Chapter 20 - Beckett
Beckett
The dust settled slow, drifting across the road like smoke after a fire. Bodies lay where they’d dropped, weapons still warm, tires still hissing. My pulse hammered steady, not from the fight—we’d won—but from the woman standing ten feet from me with a pistol still smoking in her hand.
Elara Voss.
Asset. Liability. Hydra’s polished face.
And a fighter. A damn warrior. She stood at five feet ten inches and she was beautiful.
I hadn’t expected this. Not like that. I’d seen rookies freeze, veterans break, even my own men hesitate under fire. Not her. She moved as if she’d been made for this—precise, efficient, savage. Like Hydra had shaped her sharp and trained her to bleed only when it benefited them.
It made me sick to my stomach. Not because she’d killed, but because she’d been made to.
She caught me watching. Her chin lifted, daring me to say it—daring me to call her what she was afraid of. Hydra’s creation. A weapon.
Gage strode past, muttering curses as he kicked a rifle out of reach of a fallen man. Oliver started calling in coordinates for cleanup. Cyclone was already digging through the crates, eyes bright with data.
But me? I couldn’t move.
“You fight like one of us,” I’d told her in the heat of it, and I’d meant it. But standing here now, the words clawed at me. Because I didn’t know if that made her an ally… or a threat I couldn’t afford to ignore.
She holstered her weapon with smooth precision, shoulders squared, mask flawless again. To anyone else, she looked untouched. But I’d seen the flicker—the moment the blood hit her hands and she froze, just for a heartbeat. A crack in the armor.
And God help me, I wanted to dig into it. To know how much of the fight was her, and how much of it was Hydra still living in her bones.
I forced myself forward, closing the space between us. Dirt crunched under my boots. Her eyes met mine, sharp and steady, but there was a shadow there she couldn’t quite hide.
“You okay?” I asked, voice rougher than I meant.
She gave me the same line she always did, cool and perfect: “I told you. Hydra doesn’t scare me.”
I stared at her for a long beat. Not at the mask. At the woman underneath it, the one who’d looked at me last night like she’d already broken and was just waiting for someone to notice.
And I realized something I didn’t want to admit.
Hydra might have built her. But she wasn’t theirs anymore.
For better or worse—she was mine to guard.
Hell.