Chapter Six
MIA
Wolf did not move.
The room was too small for the way he stood inside it. My bed and the metal locker had already claimed most of the usable space, leaving Wolf to fill the narrow strip between me and the door so completely that the exit felt imaginary.
His eyes stayed on mine.
“Sit down.”
“No.”
The word came out before I had to think about it and the skin along my upper arm still carried the faint ache of where Wolf had grabbed me behind the hedge.
He looked exactly as he had when he came for me, still in tactical pants and heavy boots with the plate carrier fitted across his chest and the black mask covering everything except his eyes. The rifle was gone, probably secured downstairs, but the belt remained around his hips.
Wolf closed the small distance to my desk and set both hands against the edge without taking his eyes off me. “You were given a route.”
“And I used it.”
“You crossed the last support line.”
“Because Kade was talking.”
“You lost Hawk.”
“Raven still had me.”
“Until he didn’t.”
I folded my arms tighter. “For forty-eight seconds.”
His stare sharpened. “You really want to keep saying that?”
“Yes, because you keep talking about it like I disappeared for six hours. I moved behind a cabana at a party where half the guests were barefoot, not into the back of a sketchy van.”
The skin around his eyes tightened, and his shoulders settled into the rigid stillness I had started associating with the moments when his temper went quiet instead of disappearing.
“You don’t know what could have happened,” he said.
“Neither do you.”
“That’s the fucking point, Mercer.”
“No, your point is that you didn’t know exactly where I was for less than a minute and apparently that was enough to turn the entire operation into a lesson about obedience.”
Wolf pushed away from the desk.
“Hawk lost visual.”
“I know.”
“Then I lost audio.”
“I know.”
“I lost the only way to know whether you were still standing there or whether somebody had already moved you somewhere I couldn’t reach.”
“I was the one standing there. I could see what was happening.”
“Exactly. You had the room in front of you. I had to account for everything you couldn’t see.”
Wolf’s shoulders went still and I realized I should have stopped there. Any reasonably intelligent person would have recognized the shift and chosen survival. But I had spent four days proving that intelligence and self-preservation were not always related.
“We found Kade, and I spoke to him long enough for Raven to capture both Morgenstern and Südweg. Now we have a Thursday movement, and Hawk finally has a photograph that doesn’t look like somebody took it through a dirty windshield.
You can be angry that I didn’t obey fast enough, but don’t stand in my room pretending the operation failed because it didn’t happen exactly the way you wanted. ”
“I never said it failed.”
“You’ve barely acknowledged that it worked.”
“Because this isn’t a fucking performance review,” he sneered.
“No, it’s apparently the part where you drag me upstairs so you can explain that every good result becomes bad if I make one decision without asking permission first.”
Wolf’s voice dropped. “You made the decision after I explicitly told you not to.”
“There it is.”
“There what is?”
“The actual problem.”
He stared at me.
I uncrossed my arms and gestured between us. “You cannot stand that I didn’t do what you said. The party worked and we came home with something useful, but you keep dragging everything back to the same point: you said move, and I didn’t move fast enough.”
“You weren’t right because you got lucky.”
“I wasn’t lucky, I listened.”
“You ignored extraction criteria.”
“Because the situation in front of me hadn’t reached the threshold you were imagining from outside.”
“I lost you, Mercer. That was the threshold.”
My laugh came out sharp. “You hear yourself, right?”
Wolf did not answer.
I stepped toward him instead. “Everything with you is control. You decide where people stand and when they move, which door they use and who gets to speak before you shut the whole room down. You turned six people into a system that does exactly what you want, and now you’re furious because I won’t become another piece you can put where you left it. ”
His eyes darkened.
“Careful, Mercer.”
“There you go again.”
“I’m warning you.”
“About what? Your feelings?”
He moved before I expected it, closing another foot of space until I had to tip my face up to keep looking at him. His plate carrier grazed the front of my breasts, running a tingle up my spine.
He was covered from throat to boots in black fabric and hard gear. I was standing in front of him in a bikini with an open linen shirt hanging from my shoulders, which made the difference between us feel suddenly, stupidly obscene.
“About speaking on things you don’t understand.”
The smell of cigarette smoke still clung faintly to him beneath the cleaner scent I had started recognizing without wanting to.
