Chapter Seventeen
MIA
Wolf crossed the operations floor, took the stairs two at a time and disappeared down the short hall toward his office while I stood beside the open briefcase trying to decide whether I wanted the argument badly enough to go after him.
The cream Paris invitation was still lying beside Raven’s keyboard, absurdly clean against the rest of the evidence.
Keller had been dead for only a few hours.
My hair still smelled faintly of warehouse dust and helicopter fuel, and the black cargo pants I had worn into Offenburg were streaked at one knee where I had gone down beside him on the concrete.
My field jacket had been dumped over the back of a chair.
Under it, I still wore the fitted charcoal long sleeve shirt I had put on that morning, damp between my shoulder blades from the hours in gear, with black combat boots that suddenly felt twice as heavy as they had on the drive home.
I looked toward the stairs and followed.
The office door was open when I reached it, and for the first time, I got a proper look inside.
The room was compact, with a heavy desk facing the narrow window, one large chair behind it, a cabinet against the wall, and neatly stacked files taking up most of the remaining surface space.
Nothing about it looked decorative or comfortable.
It looked exactly like Wolf.
He stood behind the desk with his back to me, stripping the remaining gear from his plate carrier before hanging it over the chair.
He still wore the long-sleeve black field shirt beneath it, black cargo pants, boots and the belt that had stayed on him since before we entered Offenburg. His tactical mask covered his entire head except for the narrow opening around his eyes.
Nothing human enough showed to soften what was waiting in his stare when he finally turned.
“Close the door.”
I did.
“Lock it.”
My hand stayed on the knob for a second.
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
There was no room in his voice for the version of me that usually turned his instructions into debates. I twisted the lock and heard the latch settle.
“Come here.”
I crossed part of the room and stopped a few feet from the desk. His eyes dropped to the floor between us, then returned to mine.
“Did I tell you to stop there?”
I frowned, genuinely confused.
“I am here.”
“No. You’re standing where you decided was close enough because apparently you still haven’t learned the difference between an order and a fucking suggestion. Come here.”
The last two words were louder than the rest. I walked the remaining distance.
He did not move out of my way. By the time I stopped, there was barely enough space between us for me to fold my arms, which I did do, mostly because I knew he would hate it.
His eyes went straight to them.
“Uncross your arms.”
“Seriously?”
“Do I look like I’m fucking joking?”
I held the position another second out of spite.
Wolf leaned forward.
“Uncross them,” he repeated slowly.
I let my arms fall and the obedience annoyed me immediately. It also sent a sharp, unwelcome awareness through the center of my body that had nothing to do with the argument I had been preparing all the way upstairs.
“Now look at me.”
“I am looking at you.”
“Keep doing it.”
I almost rolled my eyes but his voice hardened before I could.
“Try it.”
I stopped.
He had never spoken to me like this before, and the warning made it clear that tonight he was done indulging the expression.
Wolf had always been controlling. I had watched him run rooms full of armed men with almost no wasted language and make half a dozen people change direction with a single word over comms.
He had been rough with me before, crossed a line with me before, then spent the days afterward making sure we both understood exactly where that line sat.
I had thought the version of him he warned me about in the car would be physical.
Restraint. Pulling hair. Being told what to do once I had agreed to let him.
Standing in his office now, I realized I had misunderstood the warning. The part he thought might send me reaching for the door wasn’t the webbing or what his hands could do.
It was him.
This. The cold, relentless attention. The refusal to let me hide behind sarcasm or give him half an answer because I knew how to make one sound clever.
He looked at me as if every excuse I had brought upstairs was something he intended to strip down until there was nowhere left for me to stand except the truth.
“What did I tell you in that warehouse?”
I exhaled through my nose. “You told me to stay in the corridor.”
“Wrong.”
My patience tightened. “That’s what you meant.”
“I didn’t ask what I meant, Mercer. Repeat what I said.”
I looked toward the desk.
“Eyes up.”
My gaze snapped back up to his. The order sent another pulse through me, lower this time, and I hated the timing enough to become angrier at him for causing it.
Wolf stepped even closer, now towering over me.
“What did I say?”
“You told me not to move.”
“Again.”
“Wolf-”
“Did I tell you to use my name, or did I tell you to repeat it?”
