EIGHTEEN
Rome had held it together during the terrifying drive through the mountain pass.
He held it together when Stina and Jolie’s kidnapper whipped the SUV onto the side road and damn near sent the vehicle over the ridge.
He held it together on the way back, when Townie told them Rivers was in surgery.
He could fall apart later. Right now he needed to hear every word.
Stina and Jolie sat side by side at the table, talking in stutters that turned into short bursts.
Slowly, as the story unfolded, they talked over each other, filling each other’s gaps and correcting timelines with the efficiency of two people who spent enough time together to know whose memory was sharper on which details.
As much as Rome wanted to walk over to Stina, pull her out of the seat and cradle her in his lap, he couldn’t.
He was too full of adrenaline and rage. So he stood at the back with his arms folded to keep from smashing his fist into the concrete wall. As he listened to every word, his jaw locked tighter until it began to ache.
Then Jolie got to the part about their fallen teammate.
She told Cannon how Rivers went down in the snow with blood pouring through his fingers while the kidnapper came out of the trees and forced them to the SUV at gunpoint. The bastard shoved them into the back seat before they could do anything except look back and hope Rivers was still alive.
Cannon nodded slowly.
Stina’s expression worked as she battled tears, and Rome uncurled his fists and rushed to stand behind her.
She sucked in a breath when he rested his hands on her shoulders.
“He killed Rivers.” Her voice wobbled, and she gave a loud sniff.
“He wounded Rivers,” Rome corrected.
She went still.
“He’s alive, Stina. He’s still fighting.”
The whole room let out a breath. Cannon closed his eyes briefly. O leaned back in his chair, and Monk pressed his fist against his mouth.
Her hand came up to cover her mouth and shook there for just a second. Jolie reached for her at the same moment and they grabbed each other and held on.
It hit Rome square in the chest, and he damn near lost it.
Rome’s throat was so tight he had to look away. When he looked back, Stina’s eyes were bright but dry, her jaw set, back in it.
“Okay.” Her voice came out thick. “Good. Okay.”
Rome cleared his throat. “Let’s discuss the channel issue.”
Cannon gave a hard nod. “Nobody in Sierra uses regular command, you hear me? Not for anything related to this operation, not for anything related to these women, not for anything at all until we know how deep the compromise goes.” He looked around the table.
“Dante’s channel only. Blackout exclusive.
If it doesn’t come through that line, it doesn’t exist.”
“Which brings us to our guy.” Cannon’s body snapped with tension. “He knew we’d been pulled off the mountain.”
“Or was responsible for the bogus command.” Monk barely got the words out through his clenched teeth.
Cannon’s nostrils flared—the closest he ever got to demonstrating fury. “He knew the base location, or close enough to it. He knew the secure channel well enough to send a command through it that looked legitimate.” He looked at each of them. “He knows the Blackout network.”
No one argued.
“That’s not civilian knowledge,” Younger said from the end of the table.
“No.” Rome gripped the back of Stina’s chair hard. “It’s not.”
“He’s gotta be government,” O said. He hadn’t spoken since the debrief started.
He had the look of a man who had been building something in his head while everyone else talked.
“Has to be military, FBI, CIA—someone with access deep enough to know Blackout exists and shallow enough to still be hunting for what Jolie and Stina know.”
Rome locked stares with Monk. “Which must be the identity of the guy using the voice modulator.”
“Or someone who used to have access.” Rorke’s gaze stayed on the table. “The dangerous ones aren’t the people who know too much.” He looked up. “They’re the ones who know just enough.”
“Either way,” Cannon said, “we’re looking at an insider. Current or former.” He looked at O. “Cross-reference the profile we’ve built against anyone with access to the regular channel. Anyone who could have known the network well enough to spoof a command through it.”
O nodded once and pulled his laptop toward him.
Rome looked at Stina. She was listening, absorbing, her eyes moving between faces as the conversation built around her.
She was bruised and exhausted and fresh off a night that should have broken her, but she sat there with her chin still tipped at that proud angle he’d come to crave.
Rome looked at her beautiful face and knew with bone-deep certainty exactly where she belonged. Not in Chicago. Not on the run. And sure as hell not in the hands of the men hunting her.
She belonged with him.
The truth landed hard, leaving no room to dodge it.
Somewhere between wanting her, protecting her and watching her fight like hell to survive, Rome had done the one thing he never thought he would.
He’d fallen in love with Stina.
* * * * *
“Keep them closed.”
“They’re closed.”
“You peeked.”
“I did not peek.” She hadn’t.
She was walking blind with Rome’s hand warm on her shoulder guiding her through a doorway she couldn’t identify by sound or smell, which was more disorienting than she’d expected. She’d gotten good at navigating this base but she had no clue where they were headed.
