For a heartbeat, the only sound in the room is the steady melody of the song playing from my vinyl, each note slicing through the silence like a metronome counting down to something I don’t want to name. I blink a few times, searching his expression for the familiar glimmer of bullshit, the smirk, the tell—anything. But there’s nothing.
Just sincerity—bare, unguarded, and sharp enough to cut. That, more than anything he’s said, knocks the air out of me.
A cold wave slides through my stomach, leaving a trail of pins and needles in its wake. My pulse jumps, and the blood in my veins begins to hum with a low, uneasy vibration.
“Who are they?” I ask, my voice low, the slight tremor in it betraying the rush of adrenaline flooding me.
“We don’t know anything about them yet,” he begins. “They’ve been hiding in the shadows, watching from afar. The only thing I’m certain of is that this agent of ours may be carrying information about them—more than he’s ever admitted. Everything we extracted from him before was false. Once we realized that, we understood he was playing against us.”
He sighs. “We need to eliminate him, but we haven’t been able to locate him yet. There’s a small village in the mountains; we believe he’s hiding there.”
Someone is hunting us—and The Order doesn’t even know who they are? In all my years with them, nothing like this has ever happened. Whoever these people are, they’re masters of hiding—shadows within shadows, unseen and unheard.
“So, what’s the plan once we locate him?” I ask, leaning forward. “Do I have to interrogate him?”
“No. God, no,” Cane replies, shaking his head frantically as if shoving the memory away. I know exactly which memory he sees—the last time I interrogated a target.
It happened over a year ago, and it was messy, chaotic, the kind of spectacle Cane despises. He hadn’t liked it one bit. Worse, he dragged me to a psychiatrist afterward, insisting on an evaluation, as if he needed official confirmation that I hadn’t completely lost it.
Well… no more than I already have.
“Just kill him,” he says finally.
I raise an eyebrow, curiosity pricking at me. “But don’t we need information about those people?”
“He’s chosen a side by repeatedly screwing us over. We can’t forgive that. And the longer this drags on, the higher the chance they’ll build a roof over his head or get him out of the country. We need him before that happens.”
I catch my bottom lip between my teeth, the corners of my mouth curling despite the danger of the situation. “Intriguing,” I murmur.
“Very,” he replies dryly, not sharing my intrigue. “Take Dante and head to this location first.” He taps a finger against the page, right where an extra line of scrawled handwriting sits beneath the main address. “The others will meet you there.”
I let out a quiet sigh, already feeling the creeping irritation at the idea of having more people around. Dante is tolerable, but the rest? I can already feel the noise, the distraction, the suffocating press of their presence.
But beneath the surface of my irritation, something shifts, subtle at first—a pulse of anticipation crawling along my nerves, low and electric, humming through every fiber of me.
Something new is coming.
And for the first time in a long while, I feel it.
Mount McKinley, Alaska
From where we stand, the world feels impossibly vast—endless stretches of white and shadow, silence and breath. Denali rises in the distance, its crown swallowed by a swirl of silver clouds, its slopes draped in snow like an ancient god asleep beneath the sun. The light here feels different, as if the air itself were carved from glass.
I inhale deeply and shut my eyes, wanting to feel it more than see it. The purity burns a little, a pain that slips quickly into pleasure.
When I open my eyes again, the world unfolds in slow motion. The horizon glows with a soft haze of blue-gray androse, the colors of something caught between sleep and slow waking. Frost clings to the tundra, scattering the morning light into a thousand shards of silver. A thin ribbon of gold climbs over the frozen peaks, gilding the ice until it shimmers like honeyed fire. The rest of the mountain stays cloaked in shadow, its immensity crouched beneath a sky that deepens from pearl to indigo.
Reluctantly, I pull my gaze from the view and focus on Dante. He’s leaning against the bike, staring blankly at the sky, one leg bouncing restlessly—a steady rhythm of nerves against the frozen ground.
He’s nervous. I can feel it radiating off him in waves. Maybe it’s the job, maybe it’s the idea of working in a team, or maybe it’s something else entirely.
I suppress a sigh, my eyes flicking to his watch. The numbers glare up at me, confirming what I already know.
They’re late. And my patience, like the morning frost, is beginning to thin. The worst part is that there’s nothing we can do about it. Cane insisted we team up with someone else, so here we are—standing in the cold, waiting, our nerves stretched like rubber bands pulled to their limit.
Slowly, Dante runs a hand through his hair. The black strands are damp from frost, sticking up in chaotic tufts and falling across his forehead. My gaze moves to the sloppy bandage wrapped around his hand—frayed, uneven, a poor attempt at hiding something.
“What happened to your hand?” I ask, my voice cutting through the stillness like a sword through smoke.
