By ten in the morning, Juniper had driven past the pub twice and still had no idea what she intended to do.
Her little Jeep rattled over a patch of sunbaked road where the county had filled one pothole and created three more. The air coming through the open window smelled like exhaust mixed with the decaying vegetation of the inlet.
Calusa Cove had already settled into its usual late-morning rhythm. A couple of tourists wandered down the street in flip-flops. The locals went about their day like they hadn't a care in the world. An egret took a stroll along the sidewalk like it was the Mayor.
Usually, that would have made her smile. But not today.
She gripped the steering wheel and let Sterling’s arguments roll through her head for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes.
He’d been calm about all of them, too. The kind of calm that made his points harder to dismiss because he hadn’t pressed them like a man trying to win. He’d laid them out logically and didn't try to sway her decision with emotion. He simply numbered them on a piece of paper, all Sterling-like. That madeher want to throw something at him and kiss him in the same breath.
The reality was, if the roles were reversed, she'd want her team to know. Keeping the Aegis team blind might protect her Bureau paperwork, but it sure as hell didn’t protect Sterling.
Or his team.
That was the part she hated most.
She could lie to strangers. She could lie to suspects. She could smile over a beer tap while feeding half a town a version of herself that had started as cover and somehow grown skin, bone, and a heartbeat. She wasn't worried about keeping her cover to everyone else. She could do that.
But she struggled with lying to Bea about breaking to Sterling and his team.
And that thought landed hard in her gut.
Bea had warned her about attachment. About how staying this long might become easier than being her old self. Juniper used to roll her eyes at that kind of handler nonsense. Undercover work came with rules and risks and emotional hazards dressed up as common sense. Not to mention that Bea also constantly suggested that perhaps Juniper's time as an agent had come to end. That maybe this assignment might mark the transition to something else.
Only now, if she let her cover crack for Sterling’s team, she had to lie to Bea. And Bea was the one person who knew Juniper better than she knew herself half the time.
Juniper made the loop by the pub for the third time but drove right past the parking lot. The whole point would be to help Sterling and his team. To give them enough truth to stop them from stepping around her like she was a loaded weapon someone had left under a bar towel.
And the cost?
Her job.
Her badge.
Maybe her freedom, if someone in NSD decided she’d compromised a long-running domestic counterintelligence operation for a man with a terrifying memory.
She punched the gas. Five minutes later, she pulled into the gravel lot outside the Aegis Network office and sat with the engine ticking and her pulse hammering.
The building looked ordinary from the outside. Low roof. Blinds half-drawn. Buddy’s truck in its usual spot. Sterling’s beside it. Cullen’s work truck angled near the side like he’d arrived in a hurry and trusted gravity to finish parking for him, and Dove's new SUV in a spot where no one would dig her new doors.
Juniper cut the engine. “Well,” she muttered as she snagged her laptop case. “This is either brave or stupid. Regardless, I'm going in.” She climbed out, smoothed her hands over her jeans, and crossed the lot before her FBI training got the better of her and forced her to turn around and continue with her cover.
The humidity hit hard enough to make her shirt stick between her shoulder blades. A cicada screamed from the scrub oaks beside the building, one long electric complaint. Juniper wasn't sure if that was a warning or cheer.
She opened the door and stepped inside.
Cold air washed over her. Slowly, she made her way down the hallway until she reached Sterling's office. She didn't bother knocking. It wasn't about surprise. It was about nerve.
The Aegis office had always looked like someone tried to combine a tactical operations center with a small-town insurance agency and quit halfway through.
Two whiteboards stood in the center of the room, and Buddy in front of them like a schoolteacher with a black marker in one hand and a phone in the other.
Sterling leaned against his desk with his arms crossed, gaze locked on the boards. Cullen braced a shoulder against the wall near the window, one boot crossed over the other. And Dove sat in her chair with her legs propped on an open file drawer, both hands resting on her belly while her thumbs moved in slow circles over the small curve beneath her shirt.
All four of them turned toward Juniper, and she crossed the threshold.
Buddy lifted his phone. “Nick, hang on a second. We’ve got a visitor.”
