Chapter 28 #2
“This is a waste of time,” one of the sellers started, bringing his weapon up and pointing it at Charlotte’s head, but Darcy cut him off.
“Think about it. She’s worth billions in future weapons development. Kill her boyfriend and handler, and you get a brilliant but uncooperative asset who’ll sabotage everything she touches. Keep them alive, at least for now, and she’ll be motivated to do her best work.”
The sellers huddled together, rapid-fire conversation in what sounded like Russian. Finally, the lead one turned back.
“She fixes the Protocol now. We see proof it works.”
“It’ll take time,” Charlotte said, her voice now shaky. “Twenty minutes minimum. Maybe thirty. The countermeasure I deployed is complex—”
She was stalling. I knew it, Darcy knew it, hell, everyone in the room knew it.
“Then it will have to be done on the move,” the seller said. “We cannot stay here that long. The FBI will move in soon.”
He looked between Ethan and me like he was choosing cuts of meat. “Pick one,” he said to Charlotte. “One comes with us while you work. The other dies here.”
“That’s not—” Charlotte started.
“Choose, or we choose for you.”
I watched Charlotte’s eyes dart around the warehouse, and I could practically see her brain working.
Taking in variables—distance to exits, number of weapons, positions of every person in the room.
Her green eyes were bright with concentration, that beautiful mind running through scenarios faster than any computer.
She met my eyes, and something shifted. The terror that had been riding her hard since she’d been dragged in began sliding away, replaced by the focused intensity I’d seen when she was deep in her work. Whatever solution she’d come up with, she was committing to it.
She nodded at the sellers, then looked at me, then Ethan, then back to the sellers.
“Five minutes,” she said clearly. “I can make the Cascade Protocol functional again in five minutes. Then you can use it on whatever law enforcement shows up. Your own personal mini-bombs. Every agent who responds will be carrying their own death in their pocket.”
Charlotte turned to Darcy. “The info you’ve stolen from the FBI should give you the cell phone numbers you need. Get them ready.”
Darcy’s smile could have frozen helium. “You’re right. I have every field agent assigned to this case. We can take them all out at once. They’ll never know it was coming. Might end up taking some other agents out accidentally, but…oh well.”
Charlotte nodded and pulled her laptop from the bag one of the goons had been carrying. She opened it and started typing.
I wanted to scream at her not to do it. Ethan and I were willing to die to stop the Cascade Protocol from getting into the wrong hands. Every FBI agent on this case had accepted that risk when they signed up. Dozens of lives against the hundreds or thousands the Cascade Protocol could kill.
The math was brutal but clear. Charlotte had to know that.
But she wasn’t looking at me. She was hunched over her laptop in that way she got when she was really focused, shoulders curved in, the rest of the world forgotten. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with the speed of someone who thought in code.
Then I noticed something odd.
She was typing with one hand, her right, while her left hand tapped against the side of the computer. At first, I thought it was just nervous energy, the same way she fidgeted and talked to herself when she was thinking. But there was a pattern to it. Deliberate. Rhythmic.
I’d never seen her do that before. Charlotte had her quirks when she worked, but this was different.
She glanced over at me, just for a second, and her left hand kept tapping.
Long-short-long-long. Long-long-long.
Holy shit. She was using Morse code.
My chest went tight. SOS? No, she kept going.
Long-short-long-long. Long-long-long.
Y. O.
Short-short-long. Long-short-long-short.
U. R.
I kept my face neutral, years of training the only thing keeping me from reacting as I translated the rest.
P-H-O-N-E B-O-M-B
Your. Phone. Bomb.
Understanding hit like a physical blow. She wasn’t giving them what they wanted. She wasn’t reactivating the full Cascade Protocol. She was making it specific to one phone—mine. Creating our one chance at an element of surprise.
I caught Ethan’s eye and glanced down at my hand, then started tapping my own fingers against my thigh. His eyes narrowed slightly—message received. He’d figure it out or he wouldn’t, but either way, I had to be ready.
Charlotte kept typing, lost in her work to anyone watching. But I saw the way her shoulders tensed, the white-knuckle grip she had on the laptop. This brilliant, brave woman was trying to save us all with nothing but her brain and sheer determination.
Two minutes passed. Three. The sellers grew restless, weapons shifting, fingers dancing near triggers. Four minutes.
“Done,” Charlotte said, her voice small. She turned the laptop toward Darcy. “Enter the phone numbers.”
Darcy’s fingers danced across the keyboard, entering number after number with the efficiency of someone who’d memorized them all. “There. Every FBI agent on this case, and maybe a few extra for good measure. Sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye to George Mercer.”
I prayed George was hearing this and having his people dump their cell phones, in case this didn’t work.
One of the sellers leaned forward, eager. “This is impressive. Maybe we keep this weapon for ourselves. Now that we’ll have someone to develop other weapons, this one could be our calling card.”
“Please don’t do this,” Charlotte said, but her protest sounded weak, defeated. “Those are innocent people—”
The seller laughed. “FBI agents are never innocent. They’re tools of the state. And tools can be broken.”
