THIRTY-TWO
DAKOTA
Mercer shouldn’t have looked at me like that.
Like I’m the answer to a question he has been afraid to ask.
Like I’m something that can be opened. Not in front of me.
And not in a room where my father’s name still sits open on a table and every locked door smells like bleach, secrets, and men who think permission is a decorative concept.
I’m not a missing page.
I’m a woman with a knife they didn’t find, old blockers dying depressingly in my blood, and four Alphas settled around me like the universe finally grew a spine.
Mercer watches me across the table, and I watch him back. Hale stands near the corner of the room with his arms folded. Valeria remains by the inner door, face unreadable, and one hand on her radio. The guards are doing their best not to stare at me, but they’re failing in shifts.
Professional. Adorable. Fucking awful.
“You want me to help you understand my father’s research,” I say.
I don’t mean to say my father, but it comes out anyway like a dropped match. Only a small one, but the whole room catches fire instantly.
Hale’s head lifts and Valeria’s eyes sharpen. One of the scientists by the glass wall goes very, very still. Mercer doesn’t react, and that’s the worst reaction of all. Because he already knew. Or he suspected enough that hearing it only fills in the blanks in his mind.
Beside me, Fletcher’s body changes. Not with surprise, or not exactly. He already knew pieces because he had enough of them to form an ugly enough picture. But the word father falls differently. It puts blood on the facts.
Ewan is too quiet, and so is Xeon. Kaito’s scent deepens at the edge of the room, burning wood and worn flannel held tight, controlled enough not to crowd me.
No one says a damned thing, and I hate all of them for that, too.
“Dr. Conrad O’Reilly was your father,” Mercer says carefully.
It’s not a question, but I answer it like it is.
“No,” I say, because apparently my mouth has picked a theme to stick with.
Mercer blinks once, and I lean forward, palms flat on the table, black-painted nails stark against the metal. Then I say, “Dad was my father. Conrad O’Reilly was my father. Dr. Conrad O’Reilly is just a name on your file.”
Mercer’s face shifts to something like pain, maybe. Good. Let him have some.
“Fair enough,” he says, and I catch the Hackney edges under the words that I recognize from a TV show before the world trusted a fart and shit itself. It’s not polished, or soft, and tired enough to be honest.
Hale steps closer then. “You should have told us who you were.”
I turn my head toward him slowly just as Fletcher says, “Careful.”
Not to me, but to Hale. That’s nice. Everyone is learning.
Hale completely ignores him. “If you’re O’Reilly’s kid, that changes the entire situation.”
“No,” I say. “It explains why everyone with a gun keeps looking at me like I came with assembly instructions. I’m not an Ikea desk.”
Valeria’s mouth tightens, but Hale’s gaze doesn’t move from mine. “It means you might have information critical to this compound’s survival.”
“I mean, I’ve got trust issues falling out of my ass and a screwed knee. Do either of those save lives?” I question.
“You know things.”
“So do you.”
“That archive is incomplete,” he tries.
“And that very much sounds like a you problem,” I counter.
Mercer rubs a hand over his mouth, hiding something that might almost be amusement if today had any manners at all. “Commander, pressing won’t get us anywhere.”
Hale’s jaw flexes. “We don’t have time to be delicate.”
“Good,” I mutter. “I hate delicate.”
“Enough,” Valeria finally chimes in. It’s not loud, but it works anyway. She looks between Hale and Mercer before she says, “If this really is Dr. O’Reilly’s child, we need a controlled debrief.”
Controlled.
There it is again. Everyone’s favorite word for a cage with all the fun paperwork.
“No,” I say.
Valeria looks at me. “You don’t even know what I was going to suggest.”
“I heard the word controlled and rejected the entire application. Thanks, though,” I tell her.
Ewan makes a small sound behind his fist and Fletcher keeps his eyes on the door. Xeon’s focus is on me. Not my scent, not my mouth under the bandana. Me. And that might actually be worse.
Mercer closes the file with my father’s name on it, and the sound is quiet. Final. Then he opens a different folder from the gray case. This one is thinner. Newer. The paper is less yellowed than the others, and the tab has a printed sticker instead of handwritten ink.
CURE DEVELOPMENT/FIELD TEAM CROSS-REFERENCE.
I stop breathing. Not because of the cure, because every asshole in here and outside the compound’s walls wants a cure. People have killed for less useful lies. But it’s the label that catches me off guard.
Field team.
Six years of streets and rot have long since taught me that field teams don’t always come back whole, if at all.
