Him, standing frozen in the center of the room—blood-stained, wounded and looking more lost than she’d ever seen him.
Outside, the resort lights glowed in the distance, oblivious to the violence that had occurred only minutes ago. To the revelation running like a fault line between them.
Emma pressed her fingertips to the glass, feeling the cool surface against her skin. Real. Solid. Unlike everything else in this moment.
Behind her, Zach didn’t move. He waited.
She closed her eyes—throat tight, stomach in knots—trying to sort through the storm of emotions inside her.
But underneath it all…
Relief.
But he only told me because he had no choice.
Emma opened her eyes, studied their reflections. Zach looked like what he had described. A living weapon.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Emma said, still facing the window. The words felt heavy and unfamiliar in her mouth. “If I’m strong enough for… whatever this is.”
She sucked in a deep breath and turned to face him. “I don’t know if I can trust you now, but I’ll stay for tonight.”
She retreated to the bedroom.
Behind her, the silence was absolute.
Chapter 27
Operational Failure
Zach staredat the bedroom door.
Closed. Not slammed. Emma didn’t operate that way—she didn’t weaponize her emotions or punish people with dramatic exits. Instead, she withdrew, retreating behind a boundary he didn’t know how to cross.
The silence in the cottage pressed against his chest.
I pushed her too far.
The thought arrived with the certainty of a mission gone sideways: the moment of realization that the operation was compromised, the asset burned, no clean extraction possible.
He’d shown her what he was, in the worst possible way. And now she was gone—not physically, but in all the ways that mattered. She’d looked at him like he was something foreign, something dangerous, something she couldn’t reconcile with the man she thought she knew.
She no longer trusted him.
Zach crossed to the window, muscles locked tight. His reflection stared back—a man who’d just committed the one operational failure he’d spent years avoiding.
Compartmentalization compromised. Asset exposed.
Emma knows.
The full weight of his new reality settled over him like water closing over his head. She knew what he was. What he could do. The truth that made him something other than human.
Stop.
He forced himself to breathe, but his thoughts spiraled.
What if Emma betrays me?
The question surfaced before he suppressed it, and he physically recoiled. His mind rejected the idea—she wasn’t that person. She didn’t operate with deception or calculated cruelty. Everything about her ran counter to betrayal.