“Two more feet. Stop.” His hands settled on her shoulders from behind, positioning her, and she felt him close at her back. “Okay.”
She opened her eyes.
For a moment she just stood there and looked and didn’t say anything because her brain needed a second to process what she was seeing as real.
The pots were first—a full set, hanging from a rack she didn’t remember being there before, copper-bottomed and gleaming and the exact weight and quality she’d spent years coveting from the other side of a price tag that never made sense on her budget.
Not the institutional dented things she’d been wrestling with since she got here.
Real pots. The kind her baba had saved up for over two years and treated like heirlooms.
Below them on the counter sat the knives.
She pressed her hand to her mouth.
Was she actually going to cry over new knives?
She was.
The block was dark wood, the handles glinting the way that good steel did.
She crossed the room without deciding to and pulled one free—a chef’s knife, perfectly balanced, and she turned it once in her hand.
“Rome.” Her voice came out strange. “When did you get these?”
“Ordered them after we were upstairs in the resort. They came yesterday while you slept.”
His voice was even, but she caught the slight waver of emotion. While she slept off her ordeal, he stayed right by her side. When she woke, he was right there with his arms around her, and his scent wrapped around her senses and anchoring her to the knowledge that she was safe.
“You say this like it’s a normal thing, like men order professional grade copper cookware and Japanese steel knife sets for women they’re hiding in covert bases every day of the week.”
He grinned. “The delivery took longer than I wanted. I had O reroute it through three different addresses.”
She set the knife down carefully and turned to look at him.
He was watching her from the doorway with his arms crossed and his shoulder against the frame, trying to look like he hadn’t done something that made her feel important and cherished.
It wasn’t working.
She set down the knife. “You just assumed I’d stay, without ever asking?”
The question hovered between them with more weight than she’d intended. She heard it after it was out, heard all the things she hadn’t said directly but that had been building since the night she’d climbed into his bed because her body knew it before her heart ever caught up.
Rome held her gaze for a moment.
Then he pushed off the doorframe and crossed to her. She met him halfway without thinking about it, her arms going around his waist and her face turning into his chest.
He pulled her in with both arms and held her there.
“I told Cannon,” he said, low against her hair, “that if I found you I was never letting you go.”
She stilled against him. Then she tipped her head to look at him. “In those words?”
He nodded.
“Out loud?”
He nodded again, eyes glimmering with amusement and more.
“In front of witnesses?”
“Yes.”
Her chest ached with all the things she felt for him.
She thought about the pass. The rock face, the man with the rifle, and underneath all of it—even then, even in the middle of that—the awareness that Rome was out there somewhere moving toward her.
She hadn’t doubted it for a second, and she understood now that the certainty had come from him.
From the man standing in front of her who had ordered her copper pots after one afternoon in an abandoned kitchen and told his commanding officer out loud that he wasn’t letting her go.
She reached up and cupped his angular jaw.
“I told Jolie I didn’t know if I’d recognize a good man,” she said quietly. “That I’d dated so many wrong ones I might not know the difference.”
He waited.
“I was wrong,” she said.
Emotion flickered across his expression. After a long heartbeat, he turned his face into her palm for just a second and pressed his lips to it.
Then he pulled her back against his chest and she slipped her arms around him breathed in the scent of the man she needed as much as air.
Silence throbbed between them for a heartbeat.
Rome brushed his lips over her hair. “I love you, Stina.”
His voice was low, his words simple, as if he’d been carrying them in his heart and waiting for the perfect moment to share them with her.
She issued a low cry and surged onto tiptoe. Against his mouth, she said, “I love you too, Jack Rome. So very much.”
All talk faded to the brushing of lips and tongues as they shared an endless kiss.
When they pulled back, they shared a smile. But she was still tense. Why?
Then it hit her.
She realized what she was bracing for.
For him to retreat. To hold her at arm’s length.
For the invisible wall he always rebuilt between them.
It never came.
When she looked past his shoulder at the copper pots gleaming under the kitchen lights, she let out a happy sigh.
“I don’t know how to take that sigh.” The teasing in his tone made her look up at him.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if you’re happier about me being in love with you or the new set of pans.”
She giggled. “The pans. Definitely the pans.”
She tightened her hold on him and tipped her mouth up for his kiss. “Come here, you impossible man.”
He swept her into a kiss that turned hotter by the second, but Stina only held on tighter, letting herself sink into the iron shield of his chest and the man who had changed everything.
Because in the end, it wasn’t Chicago she wanted.
It wasn’t the life she’d left behind.
It was this man. This love. This future.
And wrapped in Rome’s arms, Stina knew she was exactly where she belonged.
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