“I had good material.” I tilt my head back. “And a good partner.”
“Partner.” His lips brush my forehead. “I like the sound of that.”
“Diego?” I pull back enough to meet his eyes. “When Ghost said both of us … Did you know?”
“Together.”
I rise onto my toes, kiss him softly. “I like the sound of that too.”
Outside these walls, an AI is building something terrifying in a Nevada desert. A hydroelectric dam powers servers running calculations we can’t comprehend. A senator’s daughter holds the keys to either salvation or destruction.
In forty-eight hours, a team will launch into hell.
But right now, in this moment, I’m exactly where I belong.
Not invisible. Not erased. Not a footnote in someone else’s story.
I’m part of something bigger. A team. A mission. A family.
Diego’s family.
And now, mine too.
TWENTY
“The Vow”
HALO
I wake before dawn.
Old habit. The kind that’s saved my life more times than I can count. My body doesn’t know how to sleep past 0500—some internal alarm wired into my nervous system during years of deployments and extractions and nights when closing your eyes for too long meant never opening them again.
But this morning, for the first time in years, I don’t immediately catalog threats. I don’t reach for my weapon. I don’t run through exit routes and contingency plans.
I lie still. Beside me, Cassie sleeps.
The quarters are dark except for the faint glow of emergency lighting seeping under the door—the soft blue illumination that never fully goes away in a facility designed to operate through any disaster. She’s curled against me, her head on my chest, one hand resting over my heart like she’s checking to make sure it’s still beating. Her hair spills across my shoulder, red silk against the scars that map my history.
In sleep, her face is soft. Unguarded. The tension that’s become her constant companion over the past ten days finally released. No furrowed brow calculating threat probabilities. Nojaw clenched against fear she refuses to show. Just Cassie, breathing slowly, trusting me enough to be vulnerable.
I did that. I kept her alive long enough to look like this.
The thought should trigger the old guilt. The voice that whispers I don’t deserve this, that everyone I protect ends up dead, that Sofia’s ghost is watching from the shadows with accusation in her eyes. For six years, that voice has been my constant companion—louder than my heartbeat, more persistent than any enemy.
But the voice is quiet this morning. Not gone—I don’t think it will ever be completely gone—but quieter. Drowned out by something stronger.
Hope.
I trace my fingers through Cassie’s hair, careful not to wake her. The strands are soft against my calloused hands, impossibly delicate. Ten days ago, she was a name in a file. A threat assessment. A mission parameter I was supposed to extract, relocate, and forget.
Extraction. Relocation. Disappearance.
That’s what I do. What I’ve always done. I make people vanish, give them new names and new lives, then walk away before the attachment can form. It’s cleaner that way. Safer. Attachments are vulnerabilities. Pressure points that enemies can exploit.
I’ve spent six years building walls specifically to prevent this—to make sure I never again had something to lose.
And then Cassie Brennan pepper-sprayed me in her apartment, called me a psychopath, and demanded to know who the hell I thought I was breaking into her home.
