He looked down at their joined hands. “This is going to be our future now, beautiful. Use our spidey-senses together and do a lot more good than either of us could’ve done alone.”
She gave his fingers a small squeeze. “I know. Just…”
She looked past him at the floor plan on the wall. The house, the perimeter positions, the sight lines his team would cover. Every angle mapped, every contingency planned. A trap built with precision by people who did this for a living.
A trap that didn’t need her inside it to work.
Her mouth pressed into a thin line. She held it for a long moment. Then she squeezed his fingers once more and let go.
“Fine, I’ll stay here. But I want comms access. I want to hear everything that happens in real time while you’re in that house.”
That he could do. “Done. You’ll have a direct channel.”
“Thank you.” She held his gaze, then reached up and kissed him softly. “Be careful. Like you said, the good we’re going to do here, we’re going to do together. So handle this asshole and let’s get started.”
He grinned. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
Without another word, she turned and walked out the door.
Isaac watched it close behind her.
Ryder cleared his throat. “You better hold on to that woman.”
“Oh, I plan to.” In every possible way.
“She trusts you enough to be in the driver’s seat with this op, and you respected her enough to hear her out when she needed to be heard.” Ryder picked his stylus back up. “That’s more than a lot of people have. So let’s get her and Cassie safe.”
Cassie. Not Cassandra, not even Cass. Isaac almost called him out on it, but now wasn’t the time.
Right now, he had an operation to run.
The rental house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac in a suburb thirty miles south of Austin. Beige siding, brown roof, a lawn that needed mowing. The kind of house that existed to be overlooked.
Isaac had been in position for six hours.
He was inside the house, in the back bedroom, with a clear view of the front approach through a monitor fed by a camera disguised as a doorbell. Ryder was in the garage, the door cracked two inches, covering the driveway. Two Rogue operatives held the perimeter: one in a parked sedan four houses down, the other on foot in a neighbor’s backyard with a sight line to the rear of the property. A fifth operative sat in a utility van at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, running electronic surveillance on every signal within half a mile.
The house smelled like new carpet and stale air. The lease had only been active for five days, and Cassandra had arranged for minimal furnishing: a couch, a table, a lamp visible through the front window. Enough to suggest someone lived here. Not enough to suggest they’d settled in.
Isaac keyed his comms. “All positions, status check.”
The responses came back clean. Perimeter secure. No movement. No signals. Six hours of nothing, and nothing was what he’d expected. The wait was always the hardest part, not because it was boring, but because it tested every instinct that wanted to act. The body wanted to move. The mind wanted to solve. And the operation demanded that both stay still.
“All positions, keep your heads in it,” Isaac said into comms. “Boredom is the enemy right now. Kessler will come when we least expect it, which means we need to expect it every second.”
Ryder’s voice came through the earpiece, low and dry. “I’ve memorized every tool hanging on this garage wall. There’s a rake with a broken handle and a half-empty bag of fertilizer. If Kessler doesn’t show soon, I’m going to start a garden.”
“Copy that. I’ll put you down for landscaping duty.”
A quiet laugh from one of the perimeter operatives.
The tension needed somewhere to go. Isaac knew that. He’d managed teams through long surveillance holds before, and the rhythm was always the same: the first two hours were easy, the next two were restless, and everything after that was a discipline problem. He kept the comms open. Let the team talk in short bursts between checks. Gave them enough slack to stay human without losing the edge.
Fallon was on a separate channel back at the compound, listening. He could picture her sitting in the control room with her hands in her lap, hearing every status check, every silence between them, her whole body tuned to the frequency of an operation she couldn’t touch. He thought about keying her channel and saying something. Decided against it. She didn’t need reassurance; she needed the operation to work.
Hour seven.The light through the front window shifted from bright to amber. The neighborhood settled into its evening rhythm: garage doors opening, cars pulling in, the muted sounds of a suburb winding down.
“Command, I’ve got movement.” The operative in the sedan. His voice had changed—the casual undertone gone, replaced by something clipped and precise. “Vehicle approaching from the east. Dark SUV, tinted windows. Speed is below the limit. Driver’s scanning.”