I held my ground, and so did he.
“You told me not to move.”
“Again.”
I could feel my jaw setting.
“You told me not to fucking move.”
“Better. And what did you do?”
“I went after Kade.”
“Again.”
“I went after Kade.”
“After what?”
I understood exactly what answer he wanted and resented him for making me say it.
“After he shot Keller.”
“Louder.”
“After he shot Keller.”
Wolf’s eyes did not change.
“And after I gave you a direct order.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not what I asked you to say.”
“You didn’t ask anything.”
His head tilted a fraction.
“You really want to do this tonight?”
I should have known the answer to that question was no.
Instead I said, “You’re the one who dragged me up here.”
Wolf moved so quickly that the back of my thighs met the edge of the desk before I realized I had given him enough irritation to close the remaining space. He didn’t touch me as his palms landed on the desk to either side of my hips, caging me there while his body stayed inches away.
“I didn’t drag you anywhere. You walked into this office willingly because you know exactly what you did.”
“I came up here because you ordered me to,” I said.
“And look at that. You can follow an order when it suits you.”
I opened my mouth.
“Shut that fucking mouth,” he said.
The sharp command stopped me more effectively than raising his voice would have. Wolf lowered his head just enough to make me tip mine back.
“You spent the entire ride home rehearsing the fucking briefcase speech, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t rehearse anything.”
“Bullshit.”
“The briefcase is important.”
“I know.”
“Raven said it could keep us working for months.”
“I heard him.”
“There are routes, victim records, shell companies, access credentials, the Paris invitation and whatever the hell is on those drives,” I blurted quickly.
“I know what’s in the goddamn case, Mercer.”
“Then stop acting like I ran out there for nothing,” I half-shouted.
Wolf pushed away from the desk and paced once toward the office window before turning back.
“You did run out there for nothing.”
“Excuse me?”
“You had nothing when you made the decision to run. You had no idea what was in that case. You had no idea he was going to hand it to you. You had no idea who was waiting on that helicopter, and you sure as fuck did not know whether the man holding the MAC-10 he had just used on Keller was going to keep it pointed at the ground when you walked up to him.”
“He did.”
Wolf’s hand came down against the desk hard enough to make the lamp jump.
“That is exactly the fucking problem.”
I stopped talking.
He was breathing harder now, the rise and fall visible beneath the fitted black shirt. His anger usually became quieter the worse it got. This was different. There was still control in it, but the control had become something he was using to aim the anger instead of hide it.
“You keep surviving your own decisions and treating that like proof the decision was good.”
“I got the case.”
“You got lucky.”
“I got evidence.”
“After you got lucky.”
“That evidence could tear Cerberus open.”
“And if Kade had put three rounds in you before deciding what to do with the fucking case? What would Raven be decrypting then?”
I looked away.
“Eyes fucking up.”
I did not move.
Wolf crossed the space between us again.
“Did I tell you to look away?”
My eyes came back to his.
“No.”
“Then don’t.”
The words were rough enough that my breath caught.
I knew he saw it because his stare dropped to my mouth for less than a second before returning to my eyes.
The reaction made me furious with myself.
I had blood on my boots, Keller’s death still sitting behind my eyes and somehow Wolf telling me where to look had managed to send heat through me anyway.
I had spent most of my time here baiting this man about control. Apparently my body had not understood that eventually he might stop letting me treat it as a joke.
“The pool party,” he said.
I frowned at him. “What about it?”
“Same fucking thing.”
“It was not the same.”
“You were given a boundary. You broke it. You came back with something useful and decided that made the boundary stupid.”
“Südweg led us somewhere.”
“I know where it led.”
“Then you know why I followed him.”
“No. I know what you got afterward.”
Wolf took another step, making me give ground until the backs of my thighs touched the desk again.
“At that party, comms dropped and you followed a target behind the cabanas after I told you what to do if contact failed. You came back with Südweg and spent the next week acting like that meant I had been wrong to tell you not to disappear.”
“I didn’t spend the next week acting like anything.”
“You sure as hell learned something from it.”
“What, exactly?”
“That if the result is good enough, you can ignore me and argue about the prize later.”
“That’s not fair.”