Chapter 2
TWO
Mason thought leaving Elin had protected her, but seeing the scar of that choice carved into her warm green eyes, as deep as a Swedish vale, was damn near killing him.
The briefing ended with Con’s clipped dismissal, and the team dispersed like smoke. Most headed for the shower but others would end up in the gym to burn off the last remnants of adrenaline after their op.
Mason stayed rooted to his seat, watching Elin’s back as she followed Con and Dante toward the new computer lab to meet Sophie.
She hadn’t looked at Mason once since that initial moment of impact. Not once.
Fuck. How did she find him?
The countdown clock mounted on the wall blinked at him. Six days. One hundred forty-four hours. Eight thousand six hundred forty minutes until Cipher’s cyberattack brought the Eastern Seaboard to its knees.
Six days.
But all Mason could think was: Six days close to Elin.
In the two years since he walked out of her life, he thought he would get over his feelings for her, but just the sight of her brought a surge of emotion in him.
When she walked through that door, she didn’t even flinch when she saw him sitting there, which could only mean that she knew before her arrival.
And as their gazes locked for that brief but thundering heartbeat, he knew she hated him for what he did.
He deserved her hate. He’d earned it…but he couldn’t live with it.
When they were together, she’d slipped past every defense he’d spent years building and made him believe he could have something normal, something good.
But the walls she’d built around herself now?
Christ, they were more impenetrable than the walls of Blackout’s base.
He sat there for long minutes, head bowed, fingers tightly laced, while that damn clock continued to count down.
He was frozen in place, running scenarios in his head like he was planning an op, but every scenario ended with variables he couldn’t control.
She found him when he was supposed to be unfindable.
Why?
For revenge? Closure? Or something else entirely?
Maybe they wouldn’t cross paths. The mansion was big, with several wings sprawling across the expansive grounds.
There was more than enough space for a team of SEALs to live without tripping over each other, not to mention that several of the men had significant others who all lived here with Charlie team.
He could avoid Elin—stay in the east wing, take his meals at unusual times, bury himself in mission prep.
But she’d still be sleeping under the same roof. Breathing the same air.
Goddammit, the problem wasn’t how to avoid her. It was the fact that he didn’t want to avoid her.
She was his one regret. The thing that kept him awake at three in the morning when the rest of the team was dead to the world. Elin’s angelic face haunted him during downtime, and it was her voice he heard in his head when he made decisions that could get him killed.
But that fateful day, she came damn close to losing her life. Liam was sent to retrieve a flash drive holding intel she acquired about a strike.
Only she got stuck in traffic and texted that she’d be ten minutes late.
Those ten minutes saved her life.
The meet went sideways. Hostiles materialized out of nowhere—three men with automatic weapons and the kind of training that whispered they weren’t local thugs. Mason’s team swooped in to assist.
Every day since, he thanked God that Elin hadn’t been one of those bodies that dropped.
A mere hour later, he was standing in his commander’s office with a recruiter.
They’d seen his performance and reviewed his file. They wanted him for Blackout, a team that didn’t exist on paper, doing work that never made the news. The timing was perfect.
Or maybe it was fate telling him what he needed to hear.
If he stayed, he was going to get her killed. Every day meant she was a target, an opportunity for his enemies to figure out that the way to break him was through her.
Walking away ensured that could never happen. He was saving her by disappearing.
She was strong and brilliant. Though he knew his “death” would hurt, he knew she’d be fine.
Except she was clearly seething about all this. The looks she gave him—when she bothered to look at all—weren’t just dirty. They were deadly. Like she was plotting all the ways she could make him suffer and deciding which one would hurt the most.
Mason pushed to his feet, his sore shoulder protesting the movement. In the hall outside the war room, another countdown clock mounted on the wall ticked away the seconds, a constant visual reminder of their reason for being here.
Mason didn’t take two steps before Con emerged from the computer lab. He spotted Mason and twitched his head for him to follow.
Dammit. He wasn’t prepared to answer questions about Elin, but he’d thrown himself into the fire by trying to get her attention in the war room.
Each step he took, he felt his own adrenaline fading, so his boots felt like concrete. When he entered the room behind his commanding officer, Con said, “Close the door.”
