“She was,” Larkin replies softly. There’s no comfort in her tone, only regret. “Until she wasn’t. She knows the case as well as you do, Jon. I needed someone I could trust, someone who already had access and intel. So I called her back.”
My body starts moving before my brain does. I’m pacing, jaw clenched, teeth grinding, cigar shoved back between my lips. I can’t sit still. I can’t breathe. The walls feel closer, the air thinner. I pray to every god I stopped believing in years ago that this is some mistake, that she’s wrong, that I misheard her—
“We received a distress call,” she continues, pressing a key on the comms panel. Her fingers don’t shake, but I can see the tension in her shoulders. “Secure channel. You should hear it.”
The speaker crackles. A second passes, stretching long and taut. Then:
“This is Echo Sierra Nine,” Delilah’s voice, strained and distant, comes through. “I’ve been compromised. Repeat, I’ve—”
Silence.
I freeze, the sound of her voice slicing clean through me like a blade I didn’t see coming. It’s not just the words—it’s her tone. Controlled panic. That particular cadence she only uses when she’s thinking fast and bleeding faster. The muffled edge around the consonants, the faint echo that tells me she’s somewhere enclosed, somewhere wrong.
And then it’s gone. Cut off mid-breath.
I don’t think. I move.
I turn for the door, barely aware of my own limbs, of the sweat breaking out down my spine. Every instinct I have is screaming at me to run, to get to her, to put myself between her and whatever the hell is out there. I need to go. Now.
“King!” Larkin’s voice snaps across the room, sharp as a whip.
He’s faster than I expect, catching my shoulder before I reach the doorframe. His grip is firm, fingers digging in just enough to remind me he’s there, that there’s more than one person in this room trying to keep me from detonating.
“Move,” I growl, ripping the cigar from my mouth and flinging it across the room. It bounces off her desk and lands with a dull, defeated roll, coming to rest near the leg of her chair. A sad little symbol of control I no longer have.
“He stays here. This is yours, King,” Larkin orders. “No exceptions.”
I fight against the pressure in my chest, the adrenaline spiking hard enough to make my vision tunnel. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips, in my throat, in the bruise forming under King’s grip.
“The hell I do,” I bite out. “You can’t keep me off this.”
“I’m not keeping you off,” she says, jaw set. “You’re in his ear. You don’t leave this base.”
I whirl on her, every muscle in my body ready to throw something—preferably this entire fucking situation out the nearest window. “Bullshit!”
“You’re too attached,” she says. “And you know it.”
She doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t flinch. But it hits me harder than if she’d screamed. That kind of honesty—the kind that only comes from someone who’s seen you at your lowest and stayed anyway—it cuts cleaner than any blade.
Too attached.
Like there’s a version of this where I’m not. Like there’s a universe where she’s taken and I don’t feel like I’m about to tear through concrete with my bare hands to get her back.
My fists clench, shaking slightly from the restraint it takes not to slam something into a wall. I want to fight her. God, I want to scream and break protocol and flip every table in this room. I want to tell her she doesn’t get to make this call. That no one does but me.
But instead, I force the breath back into my lungs, one ragged pull at a time. In. Out. In. Out. The sound is harsh in the quiet, like gasps dragged over gravel.
We lock eyes. No words. No apologies. Just understanding.
And I hate it.
“Dismissed,” she says quietly.
I nod once. It’s stiff. Final. The kind of nod that feels like the end of something. The end of pretending I’m anything other than exactly what she just accused me of being.
Then I walk out, the echo of Delilah’s voice still rattling around in my skull like a ticking bomb, and no way to shut it off.
Chapter 3