They started laughing and muttering about how they wished they could see the carnage. Would heads be blown all the way off? Sons of bitches.
“Let’s do this and get out of here.” Darcy smiled. “Shall we? On my count.”
I shifted my weight, hand drifting to my pocket where my phone waited. The movement looked casual, nervous energy from a man about to watch dozens of his colleagues die.
“Five,” Darcy began, her voice bright with satisfaction.
I palmed my phone.
“Four.”
Got my grip right, feeling the weight and balance.
“Three.”
Caught Ethan’s eye one more time. He gave the tiniest nod.
“Two.”
I pulled the phone free, arm already in motion.
“One.”
I hurled my phone across the warehouse floor toward the buyers.
Before anyone could figure out what was going on, it exploded with enough force to shake dust from the rafters—smaller than a grenade but bigger than a firecracker, the perfect amount of chaos.
The sellers and goons instinctively ducked, shielding their faces from debris.
Ethan moved at the same instant I did. Muscle memory took over—disarm the closest threat, acquire a weapon, neutralize, and move.
My elbow caught one of Darcy’s goons in the throat as I ripped the pistol from his hand.
Ethan had already dropped one seller and was diving for cover as bullets started flying.
The phone’s explosion had done more than expected—something in the old warehouse’s structure caught fire, probably decades of oil and chemicals soaked into the concrete. Smoke began filling the space as orange flames crawled up one wall.
I shielded Charlotte with my body, pulling her behind an overturned table as the rest of the FBI team burst through every entrance at once. Muzzle flashes lit up the smoke like deadly fireworks.
“Stay down,” I told Charlotte, pressing her against the floor as bullets whined overhead.
The firefight was brief but vicious. These weren’t criminals who’d surrender at the first sign of resistance. They fought like what they were—international arms dealers who knew capture meant life in prison or death.
But they were outnumbered, outflanked, and half blind from smoke. One by one, they went down. Some permanently, others screaming as they hit the ground, weapons skittering away across concrete slick with blood.
Through it all, I kept my body between Charlotte and the mayhem, one hand on her back to keep her down, the other gripping a stolen Glock and looking for threats. The fire spread, eating through old wooden supports, turning the air toxic with smoke.
I saw Darcy try to run, heading for a side exit. She made it three steps before Ben materialized from the smoke, Jolly at his feet. He gave the command for the dog to take her down, and down the fuck she went, a hundred pounds of Belgian Malinois on top of her.
More gunfire. More shouting. The deafening cacophony of violence that always seemed to last forever and be over in seconds. Then, suddenly, silence except for the crackling of flames and someone groaning in pain.
“Clear!” George’s voice cut through the smoke.
“Clear!” Ben echoed. “Suspect in custody.”
“Southwest clear!” Logan.
I waited another heartbeat, then two, before I eased my weight off Charlotte. She was shaking, her laptop clutched against her chest like armor. “Clear. I’ve got Charlotte.”
“You okay?” I asked her.
She nodded, then shook her head, then nodded again. “I don’t— I’m not—”
“You’re okay,” I told her, pulling her close. “It’s over.”
“Ty!” Donovan’s voice. He emerged from the smoke, blood staining his head and gear, but moving. Alive.
“We need to get out,” he said. “Fire’s spreading fast.”
He was right. The flames had found something particularly flammable, racing up the walls. Burning debris fell around us, and the smoke was getting thicker.
Charlotte tried to stand, but her legs gave out. I scooped her up without hesitation.
“Everybody out! Now!” George shouted.
We burst out of the warehouse into morning sunlight that seemed impossibly bright. FBI vehicles and ambulances everywhere, agents and EMTs swarming the scene. Behind us, the warehouse groaned, then a section of roof collapsed inward with a sound like thunder.
I set Charlotte down carefully on a concrete barrier, keeping one arm around her as an EMT rushed over with a medical kit. She was shaking, her laptop still clutched against her chest like she couldn’t quite let go.
“You’re okay,” I told her, pulling her closer. “It’s over.”
Through the smoke pouring from the warehouse, I watched George’s team hauling Darcy toward an FBI vehicle, her perfect composure finally cracked. The sellers who’d survived were being loaded into other vehicles, some on stretchers.
Donovan appeared through the disorder, loopy but walking under his own power. Ethan emerged next, sporting what would be a spectacular black eye. Ben and Logan flanked the remaining suspects.
All alive. All accounted for.
Charlotte’s fingers found mine, gripping tight enough to hurt.
“That was brilliant,” I told her, my voice rough. “The Morse code, the way you modified the Protocol. You saved us all.”
She looked up at me, those green eyes bright with tears and exhaustion and something else—relief maybe, or just the adrenaline finally crashing. “I knew you would see it. Would figure out what I was signaling. Anybody else, I wouldn’t have trusted to be aware enough, but you…”
She’d trusted me. I didn’t have words for how much that meant.
I cupped her face gently, careful of her bruises. “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever known.”
“Right back at you.”
I smiled. “One more very important question.”
She nodded solemnly. “What?”
“Do you own a bikini?”