted that target anyway. Turns out walking away didn't keep her safe at all.
Eyes adjust to the dim interior after the desert glare. Cool air flows from a window unit. The living room is small but tidy with a couch against one wall and a television on a stand. Bookshelves filled with paperbacks and children's books. Photos on the wall show Lucas at various ages, none of Rachel with anyone else, only mother and son.
Rachel keeps herself between me and the hallway where Lucas is standing. Phone still in hand, positioned near the door with clear escape routes. Every movement deliberate, calculated. This is someone who learned survival the hard way.
"Lucas, go to your room," she calls without taking her eyes off me. "Now."
I hear a door close down the hall. Only then does she shift her weight, planting herself more firmly.
"Talk," Rachel says, and the flat finality in her voice tells me everything about who she's become.
She's not the woman who needed me to be more than a weapon or the woman who asked me to stay.
She's someone who learned to save herself, someone who sent her son to safety before dealing with me, someone whose controlled calm is more threatening than any weapon.
Kane said to handle it right. Looking at Rachel's eyes—hard where they used to be soft—I'm not sure I know how.
2
RACHEL
Colton Stryker is standing in my living room, and I need him to start talking before I do something stupid like cry or scream or both.
Lucas's door is already closed down the hall. Good. Whatever Colton is about to tell me, my son doesn't need to hear it, doesn't need to watch me measure the distance to every exit or catalog which neighbors would hear me scream.
Hair still short and military-precise. Eyes that miss nothing, already calculating exits and threats even in my tiny living room with its secondhand furniture and photos of Lucas on every wall. Still looking at me like I matter.
"Talk," I say again, and I'm proud of how steady my voice sounds. How flat. Like he's a stranger instead of the man who taught me what it felt like to be seen and then made me invisible by disappearing.
His jaw tightens. "I’m right about the nightmares, aren’t I?"
My stomach drops. "Yes."
Three weeks of Lucas crying in the dark, saying he's sorry, refusing to tell me why. Three weeks of me thinking it was delayed trauma from the cartel, from everything that happened when Micah's team got us out.
