The search didn’t end.
It thinned.
Boats held position instead of moving forward. Radios dropped to shorter updates, voices lower, more careful with words. The water stopped being interrogated and started being watched.
Fly felt it settle into him without permission.
He eased Valor into a slow hold, bow still into the wind, keeping her steady while the bay rolled past with dark, relentless swells. The cushions they’d thrown drifted farther out now, bright and useless, marking a place that no longer mattered.
Bridge lowered herself onto the deck, arms wrapped around her knees, eyes still scanning even as her focus slipped. Joss stood rigid, hands clenched on the rail, staring so hard it looked like he might burn a hole through the surface. Than hadn’t moved. He stood exactly where Fly had left him, soaked, shaking, gaze fixed on the water with a kind of quiet that scared Fly more than noise would have.
Fly waited for something inside himself to break. What came instead was a cold, exact certainty. The math had finished running. Drift and time had intersected, then passed each other without touching.
Static cracked over the radio before the Coast Guard’s voice cut through the storm, ordering all civilian vessels out of the search area.
Fly breathed in, slow and controlled, and let the reality settle where it would have to live from now on. Deep. Permanent.
The conditions were worsening, and the authorities weren’t taking any more chances.
Had rescue become recovery?
He didn’t say the words. He simply adjusted Valor a fraction to hold position and kept his eyes on the water, as if she might still give something back if he stayed ready enough.
He stayed at the helm, hands steady, shoulders squared, holding the boat and the moment together because someone had to, and because letting go would change nothing.
15
RCMP WILD Headquarters, TOC, Outskirts of Kamloops, British Columbia.
Breakneck adjusted his stance near Ayla’s console, the bruises under his plates throbbing with every breath. He didn’t let it show. He’d taken worse hits in worse places, but the ache twisted tight under the bone, vision narrowing at the edges every time he inhaled too deep.
He forced himself still, moving slightly, but he released a soft grunt he couldn’t bite back. Blair heard it and looked at him.
Geezus.
She unraveled him just by breathing next to him, but that soft, compassionate, worrying look slid through him like a blade through hot butter. She looked away, her eyes a bit glassy. He realized he wasn’t the only one who had to recenter, pull his shit together, and that didn’t help his focus one damn bit.
He forced himself cold. He had to. Blair was talking, taking it to a professional level.
He switched ruthlessly to tracing the map, calculating distance and wind direction and muzzle rise over elevation, mapping sniper real estate the way his mind always did. But her voice pulled at him, low and steady, each syllable anchoring him and lodging there like a clean shot.
He didn’t like how much he was drowning in that voice.
Ayla changed the feed, and the image of the compound expanded across the wall. Breakneck’s posture tightened. The formation was hostile, messy, dangerous, exactly the kind of chaos he should’ve been devouring whole.
He focused. Hard. Multiple structures. Gate choke point. North fence patrol. Fire pit cluster. Porch sentry with overwatch dominance. Garage bay with unknowns, heat signatures, a problem waiting to escalate.
His sniper brain clicked through the threat matrix on instinct. His body lagged behind, shaking and exhausted.
Blair stepped in beside him to study the screen, the warmth of her presence brushing against the cold in him, and the contact lit something he’d sworn he’d gotten under control.
Her scent was close, magnolia, leather, and the faint trace of heat under her skin. Every time she spoke, the vibration of her voice threaded through the quiet space between them like she was somehow inside him already, finding places he didn’t let anyone go.
This was not good, safe, or smart. He needed to sit down, and he folded back into his seat.
He was in the worst place mentally he had ever been. The swamp of his mother’s betrayal clung to him like mud he couldn’t scrape off, every breath reminding him that Derrick’s blood ran in his veins, the same blood that terrorized his childhood, the same blood that led him to sick, ugly questions he didn’t want answers to.
He didn’t know who he was anymore or trust the man behind his own eyes, not the stillness, or the violence, or the frightening lack of remorse that came with doing what had to be done.
