Page 20 of Charged By the Razorbacks

“Stabilizing it makes it way more usable,” she said. “Makes it reliable.” Her gaze moved across the room, landing on each of them. “One version of that existing is already too much.”

Jarek felt that hit deep, because she wasn’t wrong.

“We don’t fix it,” she continued. “We break it.”

Elara’s eyes lit slightly.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Into a million pieces that they could never hope to put back together.”

Riley nodded. “We destabilize the delivery system further.”

Sienna’s lips curved. “Make it unusable in the field.”

Claire added, “And if we do it right, it collapses on activation.”

Tamsin’s gaze sharpened. “Exactly.”

Jarek exhaled slowly.

There it was.

A plan.

A real one.

His attention flicked briefly to Aleksy, then back to the room. Then to her. Standing there like she belonged in the center of it. Like she always had.

His grin came back. Slow. Dangerous. She’s not going anywhere.

And this time—that wasn’t just instinct.

It was fact.

Chapter Four

Aleksy had seen efficiency before. He’d built his life on it. Precision. Control. Outcome over emotion.

But this—this was something else.

He didn’t move from where he stood, arms folded loosely across his chest, gaze steady on the command table as Elara, Riley, Sienna, and Claire moved around it like they’d been doing this together for years.

No hesitation. No one trying to lead.

They just—flowed.

Elara drove the core structure, breaking the formula down with a focus that bordered on surgical. Riley adjusted alongside her, already mapping the biological impact, recalculating outcomes in real time like she could see the human cost before it happened.

Sienna shifted the lens outward, turning theory into battlefield reality, every scenario already branching into three more.

And Claire—Claire filled the gaps. The ones no one else saw yet. The ones that would matter later.

Aleksy tracked it all. Not as a soldier. Not as an enforcer.

But as something more deliberate. As a man watching his woman and a group of her friends making the world a safer place like a well-oiled machine.

Beside him, Jarek exhaled slowly.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “We got lucky.”