“He does.”
There was a pause. She must have been looking through the photos.
The man couldn’t be sure, but he thought he heard his superior let out a stifled gasp.
“Ma’am?”
Her voice came back lower this time. “The woman. Who is she?”
“I haven’t loaded her image into the system yet. But they came out of McKinley Flowers.”
The man wasn’t sure but he thought he heard his superior say something like, “That son of a bitch.”
“And where are they now?” she snapped.
“They went to her condo.”
This time, the pause was even longer.
Then, she said, “Follow them. Tell me every move they make. Is that understood?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The call ended and he looked down at his phone. He’d experienced his superior’s wrath before, but this …
He scratched his chin and went back to his crossword puzzle.
15
MICAH
The next morning, I stood in Joy's kitchen, staring at the coffee maker like it held answers I didn't have questions for yet.
The sex had been ... more than I'd expected. Both times. The first—careful, claiming, raw in a way that made my chest tight just thinking about it. The second—after we'd talked, after she'd been honest in a way that terrified me—had been different. Slower. Deeper. Like I was trying to memorize her from the inside out.
And now, I was making coffee in her kitchen while she slept in the next room, her body warm and loose in sheets that smelled like us.
What the hell was I doing?
I'd never had a relationship in my life.
Not a real one.
I'd convinced myself years ago that I was cursed that way. That men like me—men who'd seen what I'd seen, done what I'd done—didn't get to keep soft things. We got missions. Objectives. Targets.
We got one-night stands in foreign cities where no one asked your real name.
We got doorway handjobs from women who didn't care about your scars because they'd be gone before morning.
We got alone.
And I'd resigned myself to that. Accepted it the way a monk accepts celibacy—not because I wanted it, but because it was the only path that made sense.
Except now, I was standing in a sunny kitchen above a bakery that smelled like sugar, making coffee for a woman who'd looked at me like I wasn't broken, and my brain was doing something I didn't recognize.
It was planning.
Not an extraction. Not an op. Not an exit strategy.
