Halo’s expression hardens. “Yeah.”
“You found something?” Talia asks, stepping up beside me. “In the Admiral’s files?”
“I did.” Halo taps the car door. “I dug into the specific threat profile Phoenix built on her. It’s not just surveillance. They’re terrified of her.”
“Why?”
“Because she wasn’t just looking at the money,” Halo says. “She found the connection between Vanguard Defense and a black-site project in Nevada. Something the Admiral was trying very hard to keep buried.” He looks at me. “She’s the next domino. I feel it. If Phoenix takes her out, we lose the trail to the Rook.”
“The Rook,” I repeat. The next piece on the board. The money man. “That’s the next piece?”
“Looks like.” Halo glances at Talia, and she nods. Their tech brains work on a level I’ll never achieve.
“Don’t let them take her out,” I say.
“I won’t, but it’s just me on this op, while the rest of you?—”
“Right. ”A laugh punches out of me, sharp and disbelieving. Just him. The hell it is. “You’rejustthe guy who ran a five-man strike team around a warehouse like you had them on puppet strings.”
Halo stiffens. “That was situational awareness.”
“Situational awareness?” I raise a brow. “You called the ricochet angles like you were seeing them before they happened.”
He grimaces like I’m dragging up something embarrassing.
“I calculated probabilities.”
“You calculated them while dodging bullets.”
“Multitasking.” He shrugs, like that isn’t ridiculous.
I step close enough that he has to look up at me. I grip his shoulder, feel the tension thrumming beneath the half-casual posture.
“You can handle this.”
“I’m a tech guy, Jackson. I don’t kick down doors.” He exhales through his nose, eyes dropping. “And I certainly don’t do it alone.”
“Then don’t kick them.” I lean in, voice low. “Pick the lock. Cheat. Use your luck and win.”
His eyes lift, that small spark flickering through the humility he tries like hell to wear like armor.
And here’s the thing he’ll never say out loud—and doesn’t have to, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Halo runs circles around most of the door-kickers I’ve served with. Not because he’s the strongest or the fastest, but because the universe bends for him in ways that shouldn’t be possible.
He calls it luck.
I call it supernatural. He has a pattern of surviving things no human should survive.
The reason he’s Halo?
It’s not a joke.
It’s not irony.
It was that night in Basra—twenty-seven seconds of bullets slicing the air like angry hornets, every single one missing himby inches, ricocheting off walls in angles that should’ve killed him but somehow didn’t.
He moved through that kill box like something unseen cleared a path for him. A guardian angel tugging him out of harm’s way. We joke about guardian angels, but deep down, watching him walk through a warzone untouched—watching death curve around him—it doesn’t feel like a joke.
It feels like witnessing a glitch in the universe.
