A wide flank approach—never the direct path—boots soft on wet ground, steps staggered irregularly to avoid pattern recognition. She pressed two fingers to the siding beneath the kitchen window.
Cold. No vibration.
She checked the doorframe. No scrape marks. No tampering she could feel.
Still not safe. Just less unsafe than a minute ago.
She eased the door open and slipped inside. The lock clicked behind her—the false comfort of a boundary pretending to mean something. The room smelled faintly of old coffee and colder hours.
Her boots left wet streaks on the floor.
And for one impossible moment, she let herself hope—against training, against reason—that Blake might already be here. That he’d made it out of the storm and back to this place they’d used as a staging ground, back before the tide closed over whatever hell had taken him.
But the room was empty.
Just her, the quiet, and the ache of someone missing.
And she had hoped—absurdly, recklessly, against everything survival had ever taught her?—
that Blake would be here.
This cabin had been a staging ground once. A quiet place before storms. A place where she could look across a table and know exactly who was watching her back.
Now it felt like a tomb with the wrong body missing.
With caution, she cleared the small place and confirmed no one waited. She wouldn’t stay long, because if Thirteen had been right, agents could be watching the place.
The musky smell of him lingered behind, making her recall the first time they’d met, a week before their first mission together. He’d been leaning against a sink in the breakroom like he owned the world. He’d told her, half-joking, that she needed to stop treating briefings like funerals. She’d shot him a look and then bickered for ten minutes about field prep and emergency rations. The memory was a small, private arrogance she had tucked into her chest like contraband.
Tonight, there was no grin at the sink. The only bed abandoned, the map tacked at an angle. No sign—only the thinache that lived under every operative’s ribs when someone you depended on vanished.
She sat at the antique desk, the one set beneath a weak lamp that threw more shadow than light if she’d dared to turn it on. Her hands, still salty from the ocean mist, moved to her pocket out of habit. The physical photograph was folded there, its edges softened by her fingers. When she smoothed it out on the desktop, the paper made a quiet, intimate sound—the only sound in the room that belonged to her entirely.
He stood in the image as if mid-step, arm slung over another man’s shoulder with that half-cocked ease she recognized. Rone Archer’s grin was a carved thing beside him. To his other side stood that deceased man on the docks—the one tied to the hired militia. Dan lingered in the background, almost an afterthought.
The print was glossy under the lamp. At first glance, it looked like evidence. The kind of hard, clean proof an interrogator would slide across a table and wait for you to break.
Her chest tightened anyway. Because if this was real—if he’d been standing there with them—then the math didn’t work. He knew Dan. He wouldn’t have trusted Archer. And yet the image insisted otherwise, daring her to believe what it showed.
Hope flared, sharp and reckless.Alive,her mind whispered.He’s alive.
She forced herself to keep looking. Not because she wanted answers—but because she didn’t trust the part of her that needed them too badly.
And then the gloss turned thin. The lighting didn’t sit right. Edges bled where they shouldn’t. She stared long enough to see the seams.
Her fingers traced the surface, feeling for the telltale ridges. The lighting on Blake’s jaw didn’t obey the rest of the image. The shadows at his left shoulder had an edge that didn’t correspond to any logical fall. There was a faint, almost imperceptible line—an arc of disrupted grain—where someone had blended two prints together. On the back of the photo, someone had smudged the handwriting, a name half-erased and a date that looked freshly inked.
Her training was muscle memory. She pulled open the desk drawer, fingers finding what she knew Blake would keep there—a cheap plastic magnifier, smudged from use. Old habits. Old ops.
She laid the photograph flat on the desk and leaned over it, bringing the glass to bear.
Up close, the glossy surface turned into a landscape of dots and grain. She swept slowly, quadrant by quadrant.
Blake first. The lighting on his jaw didn’t match the rest of the scene—highlights a fraction too sharp, shadow falling at a slightly wrong angle compared to Archer’s grin beside him. The edges of his shoulder weren’t clean; there was a faint halo, a thin softness that spoke not of depth of field but of scissors and pixels.
She shifted the magnifier toward his arm. There—an almost invisible ridge where the pattern of print dots broke and restarted. Not a crease. A seam.
Her gaze tracked to the background. Dan stood there, too conveniently framed between two men. Under the glass, the focus was wrong—his features a hair softer than the bodies he overlapped, as if he belonged to a different photograph taken with a slightly different lens. Around his outline, the halftone dots warped, a subtle distortion where someone had blended two images and hoped no one would look this close.
