Patch rubbed his hand across his scruffy face and sighed.
McGuire held Savvy’s gaze. He said nothing. He didn’t have to. He knew. He’d always known and perhaps that was a good thing. She’d never been able to come out and say,hey,I’m the one giving you orders as the head of this division, because I’m your sister.The shadowy world of covert ops didn’t work that way. She’d had to protect the government, the constitution, her brother, and his team. But just sitting there, looking at him now, and knowing that he’d known all along that some of those ops he’d gone on with Task Force Sentinel had come down by her directive gave her a sense of relief.
“Wait a second.” Stone waved his hand. “Are you telling me that you’re the one who could have lost it all if one of those unsanctioned missions went sideways?”
“Technically, they were sanctioned.” Savvy shot Stone a nasty glare. “And what difference does it make if it were me or someone else?”
“Because in part, we were helping with government fuckups,” Stone muttered.
“Yeah, that was the one thing that always bothered me about those missions. Some of them were correcting those screwups the government made.” Cross shook his head.
“A necessary evil, and some of those things you went in to fix were corrections necessary because a human royally messed up during a mission, and not the op itself.” She arched a brow. “It was my division that made you all ghosts. Two years ago, we worked with MI6 to bring in Nicolas Hurraha. The CIA couldn’thave done that without the existence of Division 73. It gives the military and the government plausible deniability.”
“We’ve gotten a little sidetracked,” McGuire said with a pointed stare.
“If the op wasn’t about Jenkins and bringing him back,” Patch asked, “what was it about? Because this is a convoluted way to put a bullet in someone’s head.”
“That’s the thing,” Darius said. “The more I poked around, the more red flags I found. Comms trails go dark. File names don’t match logs. Every breadcrumb leads to a buried protocol tagged with Vance’s clearance code. Whatever this was? It wasn’t about extracting a rogue agent. That was the bait.”
Savvy stared at the screen. “And I walked right into it.”
“You and your team, but Patch is right. There has to be more to this,” Fenmore added gently. “Although that brings me to the next part.”
Darius clicked another tab. “Riven found chatter in the underground. Freelance channels. Contractor message boards. Someone put out feelers on a hit. Not a bounty—this is a contract. Quiet kill. Off the books. Large payout with stipulations on how the kill is to be completed.”
“What kind of stipulations?” Cross asked.
“Details on how it’s to be done. It will attract some of the best hitmen because it plays into their ego. While others will be interested in it for the money, because this high-ranking person will bring on the heat, they might pass,” Darius said. “And, to clarify, the contract is for you, Savvy.”
Even though no one needed Darius to spell that out, the room went dead still.
Patch’s jaw clenched, his knuckles whitening around the edge of the table. “That kind of contract hit is different. That’s not about money. That’s about cleanup, and one that takes theheat off the government. But what about the rest of the team? Are their names on it too?”
“They are.” Darius nodded. “But the amount of money isn’t as high. It’s almost an insult.”
Cross leaned forward. “That certainly does take the CIA out of the equation for the kills. But it doesn’t get them off the hook for what happened.”
“It allows them to put a spin on it,” Savvy said. “To add color to my file. To my team’s file. To weave whatever story they need to sell to the American people so that we come off as traitors.”
“But why? And who did you betray your country for?” McGuire asked. “They need a story that matches, and your record is impeccable, so I don’t see how they can do that.”
“I’m sure Savvy has some ideas on how it’s possible.” Patch stood, stepping away from the table like he couldn’t sit still. His jaw flexed once, then again. “But now we have to think about who’s actually coming for her. A professional hitman. Probably more than one. Someone who knows how to ghost a target without leaving a trace. A sniper. Military. Trained. Most likely a little left of normal. It won’t be the enemy we think it is, and it definitely won’t be the enemy that set her up. They just washed their hands of that one.”
“Someone’s making damn sure my little sister looks like a person on the edge who got what was coming to her.” McGuire’s voice was low and lethal.
Fenmore added quietly, “You’re not just being hunted, Savvy. You’ve been prioritized, and not by whoever you think is behind it.”
Savvy sat straighter, spine stiff. “So what now? We wait for them to come to us?”
“No,” Patch said, his voice hardening. He turned back to face the group. “We bring them to our door.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Have you lost your marbles?” McGuire’s voice was sharp. “We’ve got an op rewritten, a team erased, a ghost agent feeding lies, and a professional hit on my sister, and you want to bring that brand of crazy right to us?”
Patch looked at Savvy. “I don’t want to bring hitmen here, but they're coming no matter what. I want to get ahead of this, and the only way I know how to do that is to play their game. They knew she’d do what she does best… go shadow ops. Well, fuck that.” He stared at McGuire. “You said so yourself, having Savvy live out here like a ghost wasn’t a good idea. Well, let’s bring back the half dead.”
“No. No. No. A contract on her life changes things.” McGuire closed the gap between him and Patch as he puffed out his chest, ready to fight.
Savvy slowly rose. She rolled her neck. The two men she loved the most could pound their chests all day long, but it didn’t matter. “Has anyone ever heard of Black Ledger?”
