Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
By ten in the morning, Juniper had driven past the pub twice and still had no idea what she intended to do.
Her little Jeep rattled over a patch of sunbaked road where the county had filled one pothole and created three more. The air coming through the open window smelled like exhaust mixed with the decaying vegetation of the inlet.
Calusa Cove had already settled into its usual late-morning rhythm. A couple of tourists wandered down the street in flip-flops. The locals went about their day like they hadn't a care in the world. An egret took a stroll along the sidewalk like it was the Mayor.
Usually, that would have made her smile. But not today.
She gripped the steering wheel and let Sterling’s arguments roll through her head for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes.
He’d been calm about all of them, too. The kind of calm that made his points harder to dismiss because he hadn’t pressed them like a man trying to win.
He’d laid them out logically and didn't try to sway her decision with emotion.
He simply numbered them on a piece of paper, all Sterling-like.
That made her want to throw something at him and kiss him in the same breath.
The reality was, if the roles were reversed, she'd want her team to know. Keeping the Aegis team blind might protect her Bureau paperwork, but it sure as hell didn’t protect Sterling.
Or his team.
That was the part she hated most.
She could lie to strangers. She could lie to suspects. She could smile over a beer tap while feeding half a town a version of herself that had started as cover and somehow grown skin, bone, and a heartbeat. She wasn't worried about keeping her cover to everyone else. She could do that.
But she struggled with lying to Bea about breaking to Sterling and his team.
And that thought landed hard in her gut.
Bea had warned her about attachment. About how staying this long might become easier than being her old self.
Juniper used to roll her eyes at that kind of handler nonsense.
Undercover work came with rules and risks and emotional hazards dressed up as common sense.
Not to mention that Bea also constantly suggested that perhaps Juniper's time as an agent had come to end.
That maybe this assignment might mark the transition to something else.
Only now, if she let her cover crack for Sterling’s team, she had to lie to Bea. And Bea was the one person who knew Juniper better than she knew herself half the time.
Juniper made the loop by the pub for the third time but drove right past the parking lot. The whole point would be to help Sterling and his team. To give them enough truth to stop them from stepping around her like she was a loaded weapon someone had left under a bar towel.
And the cost?
Her job.
Her badge.
Maybe her freedom, if someone in NSD decided she’d compromised a long-running domestic counterintelligence operation for a man with a terrifying memory.
She punched the gas. Five minutes later, she pulled into the gravel lot outside the Aegis Network office and sat with the engine ticking and her pulse hammering.
The building looked ordinary from the outside.
Low roof. Blinds half-drawn. Buddy’s truck in its usual spot.
Sterling’s beside it. Cullen’s work truck angled near the side like he’d arrived in a hurry and trusted gravity to finish parking for him, and Dove's new SUV in a spot where no one would dig her new doors.
Juniper cut the engine. “Well,” she muttered as she snagged her laptop case.
“This is either brave or stupid. Regardless, I'm going in.” She climbed out, smoothed her hands over her jeans, and crossed the lot before her FBI training got the better of her and forced her to turn around and continue with her cover.
The humidity hit hard enough to make her shirt stick between her shoulder blades. A cicada screamed from the scrub oaks beside the building, one long electric complaint. Juniper wasn't sure if that was a warning or cheer.
She opened the door and stepped inside.
Cold air washed over her. Slowly, she made her way down the hallway until she reached Sterling's office. She didn't bother knocking. It wasn't about surprise. It was about nerve.
The Aegis office had always looked like someone tried to combine a tactical operations center with a small-town insurance agency and quit halfway through.
Two whiteboards stood in the center of the room, and Buddy in front of them like a schoolteacher with a black marker in one hand and a phone in the other.
Sterling leaned against his desk with his arms crossed, gaze locked on the boards.
Cullen braced a shoulder against the wall near the window, one boot crossed over the other.
And Dove sat in her chair with her legs propped on an open file drawer, both hands resting on her belly while her thumbs moved in slow circles over the small curve beneath her shirt.
All four of them turned toward Juniper, and she crossed the threshold.
Buddy lifted his phone. “Nick, hang on a second. We’ve got a visitor.”
“Take your time," a familiar voice said.
Dove dropped her feet to the floor with a soft thud and sat straighter. “Hey Juniper. What brings you by?"
Sterling pushed off the desk. "Is everything okay? Did something happen?"
"I'm fine. I just decided you're right." Juniper inched closer to Sterling. “Is that Nick Colter?”
Buddy glanced toward Sterling.
Sterling crossed to her and held out his hand.
The simple gesture reminded her that she really wasn't alone in this town.
She smiled and took it as his fingers closed around hers, soft, yet reassuring. He guided her toward his desk and offered her his chair. She took it, pushing it slightly toward the center of the room so she could see the whiteboards and set her case on the ground by her feet.
"How the hell do you know Nick Colter?" Buddy asked.
"I'd like that to know that, too," Nick's voice boomed over the phone's speaker.
She took a moment to study the words written in block letters behind Buddy.
Doyle. Meridian. Frost. Ashbourne. Rutgers. Anthony. Royce. Graham.
And then there was: Devlin Pace. Tallie James. Khalid Nazari.
In the middle of all of that sat Shrike.
Her stomach tightened.
