Chapter 2
Chris
The seatbelt light dings. I don’t look up.
The envelope’s pressed against my ribs—thin, discreet, lethal. Inside: transcripts, names, chatter logs. Enough to keep Vicente and Arturo on a leash for another few weeks. Maybe. If they don’t slip it like everything else in their lives.
A kid kicks the back of my seat for the third time. I think about turning around. I don’t. Enduring it feels like penance.
I shift my weight, coat bunched under one thigh, heat building where it shouldn’t be. My body still remembers... how she tasted, how he sounded, how I forgot what the hell I was pretending to be and just was.
Goddammit.
I adjust my posture, stretch my legs, do everything short of punching myself in the face. Beside me, a woman scrolls through her phone with the slow, hypnotic boredom of someone who’s never had to lie about her name for ten years straight.
Exit rows at 13 and 27. Three crew members visible. Pilot sounds sober. No signs of trailing agents or bad actors on board. Threat level low. Mental state unstable.
I close my eyes and try to run diagnostics on myself, like I used to in the field. Pulse elevated. Throat dry. Hands steady, but jaw locked.
And there it is again—Wyatt’s hands gripping my shoulders. My own voice, raw and half-unrecognizable: “Please.”
I meant it.
The worst part is, I meant it.
The drink cart rolls by. I wave it off. Whiskey won’t help. I spent four years drinking tequila I didn’t want with a man I was pretending not to care about, and all it did was make the lies taste smooth.
Don’t think about Vicente.
I’m back in that villa for a second anyway, heat, sweat, the way he used to look at me like he owned me, and the way I let him, because ownership felt easier than being known.
My phone buzzes in my jacket. One message.
LANGLEY OPS: Package confirmed. Briefing 0830. Amador intel still viable. More coming. Source remains volatile.
No signature. No commentary. Just the facts. I wouldn’t expect anything else.
I read it twice.
Still viable.
They say it like that’s a win.
Vicente Amador and Arturo Flores. Lovers, rivals, cartel royalty on a leash. They’ve been feeding us scraps for months, when they feel like it. When it doesn’t clash with whatever mess they’re calling love now.
The whole arrangement’s duct tape and bad faith. No long-term plan. No proper access. Vicente only plays nice when he wants something, and Arturo plays nice to make you underestimate him. It’s a joke.
I’ve said as much in three briefings. No one’s listening.
They want results, not reality.
I scroll absently through secure logs on my phone. Other ops, other messes. I pause when I hit a flagged message from Mason, Callie’s husband.
Officially, he’s a consultant for the Agency now, task lead for the Amador intel pipeline. He runs an auto shop off Wilshire. Restores classic cars. Keeps his daughter in a playpen in the back of his shop while he works. Looks like someone who’s figured out how to put the gun down and stay human.
Unfair, maybe, how easy he makes it look.
But I’ve seen the scars. I know the past.
Mason used to move weapons for a man who carved up his enemies with a straight razor and prayed over the blood. He came back from that world with a new name and a daughter he almost didn’t get to keep. Callie knows all of it. She chose him anyway.
I walked Zoey down the aisle. Stood with him and my sister at the altar. Zoey looked like a sugar-dusted cherub in a flower crown. Mason looked like someone holding on with both hands.
Callie was incandescent. Like she’d finally stopped apologizing for being brilliant and terrifying in equal measure.
They looked like peace.
And I looked like someone who still flinches at his own shadow.
I don’t resent him.
But I don’t understand how you climb out of hell and call it home either.
The next few hours pass like the inside of a gun barrel. Long, pressurized, quiet.
Layover in Denver. Of course.
I don’t leave the gate. Just shift seats and stare out a window like it’s going to offer me a different version of the city.
I know this place too well to feel anything good about it.
Home, technically. Or whatever passed for home when Mom wasn’t flying back and forth between hearings and black-site meetings, and Callie and I were pretending like silence made us strong.
Somewhere out there, my mother is probably prepping for her next committee appearance. Wyatt and Nina are probably still in the hotel, figuring out what last night meant. Or deciding not to.
I don’t mean to check my phone, but do it out of habit anyway.
Nina’s name sits at the top of my recent messages.
Wyatt’s a few down, task force updates, wedding logistics, the kind of contact that’s unavoidable when you share an op and a brother-in-law.
Pre-wedding check-ins. No new texts. I swipe the screen off before I can start imagining what it would say if there was one.
The second leg passes in a blur, just enough time for my body to stiffen and my brain to recycle every choice I didn’t make.
The plane jolts into descent. The pilot’s voice murmurs something about landing protocols.
