The irony isn't lost on me. She trusted me once before and I disappeared for years without explanation. Now I'm asking her to trust me again with her life while she's still furious about the first betrayal.
Tomorrow morning we brief on surveillance protocols.
Tomorrow night we go into the field together.
My hands grip the steering wheel as I drive back toward base, knuckles white against the black leather. Sarah's voice echoes in my head—cold, certain, locked down tight.
'Because we don't have a choice.'
She's right. We don't.
But choice has nothing to do with what happens when proximity strips away the walls we've both been hiding behind.
10
SARAH
The cabin sits a few miles outside Whitefish, Montana, positioned on a ridge that gives clear sight lines to the valley below where Samuel Masters's logistics warehouse operates.
Micah chose the location. I coordinated the rental through one of Tommy's shell corporations. We arrived separately at different times, maintaining the appearance of unrelated travelers passing through. Standard surveillance protocols, the kind that feel surreal to execute with someone who used to know my coffee order by heart.
He used to know a lot of things by heart.
I set up my equipment on the table near the window—signals intelligence receiver, encrypted laptop, analysis software that will monitor Masters's communications. Micah's handling physical surveillance, camera equipment positioned to track vehicle movements and personnel entering the warehouse facility.
A professional division of labor based on our respective skill sets. It's nothing personal. We're just two operatives executing a mission with maximum efficiency.
Except nothing about working with Micah has ever been just professional, and pretending otherwise is exhausting.
"Coffee?" His voice cuts through my setup routine.
I don't look up from calibrating the receiver. "I'm fine."
"You've been driving for hours. You need caffeine."
"I said I'm fine."
He doesn't argue. He moves toward the kitchen. The coffee maker starts up. The sound is too familiar, unwelcome. The equipment needs my focus—adjusting frequencies, building filters that will separate his communications from background noise.
The warehouse operates as a legitimate logistics hub for outdoor recreation equipment. Shipping containers arrive weekly, get processed through customs, distribute to retail locations across the Pacific Northwest. On paper, everything's clean. But Victoria's financial records show payments to Masters that make no sense unless she’s actively working against Echo Ridge.
Someone's using our logistics network to move information. We just need to prove it.
My receiver locks onto his office frequency. Audio filters engage, clearing static and isolating voice communications. The analysis software starts recording, timestamps syncing with the surveillance camera feeds Micah's monitoring.
Dark roast fills the cabin, strong enough to qualify as a controlled substance. It's exactly how I used to drink it during late nights tracking Committee financial networks when time zones stopped meaning anything.
The bastard remembers.
Micah sets a mug on the table beside my laptop. My eyes stay on the screen. Data streams fill the display as his office phone connects to an outbound call.
"Black, just the way you like it."
My fingers go still on the keys. Black. No sugar, no cream, no hesitation. The detail he shouldn't remember after years of silence, the detail I definitely didn't tell him when we were planning this operation.
He knows it the same way he knows how to move through tactical situations with unconscious precision. Some things his body remembers even when his mind should have forgotten.
I force myself to keep typing. "Thanks."
