Oliver let out a breath that was almost a laugh—sharp, bitter, disbelieving. He ran both hands through his hair and gripped the strands like he wanted to tear them out.
“What the fuck?” he said quietly. “What the actual fuck?”
I sank onto a gray sofa like the one in the common area. The cushions were exactly as uncomfortable as they looked. My body ached with exhaustion, but my mind wouldn’t stop spinning.
I’d been half asleep, warm and sated, with Oliver’s arm draped across my waist when Kiernan’s phone buzzed. He’d gone still, slipped out of bed, and the door had closed behind him. No explanation, just an order to remain where we were, not to leave the room.
When he returned, everything was different.Hewas different. His face had been carved from ice, his voice stripped of every note of warmth I’d learned to listen for since we’d arrived at Greymarch. He’d looked at us like we were problems to be solved, obstacles to be removed.
Pack your things. A helicopter is waiting.
He gave us no explanation and no apology. He delivered orders in that cold, commanding tone, and whenOliver had grabbed his arm, demanding to know what was happening, he’d jerked it away.
Then he’d walked out, leaving us alone and baffled.
Oliver dropped onto the sofa, beside me. Not touching, but close enough that heat radiated off his body, the same helpless rage that was building behind my ribs.
“The text,” Oliver said. “Something happened.”
I nodded. I’d been thinking the same thing. Turning it over and over, trying to find an angle that made sense.
“He was gone for what, thirty minutes? Maybe less?”
“Less.”
Oliver shook his head. “What happens in half an hour that makes someone—” His jaw clenched.
That makes someone throw away what we’d barely started to build, I finished silently. “Something he read changed everything.”
Oliver held his head in his hands. “From who? About what?”
I didn’t have an answer. The questions kept multiplying, but the data points were too few, the variables too unknown. I couldn’t solve an equation when I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be calculating.
He reached over and took my hand, his palm warming my cold fingers.
“We should try to sleep,” he said, but neither of us got up.
Hours crawled past.
I couldn’t say exactly what we did during that long stretch between Rafe’s departure and dawn. We didn’t sleep—that much I knew. We sat on the uncomfortable sofa, talking in fragments that went nowhere, sometimes in silence. Oliver made coffee, and I drank it without tasting it.
At some point, his head fell on my shoulder. I let him rest with his breath on my neck and stared at the wall while my mind refused to stop churning.
I kept asking the same questions, trying to make any sense of it. Nothing did. The thing that kept catching in my chest, the splinter I couldn’t work free, was how fast he’d done it. How efficiently he’d dismissed us. One moment, we’d been three people experiencing something I never imagined. Closeness. Connection. The next, Oliver and I were being loaded into a helicopter like cargo.
He hadn’t hesitated. Hadn’t wavered. Hadn’t given us even a moment to understand before he’d cut us out of his life like we were nothing.
The worst part was that some small, terrible voice in my head wasn’t even surprised. Because hadn’t I always known, on some level? That it was too good to be true? That men like Kiernan Lockhart didn’t fall for women like me, didn’t build lives with people they’d known for a few weeks, most of which were spent as operatives on a mission?
I’d let myself want anyway.
Now, I was sitting in a safe house in Glasgow at zero four hundred, and the man I’d given my submission to had thrown me away without a word of explanation.
Gray light began seeping under the door—dawn breaking over a city I couldn’t see. Oliver stirred and lifted his head with a groan.
“Tell me that was a nightmare,” he mumbled.
“I wish I could.”
