Page 112 of Operation: Defiance

Asher

She’s upright. Propped against the headboard, blanket tucked around her hips. Her hair is mussed, uneven waves falling over one of the electrode burns at her temples.

The bruises stand out even more now that a hint of color has returned to her face.

Her eyes are clear. She’s not averting her gaze. That’s new. Progress. The woman I pulled out of Coherent Path’s cell wasn’t Raine.

This is Raine.

“How do you want to do this?” I ask.

She looks at my hands. Then back up at my face.

Advanced pattern recognition and predictive threat modeling under duress.

She’s thinking through the steps. Calculating the risk.

“I need you to be my hands. Take the photos. And notes. What I remember. But”—she swallows, pain tightening lines around her eyes—“I have to be the one in charge.”

I don’t smile. But something in my chest settles into place.

“You’re ops, I’m logistics. Got it. Rules?”

She takes a careful breath. “Same as…before. I have to see your hands as much as possible. No touching me without warning. Or for longer than you need to. If I say stop, you stop.”

“Okay,” I confirm. “To all of it. Along with any other rules you decide on once we start.”

She studies me for a long second. “One more thing.” Her voice drops, and she pins her gaze to my hands clasped in my lap. “The photos…no one sees them but me. Us.”

Us. The word catches me off guard. There’s so much trust packed into those two letters.

“I have a new burner phone that’s never been activated. It’s yours. I’ll take the photos with it, but you set the password, the encryption key. All of it. And when you want the logs I stole, you’ll have them.”

What little color she had in her face drains in a heartbeat. “Did you…the logs…did you read them?”

Fuck.

“I won’t lie to you, Raine. I spent a couple of hours with them this morning. But they’re mostly timestamps and codes. I can see when they escalated. But not how.”

“When…” she says, almost to herself. “When doesn’t mean…anything to me. There was no time there.”

Her gaze drops to my shoulder, but I don’t think she’s seeing me. Or…anything. Her jaw tightens. Her fingers curl weakly against the blanket. The tremors start slowly. Better than before, but still too much.

I rest my forearms on my thighs, keeping my hands loose.

“They logged everything,” I say quietly. “Every change. Every escalation. Start times. End times. Results. If you want to know how long, I’ll tell you. No commentary. Just a number.”

Her head lifts a fraction. Just enough to show she heard me.

“I’m not going to spring it on you,” I add. “You ask, I answer. If you don’t ask, it stays with me.”

Because she has to decide if she needs that tether.

Raine

When.

Number.