She reached the access panel at the bay door and stopped.
The status was green. A clean, steady green that meant the system had been disengaged from the inside, layer by layer, every protocol unwound in the correct order with the correct codes. The Eyrie was open.
Her pulse pounded, cold settling into her body, the configuration she trusted most, the one that had kept her alive inplaces that should have killed her. She brought the sidearm up. She listened.
The hangar gave her back its own breath.
Her earpiece clicked.
"You're going to be pissed, so I'm heading back to Langley." Bagh's voice, low, the smile in it strained at the edges. "Don't want you to kill the messenger, but I brought you back up. Killa." Her name was threaded with so much emotion, she flinched. The smile gone. "Be careful."
The line cut.
She stood with the weapon still raised, her finger still indexed and the green light on the panel still glowing its placid, obedient green, and she didn’t move for a long count. Bagh had used her name. Not her callsign. Her name. He had used her name once before, in a hospital corridor in Bogotá the night O-voo nearly died, and he had used it now, which meant whatever he had done was bad enough that he wanted her to remember he loved her when she went to find him.
She lowered the weapon a fraction.Back up? Oh, Bagh, what have you done?
The words sat in her chest like a swallowed coin.
The shift in the air was the kind only her body recognized. The hangar simply contained him before her eyes did, the same way a room contained a storm front change a second before the rain.
She tracked him in the periphery, in the way the dust held differently around the bay door, in the faint draft that meant the seal had been broken and resealed by someone who'd grown up moving through buildings he wasn't supposed to be inside. Five sets of footsteps, but only barely. Trained men, walking on the balls of their feet, weight forward, hands free. EAST…SEALs. The team Bagh and O-voo had warned her about. Flash’s team.
Her grip eased on the sidearm. She didn't holster it. She let it hang along her thigh, the muzzle angled at the floor, the message clear enough without ceremony.
She kept her face turned away.
That was the only mercy she could grant herself in the first second. If she didn't look at him, she didn't have to know what her body would do.
The four behind him, she let herself read.
The two youngest she clocked first. So young they had to be new to the team. They shouldn't have rung anything in her at all. They should have read as warm bodies, two unknowns to log, watch, and shoot if necessary. Instead, her chest tightened the way it tightened around her own vow brothers, a low recognition that hummed somewhere underneath her sternum and refused to be argued out of place.Shadowguard. Both of them. New, raw, untried, but already on the inside of the bond she shared with O-voo and Bagh and a hundred others she'd never met.
The forms riding them hadn't settled yet. Over the broader one hung the suggestion of something vast and four-legged, the heavy shoulders of a buffalo, a head built to take a charge and hold the ground it stood on, there and gone before it finished shaping. Over the leaner one, restless on his feet, the ghost of a kite cocked its wings and hunted a current it hadn't found. Both forms hung faint and half-drawn, claimed by the Veil but not yet finished.
She had never seen these men in her life, and her body was answering them like family. She set her jaw, breathing past it.
The third one, lean, sharp, medic. Shane “Twister” Reeves emanated healer resonance, the particular cool spread of it across the air, as recognizable to her as her own pulse.
The fourth was a different problem. Matthew “Easy” Hitchcock. Predator. Whatever animal lived in him hunted, and the air around him had the watchful quality her own had whenshe was deciding whether to kill. She felt it like a blade at the back of her neck. She matched it without thinking, owl meeting cat across a hangar floor neither of them had agreed to share.
The breath she pulled in didn't reach the bottom of her lungs. Something was wrong with her. When she blacked out. Something had happened that her body understood and her mind hadn't caught up to, and the not-knowing was a kind of nakedness she hadn’t signed up for, hadn’t given consent to, and that she hated with a fury that arrived clean and total.
She instinctively knew the source. She turned her head. Her gaze found him.
Jae "Flash" Shaw stood five paces inside her hangar like he had a right to the floor he was standing on. He filled the space the way he always had, confidence in every line of that delectable, muscled body. She'd held him in memory for six months, and memory had been merciful. The man in front of her wasn’t. Over the line of his shoulders and the set of his jaw there hung, faint as heat shimmer, the suggestion of wings she shouldn't have been able to see. White and bronze and the impossible red and blue of their country’s flag. A star-spangled eagle riding the air above him like it had always been there and only now consented to be seen.
The taste of copper flooded her mouth.
The hangar tilted. Just once. A single hard slip of the floor that her balance corrected before her mind could name it. In the correction, her right hand registered a weight that wasn't there, a hilt fitted to her palm, the heft of something forged long enough ago that no metallurgy she'd been trained on would have produced it, and the conviction, absolute, cellular, older than her thinking mind, that she had held that blade against this man before and used it.
Her whole being recoiled.
She took a full half step back before her brain caught the order, weight transferring to her rear foot, the sidearm coming up an inch on pure reflex before she dragged it down again. Her free hand closed on nothing. The phantom hilt dissolved. The taste of copper stayed.
She refused to let him see it.
Heat climbed her throat, and she let it climb because anger was the only emotion she would allow herself. She gripped the fury with both hands.
