Chapter 4 Beckett
Beckett
We were two blocks from the back dock, boots silent on wet asphalt.
Dawn was still a bruise in the sky; steam curled up from storm drains, and the warehouse loomed like a sleeping beast, dark windows reflecting a crooked moon.
Cyclone whispered coordinates into my earpiece, but the sound blurred—everything narrowed until the mission became the only thing that mattered.
Oliver took point, Gage on his left, and me on the right.
River took the back. We moved smoothly as we always did: relying on trained muscle memory rather than overthinking.
Elara stayed in the middle, hands held ready to fight, her face unreadable.
Up close, the scar along her wrist looked like a pale line dragged across porcelain.
I wanted to reach out and trace it, see if it trembled.
Instead, I kept my hand on the stock of my gun, feeling the familiar calm of readiness pulse through me.
“Three breaches,” Oliver breathed. “Two on the east. Cyclone, you hit their comms now.”
“On it.” Static, then a strangled string of noise. For a second, the building felt thinner—its ears and eyes gagged. We moved.
The first door jammed; I shoved shoulder-first and felt the wood stick, the kind of old growing pain that means someone’s been propping it from the inside.
Gage went through like thunder, then a flash of bodies and the sick metallic smell of adrenaline and sweat.
Men swore, a lamp smashed, we heard that women and children were held here.
I should have expected the man with the gun in his hand. I should have expected the flinch that comes with a live target. But I hadn’t expected Elara.
She moved like someone leading a double life—economical and precise in her motions. One step, a hook to the man’s wrist, a tug that sent his weapon tumbling. She didn’t scream. She didn’t beg. She disarmed him and, with a single twist, had him flat on his back, eyes wide and suddenly very ordinary.
For the first time since she walked into the briefing, I saw her without the mask. There was a flash of something: iron, and exhaustion, and an animal curiosity that set my teeth on edge.
“Wow, good job,” Gage muttered—walking past her. I wanted to punch something for the casualness of it, for the way men tried to make everything small with a phrase.
We pushed through the middle of their network: shipping crates, stacked pallets, a maze of forklifts like iron teeth.
Men in the compound fought back with the kind of sloppy, panicked violence that made them dangerous.
Someone screamed in Spanish; someone else tried to bolt.
I fired twice—one clean hit—then ducked as a shadow lunged with a cleaver.
Elara was next to me before I registered she’d moved, shoulder brushing mine in a way that should have been intimate and wasn’t. She kicked the cleaver out of the man’s hand and shoved him into a stack of crates. He collapsed like a broken puppet.
“Cole,” she said, breath close enough that I felt it against my ear. “Left stack. Two down, one behind the crates.”
Cold and hot at once. Her voice wasn’t a mask; it was a weapon. She was untrained from my perspective, yet trained in ways that made me sick with jealousy. Who had taught her? What she’d done. How many lives had she taken and called necessary?
A shot cracked from above. The ceiling lights trembled.
Dust fell like confetti. A man on the crates had a rifle and was aiming at us.
I dove forward, the world a slow-spinning cylinder.
My body moved before my brain did—instinct, muscle, and the memory of a thousand drills.
The bullet kissed the wall where my head had been a heartbeat earlier; plaster erupted into my face.
Pain bloomed behind my ear, and I tasted metal.
“Elara!” I heard my own shout, raw and stupid, something divisible only by adrenaline.
She pivoted, saw the shooter, and dove. She moved like someone trained to throw her body into danger without caring which parts would break.
She should have worn a vest; she should have been behind me.
Instead, she tucked and rolled, a sculpture of motion, and the bullet skittered across her shoulder, shredding the fabric, then hit the padding underneath. She hissed but didn’t go down.
I ripped across the warehouse, every step a white hot decision.
My hand closed on her shoulder as I reached her, yanking her into the shadow of a stack of crates.
Up close, she was smaller—smaller than the suit and the jawline, human.
Blood leaked dark from the seam of her jacket where the bullet had grazed her collarbone.
Her face had gone pale, not the pale of fear but the pale of someone who keeps temperatures low so others don’t notice the collapse.
Her eyes found mine, and for one awful, perfect second the rest of the world fell away: the ceased fire trucks outside, Oliver swearing, Cyclone barking coordinates into his headset.
It was just her, half-breathing, the smear of blood on her collarbone, and the thought that I should have seen her as vulnerable before I’d thought of her as enemy or asset or whatever the world wanted her to be.
“You okay?” I asked. My voice was a flat thing. I touched the wound because I couldn’t not touch it. Her skin was shock-cold under my fingers.
She answered with a smile that was all teeth. “I’ll live.” Her hand came up and covered mine, fingers strong and she removed my hand. “You gonna keep staring, Cole, or are you going to shoot the guy who tried to kill us?”
I fired. The shooter went down with a wet sound. The fight lasted another thirty seconds—a minute—and then it was over. Sirens came like a promise. They’d expected us to be ghosts and we were not. We were wet and furious and alive.
When we rounded the last corner, a man tried to crawl out from under a pallet.
Elara’s foot met the back of his head with a short, efficient motion that left no room for empathy.
She looked at me afterwards as if she’d done nothing at all.
I could see underneath all of that, I knew she wasn’t as calm as she pretended.
“You okay?” I asked again, because asking once is a superstition and asking twice is reality.
She exhaled and tucked a loose curl behind her ear with a hand that trembled, just slightly. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks to you.”
Liar. But the lie was soft.
I wanted to tell her not to disappear into the kind of silence that swallowed people whole. I wanted to tell her to lean on us, to let us hold her when the night was too much for her. Instead I said, “Med team will clear you. Don’t try to run.”
She tilted her head. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Her voice, the same as before—the knife-sharp humor. Her lips brushed my knuckles when she pulled her hand away. It was a touch that could have been nothing, and it wasn’t.
Cyclone’s voice cracked into our earpieces: “Extraction inbound. Debrief at base in one hour. Everyone keep their mouths shut and their stories straight.”
I watched Elara as she walked, shoulders pressed into the armor of someone used to standing alone.
And I heard, beneath the thudding of my pulse, the thin, ridiculous thing that always started in the chest when someone important edged close: possession.
Not possession like ownership—possession like a promise I hadn’t made but already felt.
She was mine to guard.
Hell.