Her hand clenched around the mic.
“Phantom, what’s your location?” She used Ramirez’s call sign.
Silence.
“Viking, do you copy?” Again, she used Mendoza’s call sign.
Nothing.
“Gunslinger?”
“They knew.” Hale’s voice came over the coms, soft, final. And then a single, distant burst of gunfire.
Savvy froze.
Not because of fear.
Because the sound came through open air. Not comms.
They were gone.
All of them.
“No. No—” she whispered, fumbling to reboot the device. There had to be a signal. A ping. A backup satellite.
But the screen blinked once and died.
She sat there, mud soaking into her knees, breath heaving, heart pounding so hard it hurt. And in the space between those beats, the truth landed hard.
Someone in the CIA had scrubbed her and her entire team.
She hadn’t known who gave the order. She hadn’t known which bastard up the chain had flipped the switch. Nor did she understand why, but someone had turned off the safety net. Someone had fed them bad intel, sent them in blind, and shut down extraction when the first bullet flew.
And they left her to die.
She was the last one standing. The one with blood still pumping through her veins. The last voice on a dead channel.
Savvy closed her eyes, swallowed back the scream clawing at her throat, and reached into the small waterproof pouch beneath her plate carrier. She pulled out a separate comm unit—a burner not tied to any official frequency. A fallback protocol. Not CIA-issued. No, this one was family-issued.
It was the only thing she’d ever done that broke protocol. Savvy’s hand trembled as she activated it and keyed in a code her older brother had provided.
It rang once.
Twice.
“What’s going on?” McGuire’s voice came in low. Guarded. Her brother. Her anchor. “Are you back?”
“I’m in trouble.” Her voice cracked despite the steel she wrapped around it. “My team… they’re all dead… I need anextraction immediately. No questions. No help from military contacts. Just you. I don’t have much time. I’m a sitting duck out here.”
“Send me your coordinates.” McGuire’s voice was tight. “But in order to get you out now, I have to use the resources I have with the Bayou Brotherhood Protectors, and it might not be me coming for you. If we have someone in the area, it will be them. You know how this works. You set me up with these guys to begin with. Are you good with that?”
“Just get me the fuck out of here before someone puts a bullet through my skull.”
“Hang tight. Check this phone every hour. I’ll be in touch.” The line went dead. Wrong thought, in the wrong place, where everything had gone to shit in a nanosecond.
Tears burned her eyes, and that just pissed her off. Savvy LaSalle didn’t cry. Last time she had it was because the man she’d loved, she’d let walk out the door.
But her career—and his—meant more.
