I press my back against the cabin wall and watch the dark tree line. My breathing is controlled. My hands are steady on the Glock. This is what I trained for. This is what twelve years of Pararescue built into my nervous system. The fear is there, but it lives underneath the training, fuel for the engine, not in the driver's seat.
Three minutes pass. Then Deck's voice again. "Contact. Two males, tactical gear, night vision. They're pulling back. Mace cut off their exit route. Converging now."
Sounds of movement through the trees. A shout. The crack of something that might be a branch or might be a bone. Then Mace's voice, calm as always: "Two in custody. Alive. Zip-tied. They had a long-range camera and a signal scanner."
Surveillance team. Not a hit squad. Recon. Someone sent people to map our security and locate Lex's position.
"Copy," I say. "Holding on the principal until compound is cleared."
I stay on her door for another forty minutes while Deck and Mace process the intruders and Sully sweeps the entire perimeter grid for additional contacts. When the all-clear comes,the sky is starting to lighten at the edges, gray dawn creeping over the eastern ridge.
Her door opens behind me.
Lex stands in the doorway in a white t-shirt that falls to mid-thigh and nothing else. Her hair is loose, platinum strands messed from sleep, and her eyes are sharp despite the hour. She looks at me. At the gun in my hand. At the position I've taken against her wall.
"What happened?"
"Two intruders. Surveillance team. They're in custody. Compound is clear."
"How long have you been standing here?"
"About forty-five minutes."
Her gaze drops to my bare forearms. I left my cabin without a jacket. The March mountain air is close to freezing at this hour, and I can see my own breath. I didn't notice the cold until now.
"Come inside," she says.
"I should debrief with Deck."
"You're freezing. Come inside."
She steps back from the door, and I holster the Glock and follow her in because the debrief can wait and she's standing in her kitchen in a white t-shirt with her legs bare and I just spent forty-five minutes in the dark thinking about what I'd do if someone got to her before I did.
The answer was nothing good. The answer involved a level of violence I haven't accessed since my last combat deployment, and it had nothing to do with professionalism and everything to do with the woman standing three feet from me, backlit by the kitchen light, looking at me with an expression I've never seen on her face before.
Fear. Not of the intruders. Of something closer.
She makes coffee. Her hands are steady on the kettle, steady on the mugs, steady on the sugar. Two sugars, black, becauseeven at oh-four-hundred under threat, Alexandra Morrison maintains her habits. She sets my mug on the counter and wraps both hands around hers.
"They were here for me," she says.
"They were scouting. Mapping our layout, trying to locate your specific position. They weren't equipped for extraction."
"Yet."
"Yet," I agree. "Which means whoever sent them is escalating. This isn't Whitfield acting alone anymore. This is organized, funded, and it just went operational."
She nods. Processing. Running the data. Then she looks up at me, and the CEO is gone. The woman underneath, the one I've been catching glimpses of for eight days, is right there on the surface.
"You were outside my door for forty-five minutes. In the cold. With a gun."
"That's the job."
"Stop saying that."
"Saying what?"
"That everything you do for me is the job. The coffee order. The mountain. Standing outside my door at three in the morning in freezing temperatures." She sets her mug down. "Is it the job, Hayes? All of it?"