I don’t hear most of it. The woman beside me checks her seatbelt.
Her perfume is too sweet. Thoughts of Nina slip in before I can stop them.
.. her scent, how she looked last night, how she might have looked this morning if I’d stayed.
I hate that I care, but I hate even more that I wasn’t there when she woke up.
There’s a dossier on my phone about a psychological operations insertion that hasn’t been assigned yet. Some Langley plan to place a civilian asset in the orbit of Vicente and Arturo. Therapist cover, soft access. A solution to the intel bottleneck I’ve been warning them about for months.
I skim it and keep going. No names. Just a placeholder op. Probably dead in the water.
Good.
No one should get close to those two unless they’ve already decided how they want to die.
We touch down too hard. I don’t flinch. The woman next to me gasps and mutters something about turbulence.
I stay quiet. Breathing steady. Thoughts locked down.
Wyatt and Nina ended things months ago, but I’ve run enough surveillance to know when someone hasn’t let go.
The way he tracked her at the reception, positioned himself in her orbit without crowding, always one conversation away, that’s not a man who’s moved on.
I kissed her first. In the elevator, champagne-stupid and desperate.
Wyatt didn’t stop me. He followed. And none of us looked back.
I started it. Then I left before the sun came up—dead drop at 0500, couldn’t wait. Or at least that’s what I told myself. Because staying means being someone I haven’t learned how to be without a cover story.
Langley’s quiet on Sundays. Which means I have no excuse.
I dump my bag in the apartment and head straight to the gym.
Not the Agency rec center. Too many eyes, too many people who pretend not to notice. I have a membership at a hole-in-the-wall place three miles off base that’s half MMA fighters, half ex-Marines, no music, no mirrors. Just sweat and steel.
I run five miles. Pull a sled across the floor until my quads burn. Punch a heavy bag until I feel it in my teeth.
My knuckles split open sometime during the last round. I tape them up and keep going.
The burn is good. It means I still exist. It means there’s still a shape to me under all the people I’ve had to be.
I don’t need to feel strong. I need to feel used up.
Back at the apartment, I shower until the mirror fogs and the tile burns my feet. Scrub until the sting in my knuckles wakes me up again. Retape my right hand... knuckles split open from poor form, poor focus, poor everything.
I dry off. Step over the gear I haven’t unpacked. Drop onto the bed—sheets shoved down, mattress half-bare.
Doesn’t matter. I don’t plan on sleeping.
But I close my eyes anyway.
And there they are.
Nina on her knees in front of me, naked, flushed, watching every twitch of my body like she already knew how this was going to end.
Wyatt behind me—quiet, steady, hands on my hips, his breath warm against my neck. One hand gripped mine. The other moved slow down my spine, grounding me right before he pushed inside.
My body jolts at the memory, cock hard again before I even touch myself.
I curse. Let my left hand drift. The other’s too raw to use, knuckles taped, fingers stiff.
But the fantasy’s already happening.
Scratch that—the memory.
Nina was the one who told me to ask for what I wanted. She said it like a dare, and I said I want it all, like I didn’t care what it cost.
Wyatt moved like he was afraid I’d change my mind. Too slow at first. Too careful. Until I said please and pushed back against him and the sound she made—
That’s it, she whispered. Take him. Let me see you take him.
She was touching herself, two fingers between her thighs, the other hand clutching her breast. She never looked away.
I’d never felt so fucking seen. Or wanted. Or desperate to be worthy of it.
Wyatt’s rhythm changed. Deeper. Harder. My knees slipping on the sheets, my arms giving out. I collapsed down onto my elbows and Nina came closer, dragging herself forward, mouth parted, thighs slick.
I buried my face between them without thinking, licked her open like it might save me.
And Wyatt was still fucking me, still holding me down with one hand at the base of my spine while I drowned in her flavor.
I came before she did. It hit like a gut punch, everything too much, her thighs trembling, his body locked to mine, the smell of sex and sweat and something I’d never had the right to ask for before that night.
I groan in the dark, left hand tight around myself, stroking harder now, chasing that exact second when I stopped pretending I was anything other than theirs.
When I come, it’s brutal. Sudden. Shattering.
I jerk once, twice—then go still, panting.
My pulse in my throat. My stomach slick.
I wipe myself off on the damp towel still hanging from the bedpost. Toss it toward the laundry basket and miss.
Roll onto my back.
Stare at the ceiling.
My hand throbs. My thighs ache. My chest hurts for reasons I don’t want to name.
But at least for a minute, my head is quiet.
Long enough to remember that I asked for it.
Worse—I wanted it.