And just like that, he was gone, moving low and fast across the yard.
By the time I followed,Boone was already covering the flank. The air was chaos—gunfire, shouts, the sting of smoke. A man stepped from the van, case in hand, and I lunged before thinking. We hit the ground hard; the case skittered, and I grabbed it, heart slamming.
When I looked up, Hawk was ten feet away, standing in the open under a floodlight. Rain slicked his hair to his forehead, water trailing down his jaw as he fired, precise and controlled. He was the kind of calm that made everyone else come undone.
And God help me, I loved him. Still after all these years. It wasn’t a high school crush. It wasn’t puppy love. It was heartbreaking, soul-shattering love.
The rest blurred—orders, shouts, the sharp tang of blood and ozone—but through it all, my gaze kept finding him. Theway his hand brushed my shoulder to steer me behind cover, the rough warmth of his voice in my ear:“Stay with me.”
When the last shots faded, I realized my hands were shaking—not from fear, but from everything I hadn’t said.
He foundme standing near the wrecked van, hair plastered to my face, adrenaline still burning through my veins.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded, though my throat was tight. “I’m tired of people like Torres being used.”
He stepped closer, close enough that his breath ghosted my cheek. “Then we stop them.”
“And when we do?” I whispered.
His eyes dropped to my mouth, then back up. “Then I stop pretending I don’t want you forever.”
The air between us went still. Rain pattered on metal, soft and relentless. I should’ve said something, anything—but all I could do was stare back.
He reached out, brushing his thumb over the back of my hand where the evidence pouch pressed. “You’re coming with me,” he said quietly. Not an order. A vow.
And for once, I didn’t argue.
Outside, the helicopter approached, wind whipping the rain sideways. Around us, Delta Five packed evidence, secured prisoners, and shouted coordinates—but all I could feel was the heat of Hawk’s touch, the promise of a storm that had nothing to do with the weather.
15
Hawk
The cabin was half chaos, half quiet—Aaron on the radio, Miles buried in code, rain hammering the tin roof like artillery fire. Julia stood near the window, still in her damp clothes, hair curling at the ends from the downpour. The laptop drives sat on the table between us, humming softly as Miles extracted another stream of encrypted files.
I’d been through firefights, raids, and warzones, but nothing felt as dangerous as the distance between us.
She was all sharp edges and quiet exhaustion, eyes flicking between the screens and the storm outside. When she caught me looking, she didn’t turn away.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“Observing,” I corrected.
“That’s your excuse for everything.”
“Because it’s true.”
Her lips curved, just slightly. “What do you see?”
“Someone who doesn’t know when to quit.”
She stepped closer, slow enough that I could hear the soft drag of her boots on the wood floor. “Is that’s a problem?”
“Only if you expect me to,” she said.
The air shifted—so subtle it almost wasn’t movement at all. My pulse found hers in the quiet. For a long heartbeat, neither of us spoke. Outside, lightning cut through the fog, painting her face in quicksilver light.