My body noticed the proximity before my anger could stop it and a warmth grew low in my stomach that made me more furious because this was not the moment for any part of me to be interested in how he smelled.
I held his gaze.
“Then explain it.”
“No.”
“Of course not. You don’t explain anything, you just order people around until the room looks the way you want,” I said.
Wolf’s stare did not leave mine.
“That’s what command is.”
“No. That’s what control is.”
“You think there’s a difference when someone is trying to keep you alive?”
“Yes.”
He gave a humorless sound through the mask. “You wouldn’t know.”
I stepped even closer because backing away right now would have felt like letting him win.
“And you wouldn’t know where the line is if somebody painted it across your fucking boots. You don’t get to decide what happens to my body because you’re uncomfortable with not being able to see me.”
The room went completely quiet. Then something at his waist made a small metallic sound.
Click.
My eyes dropped as his right hand closed around the black retention webbing. It was the same narrow strap I had watched him use during training, attached to the hardware I heard every time he moved in gear.
Wolf pulled the folded length free. I looked back at his face.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“You want to understand the line?”
“Not if this is your version of a demonstration.”
“Hands.”
I actually laughed. “Absolutely not.”
His eyes hardened.
“Mercer.”
“No.”
He waited one second, as if giving me the opportunity to reconsider.
I didn’t.
Wolf reached for my wrist and I slapped his hand away. The second he tried again, the argument became physical.
He caught the same wrist on the second attempt, turned me around with the momentum and took my other arm before I could shove him off.
The movement was so efficient that my brain lagged behind what my body was doing.
One moment I was facing him. The next, my shoulder had turned toward his chest and both of my hands were trapped between us.
“Get the fuck off me!”
I twisted hard enough to pull one wrist halfway free.
His hand closed again.
The webbing slid around both wrists.
“Are you serious?”
The metal hardware clicked shut. My hands were bound together before the full reality of it reached me.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Wolf shifted behind me and drew the connected webbing downward, forcing my hands toward the small of my back. I tried to turn, and the open linen slipped from one shoulder, exposing most of the bikini top and dangerously close to exposing my nipples.
“Stop fighting me, Mercer.”
“Then stop fucking restraining me.”
“You were told to move today.”
“This is not the fucking party.”
“Exactly.”
I tried to turn anyway. His hand caught my waist before I got halfway around and redirected me back against him, the motion dragging the cover-up lower on my shoulder and leaving the high-cut side of my bikini completely exposed beneath his hand.
I twisted again and my bare ass struck the rough front of his tactical pants before the hard edge of his belt caught just above my hip bone. For a second I was trapped between the bed at my knees and Wolf behind me, his carrier brushing my shoulder blades every time either of us moved.
I sucked in a breath.
He did too.
It was small, only one sharper inhale through the mask, but his hand flexed against my waist at the exact same moment.
Every place our bodies touched became impossible to ignore. His palm was warm through the thin linen while rough cargo fabric pressed against my exposed skin, and the rigid hardware at my hip made the closeness feel even less accidental than it was.
My stomach tightened.
Wolf went completely still.
For one impossible beat, so did I. The silence between us changed in a way that had nothing to do with the argument. I turned my head enough to catch the edge of his mask in my peripheral vision.
“What is it, Wolf? Having trouble with your demonstration?”
His grip on the webbing tightened.
“Keep fucking talking, Mercer,” he growled in my ear.
The low answer hit somewhere it had no business hitting, and I hated the way my pulse jumped hard enough that he could probably feel the change in my breathing with his body this close to mine.
“Thought so,” I said breathlessly.
Wolf moved me half a step away from him, controlled and abrupt, and the webbing pulled taut again behind my back.
“You want to know what forty-eight seconds looks like? You want to know the things I could do to you in forty-eight seconds? What they could have fucking done?”
His voice was directly behind me now, low through the mask. He shifted the webbing in one hand and held my wrists in place with the other.
“It looks like this,” he said as he tightened the webbing even more.
I let out a small, involuntary grunt just as his fingers grazed my ass.
“D-does it look like you having a control problem?”
“No. It looks like someone stronger deciding where you stand before the person covering you has time to get through a door.”
“You are not proving what you think you’re proving.”
“No?”