In the dark of the cab, completely hidden from the sharp eyes of the other operators, Addy's hand slowly slides across the cold leather seat. Her fingers find mine, threading tightly through them.
Her grip is resolute, heavy, and deeply anchoring. It is a silent vow. We are in this together.
She doesn't let go as the truck shifts into gear, tearing away from the isolated mountain cabin.
I hold on. I wrap my scarred hand around hers, feeling the steady pulse at her wrist.
I'm no longer a rogue variable operating alone in the dark.
I have her.
And we're going to war.
EIGHT
The Safe House
ADDY
Three days.
Seventy-two hours inside these walls, and I have memorized every crack in the plaster, every water stain on the drop ceiling, every shift in the light coming through the boarded windows.
Guardian HRS keeps safe houses scattered across the country, Frost told me when we arrived.
Nondescript. Off-grid.
The kind of places nobody looks for on a map because they don't appear on one.
This one is a squat, two-story property on a rural stretch of highway with a gravel lot and a chain-link perimeter, flanked on three sides by timber. From the road, it looks like a surveying company that stopped caring. From the inside, it's hardened concrete, encrypted comms, and enough tactical kit to start a small war.
A long folding table in the main room holds my terminal. There's a bathroom down the hall with a temperamental water heater, and five men who keep finding reasons to be in whatever room I walk into.
And one man who has not.
Fourteen months of forensic audit work is spread across my screens.
Ares Global Logistics is a ghost corporation built on layered shells, and the last three days have been about collapsing those layers one by one — tracing the money from the offshore accounts back through the network, building a paper chain so airtight that no prosecutor, no judge, no attorney with a $900-an-hour billing rate can poke a hole in it.
When I hand this off to Guardian HRS and the appropriate federal authorities, the evidence will be undeniable. It has to be.
That's the job.
Complete the audit.
Make the work irrefutable.
It's intricate, meticulous work, and total focus required.
Total focus has not happened in seventy-two hours.
Flint drops his mug into the dish rack at 0630 with a clatter that makes me flinch. Kade fills the entire doorway whenever he wants to ask a question he could have put in a message. Riot paces.
The team is coiled, running hand-to-hand sparring rotations in the gravel lot outside because there is nothing else to do but wait for me to finish, and waiting is apparently a skill none of them have fully mastered.
Wyatt is out there with them every morning.
He's already in the lot when I bring my coffee to the boarded window. Moving through takedown sequences with Hawk in the gray predawn, his breath fogging in the cold air, his focus locked with the same precision that tracked me through the crosshairs before he ever kicked my door open.