Mercer flips through pages slowly. Too slowly for my liking, and my fingers twitch toward the knife they didn’t find.
Fletcher’s voice drops next to mine as he says, “Tell us what you’re lookin’ for.”
Not tell me. Us.
Mercer looks up. He hears it, and so do I, but I pretend I don’t.
“I’m checking something before I say it,” Mercer explains.
“Not a great way to start that,” Ewan says.
Mercer glances at him. “Yeah. I know.”
A scientist close to the glass wall clears her throat. “Doctor.”
Mercer doesn’t bother to look over at her, simply muttering, “Not now, Anika.”
She shuts up, and I find that interesting, because it means Mercer has authority here. Not Hale’s kind, with fewer boots and more gravity. But it’s authority all the same.
He reaches for a page he wants and then he stops. The room seems to morph around the silence and my pulse does that gross thing where it slows too much, each beat heavy and separate.
“What?” I ask.
Mercer’s eyes lift to mine and I see the hesitation in them.
Wrong choice, because every bit of softness within me turns as sharp as the edge of a blade, and I ask again, “What?”
He exhales before finally telling me, “There’s a name in our field records.”
A name.
No.
No, no, no.
No names. Names are worse than files, because names have faces. Names have hands. Names know the places inside you that never really scarred as they should have.
Hale warns, “Mercer.”
The doctor ignores him, which is good. Or bad. I can’t actually tell. “A man has been working with one of our outside research teams. Not based inside Haven Ridge. Not permanently. He moves between field sites.”
My mouth has gone dry. “Good for him.”
“He came in about eighteen months ago with a group out of the northern route,” Mercer explains.
Northern. That means nothing and too much at the very same time. I mean, hell, everything in the damned world is north if you’re lost enough.
“He gave a name,” Mercer adds.
The room is completely gone now. The walls, the glass, the guards. All of it blurs at the edges, leaving only Mercer, the folder, and the horrible care he’s using to speak each word.
My hands grow cold despite my fingerless gloves. Not a scared kind of cold, but a grave cold. Then I say, “Don’t.”
Mercer stops and the whole world stops with him. I hear Ewan inhale and Kaito shift. I hear Fletcher’s boot scrape half an inch closer to the door, mapping a path because he already knows my body has started choosing one. I hear Xeon say nothing, which somehow makes space.
Mercer’s voice lowers. “Kota.”
No.
Kota.
Not Dakota.
Careful man. Too careful.
My real name remains tucked behind his teeth, and somehow that scares me more than if he’d thrown it into the room like a live explosive.
“No,” I say sharply.
Hale turns fully toward Mercer. “How do you know that name?”
Mercer’s eyes remain on me. “Conrad mentioned enough.”
Enough.
The word twists harshly. Not children, not daughter. Not anything the rest of the room can fully unwrap. But I hear the words he’s not saying out loud. I hear every missing syllable, and my hand closes around the edge of the table.
Maine’s hat sits heavy on my head. Not just faded cloth or just protection. It’s a fucking grave marker I’ve been wearing around for six years because a burial wasn’t available and my grief needed somewhere to live.
No.
No, no, no.
Maine is dead. Maine has to be dead. The world is fucking brutal, but at least it’s simple when people die.
You lose them, you break, you keep walking.
You make the missing part useful or sharp or both.
You don’t survive six years believing someone is nothing but ash, only for a man in a lab coat to open a folder and rattle the coffin.
“Say the name,” I whisper harshly.
Mercer’s throat works with a swallow, and behind him, Hale says, “Doctor, classified personnel are not—”
I move.
Fast enough that one guard lifts his weapon.
Fast enough that my bad knee screams in pain that lances up my leg.
Fast enough that Kaito steps in front of the rifle before I fully even register the barrel pointed at me. Not touching me, but blocking them. Burning wood and worn flannel flares brightly, no longer a soft restraint but more of a warning.
Fletcher’s voice cuts through the room. “Lower it.”
The guard doesn't, and Fletcher turns his head slowly. The Southern is gone, leaving only steel in its wake.
“I said lower it.”
Hale snaps, “Stand down.”
The rifle dips, barely, but I don’t care. I’m leaning over the table now, one hand braced on metal while the other is poised near the knife no one knows about except probably everyone with eyes. “Say. The. Name.”
Mercer looks at Hale once, then back at me, right before he shatters my entire world.
“Maine O’Reilly.”
Everything stops. Not dramatically. There’s no shatter or scream, only absence. Every sound disappears so completely I almost think Ewan has snuck the headphones back over my ears.
Maine.
Maine O’Reilly.