He did, then turned at attention.
Con narrowed his eyes. “Why did you interrupt during the briefing?”
He stared at him for a long beat. He couldn’t spin a story—not with Con. Not to one of his brothers.
“I saw you looking at Miss Lindgren. Have you met her before?” Con’s voice held an edge of curiosity.
Mason gave a single nod.
“When?”
“She was gathering intel for my team before a strike.”
Con folded his arms, something like understanding flickering in his eyes. “You had a relationship?”
How the hell was he supposed to answer that? Friends sometimes turned into something else. Something bordering on real.
“She received my flag and effects.”
“Fuck.”
Mason nodded. Of course Con grasped the gravity behind that statement.
“This might get tricky.” Con pushed out a sigh.
“I get the feeling she’s pretty pissed I’m still breathing.”
The corner of Con’s lips lifted. “You think?”
“What are my orders?” He rolled his shoulders, but it did nothing to ease the tightness coiled there.
“If I tell you to say away from her, will you?”
“I’ll try. But you and I both know we’re going to have to talk.”
Con studied him for a moment. “Try to stay focused.”
“Copy that.”
Con started toward the door.
“Any advice?” Mason called after him.
He swung, a spark of amusement on his face. “Yeah. Try not to die. Sounds like you’re about to hold your funeral for real, man.”
He left, and Mason stood alone in the room, his pulse thundering harder than it did in combat. He’d faced enemy fire, explosions and the ghosts of some missions gone wrong.
Now he was about to face something more dangerous.
The woman he’d left behind.
* * * * *
Elin’s mind was whirring, spinning like a hard drive about to crash.
Sophie and Dante were talking—something about encryption protocols and back door access points—but their words barely registered. She nodded at what seemed like appropriate intervals and murmured agreement when Sophie paused for confirmation, but she hardly heard a damn word they said.
Liam was somewhere in this enormous mansion.
The base itself had surprised her. She’d expected some underground bunker, all concrete and fluorescent lighting, the kind of sterile military compound she’d seen in movies.
Instead, they’d brought her here with a black hood over her head to disorient her—to a mansion.
An actual mansion with high ceilings, crown molding and windows that probably overlooked manicured grounds she hadn’t been allowed to see yet.
The special operative named Dante mentioned the base in passing while setting up her workspace. The government had seized the property years ago, some white-collar criminal’s estate forfeited after a lengthy trial. Rather than auction it off, they repurposed it.
And this computer lab was nothing less than a dream to a hacker like Elin. If only she could concentrate on something besides Liam.
“Elin?” Sophie’s voice cut through her spiraling thoughts. “Did you catch that?”
“Yes,” Elin lied smoothly, pulling her focus back to the monitors in front of her. “Absolutely.”
Sophie’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t push. Smart woman. She’d probably figured out that something was very wrong with their new consultant, but she was professional enough not to pry.
Not yet, anyway.
Elin forced herself to focus on the screens. Code scrolled past, some of the most elegant and complex she’d ever seen, layers of security that would have stumped most hackers. Elin wasn’t most hackers.
She loosely knew what this team was. Black ops. Ghost operators. Men who’d signed away their identities to do work no government could officially sanction. They were ghosts in every sense—dead on paper and executed missions like they didn’t exist.
And Liam was one of them.
A set of boots passed in the hallway outside. The steps heavy and slow. Her pulse kicked up before she could stop it, her body reacting to the possibility that it might be him even as her mind screamed at her to get hold of herself.
She needed to get this job done fast. She had six days until the big event that would shut down a power grid, but she was giving herself three. Three days to perform the job Sophie brought her here to do.
But every second in this place felt like she was standing on a cliff’s edge. One wrong move and she’d fall, and this time she wasn’t sure she’d survive the landing.
Boots again, this time moving past the open door. She automatically turned her head, dread and hope that it was Liam warring inside her.
“Elin.” Dante drew her attention this time, his voice patient but insistent. “We need you here. Present. Can you do that?”
She met his gaze, saw the concern there mixed with frustration. He needed her skills, but he also needed her attention, and right now her attention was scattered across every hallway in this damn mansion, following boots and heartbeats and the ghost of a man who should have stayed dead to her.