Sterling stayed behind her. One hand settled at the back of her neck, his thumb pressing gently into the muscle just below her hairline.
It was such a small touch, and yet it helped way too much.
“Hey, Nick. It’s Junie.”
Another silence.
“As in Stratton?” Nick asked.
Buddy dropped the marker.
Juniper closed her eyes for one second, then opened them and stared at the board because it was easier than looking at the people who she'd fed and who in turn had teased her, trusted her, and let her pour them drinks.
“Yeah,” she said. “But now it’s Juniper Solstice. To everyone in this room, I’m Juniper, and we need to keep it that way.”
Dove’s chair creaked. “Holy shit. I did not see that one coming, and I'm usually in tune with those things.”
“Oookaaay,” Cullen said. “I’m going to need someone to tell me if I’m supposed to be impressed, pissed off, or worried I’ve been under-tipping a federal agent for months.”
Juniper laughed. “I understand everything but the undertipping.”
Buddy bent over and picked up the marker. “Well, that makes a few things make a hell of a lot more sense.”
“Does it?” Cullen asked. “Because I’m still stuck on the part where the woman who makes my burger medium rare and gives me grief about putting ketchup on everything is apparently a federal agent.”
“I don't make your burger,” Juniper said. "And since I'm coming clean, I'm an FBI agent currently working for the National Security Division."
Cullen blinked. “That sounds both bad ass and utterly terrifying.”
“She's both,” Nick said.
"You're here to spy on Sterling?" Dove asked.
"Not spy. Watch and protect." Sterling’s fingers tightened at the back of her neck.
“That's the part that matters, and she’s taking a serious risk telling us. If her handler finds out she blew her cover to my team, she’ll be pulled.
At minimum. At worse, well, I don't even want to think about that.”
"Then let's not," Buddy said. "
"I got no reason to say anything." Dove patted her belly. "I'm currently keeping the sex of this little one from my future husband because he doesn't want to know. If I can do that, I can keep Juniper's secret."
"That's kind of mean," Juniper said.
"So is calling our baby Scutelet and now baby Yoda," Dove said. "But we've digressed."
"Considering everything, we might need to clue in law enforcement," Buddy said.
“I could be agreeable with Dawson. Maybe Chloe. But that’s as big as this circle gets," Juniper said.
Juniper drew in a breath and let it out slowly. She’d faced armed men with less fear than this. Guns made sense. Bullets traveled in a line. People were messier. Hurt the wrong person, and the damage spread in directions no training manual covered. “I’m sorry I lied to all of you,” she said.
“No reason to be sorry,” Buddy said. “You were here to do a job that all of us knew was possible and could be happening right under our noses. The things Sterling knows, the work he did, it touches national security. We might not love being left in the dark, but I understand the job.”
Dove rubbed her belly. “I'm used to this kind of thing. Can't tell you how many missions I went on that I wasn't even sure the core objective was true.”
“Same,” Cullen said.
“So, I guess when I come to town, I have to pretend I don't even know this Juniper.”
Juniper’s chest tightened. “You're coming to Calusa Cove.”
“He's coming to my wedding," Dove said. "I met Nick a few years ago when my team worked a JSOC mission and crossed with something he was doing in the middle east."
“Is there anybody you don't know, Nick?” Juniper asked.
"Not many," Nick teased.
Sterling’s thumb moved against her neck, and the contact steadied her before the old grief over Mark and Norfolk could crawl out and make a meal of her in front of everyone.
Buddy turned toward the board. “Now that we’re done with the first layer of holy shit, we have to figure out how all this connects.” He tapped Doyle’s name with the marker. “Because right now, Doyle makes my hair stand on end.”
“Meridian has a questionable client list,” Sterling said. “Three names on Nick’s Shrike-adjacent list.”
Buddy pointed at Frost’s name. “And a client who claims he’s being hunted because of the Bogotá corridor.
” Buddy moved the marker to the other whiteboard.
“Then we have Royce and Graham Halloran.
Shipping. Money. Pressure on Aegis to cut Cullen which is personal.
But I'm keeping it on the board because we don't know if there's more.” He tapped the marker against the board.
“And some of the stuff Mia dug up on Ashbourne Holdings is starting to smell Shrike-adjacent, too.”
“That’s not news to me.” Juniper sat forward.
“I had Bea run Royce after Cullen told me about the contract condition and Graham.” She pointed at the board.
“I knew about the shipping money, the political donations, the shell subsidiaries, and the fact that Royce likes to pretend clean paperwork equals clean hands.” Juniper pulled her computer out of her bag.
"I get you’re old school. But do you have a way for me to project my screen to something so I can show you what I've got. Then somebody needs to tell me exactly what Mia found on Doyle, this job he wants Sterling to do, and Ashbourne Holdings.”
"If the FBI ends up firing you," Buddy said. "You've got a job in this office with us."
She laughed. "Thanks, but if when my days end there, I think I'll figure out a way to keep my pub and spend the rest of my days pulling beer for you and listening to your boring stories.
" The words flew from her mouth before she even had a chance to think about them, but after they dropped, her heart settled.
She'd meant every single one. She glanced over her shoulder at Sterling, who stared at her with wide eyes as he smiled. Finally, after all the grief and pain, she'd landed in a place she could call home.