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He stopped. The guy holding his arm let him have a second. Arlo looked at Ryder.

“I thought you were one of us.”

Once, that would have been true. The version of Ryder who used to look targets in the eye and manipulate them effortlessly would have belonged perfectly at a table like Arlo’s. That ghost would have happily poured the whiskey himself.

Ryder wasn’t that man anymore. Just two blocks away, sitting in the comms van, was a woman who had cradled his face in her palms and explicitly chosen every single piece of him. He would never be anybody’s one of us again.

Ryder’s words were as true as they were simple. “I’m not one of you.”

He turned his back as the Rogue operator escorted Arlo toward the loading dock. There was nothing left to say. Pacing across the floor, he caught Ian’s eye to ensure they were clear; judging by the massive grin plastered on the older man’s face as he talked to his FBI contacts, the aftermath was perfectly under control.

It was over.

He touched his earpiece. “Cass. We’re clear. Kids are good, nobody hurt.”

Nothing came back.

“Cassie, do you copy?”

A drawn-out hiss of empty static scraped through the line. Then, nothing.

A frown creased his forehead. Two blocks east, the comms van sat hidden behind an abandoned tire shop. In an industrial neighborhood packed with corrugated metal, radio signals could degrade a hundred different ways. Maybe she’d just yanked off the headset to rub her ears, or to finally drink the coffee she’d insisted she didn’t need.

He still didn’t like it. “Cassie.”

Static.

He started walking. Heading out the main entrance and crossing the asphalt lot, he offered a brief nod to a Rogue operator guarding the perimeter vehicles. White-hot throbbing pulsed in his knee. Beneath his sleeve, his forearm stung, and his knuckles were an absolute disaster. Cassie was going to read him the riot act for that.

He thought about the little girl holding on with both hands. He thought about Arlo’s face, lost instead of angry.

But mostly, he thought about what was going to happen once they got back to the Rogue compound.

He just wanted her back in bed, some god-awful disco track blasting through the speakers while she danced across the kitchen floor in her socks, making breakfast. He’d promised her a coffee date, and he was fully prepared to pay up. Let her call him princess all she wanted. He’d still order his with three creams and four sugars just to see her smirk.

The tire shop came up on his left. He turned the corner into the lot behind it.

The side door of the van was open.

No one stepping out for a breath of air would have left it like that. Bent off its track, the slider hung agape by a foot and a half, bearing the distinct impact marks of something heavy crashing through it sideways.

Ryder started running.

Beside the rear tire, the guard Fallon had assigned to Cassandra lay motionless on his stomach. Ryder dropped to the asphalt, jamming two fingers hard into the man’s carotid artery. The pulse beat back, steady and strong. Behind his ear, a nasty knot was already ballooning beneath the hair.

Ryder grabbed the side door and wrenched it the rest of the way open. It was empty.

Cassandra’s chair sat crooked, shoved hard against the equipment rack. On the floorboards lay her headset, its cord violently ripped from the audio jack. Beneath the console, her coffee cup rested on its side, a dark puddle still actively dripping onto the metal.

She hadn’t walked away from this. Somebody had dragged her out.

The wall of monitors hummed with live feeds. While three screens still tracked the warehouse floor where Zodiac operatives processed the scene, a fourth display isolated a single active audio channel, its green waveform spiking erratically. A tiny label in the corner read: BODY TX 2.

Cold recognition hit him… He knew that label. They were button-sized covert transmitters designed to stream over cellular networks for infinite range. But none of his team had been wired tonight.

Somebody was now. The speaker was on. He heard road noise and an engine working hard. Then he heard her.

“Heath, you don’t have to do this. Whatever you think you’re going to get out of this, you’re wrong.” Cassandra’s voice was careful and controlled.