Override (Grayline #1)

Prologue

The city is quieter after midnight.

Not silent. Chicago is never silent. There is always something humming beneath it—the distant whine of tires, a siren too far away to matter, music leaking out of a bar door before it slams shut again—but quieter.

Muted enough that I can hear the low throb of bass coming through the speakers in my car and the clicking protest in my left shoulder every time I turn the wheel.

Wheels had slammed me with an elbow during extraction. He claimed it was accidental. I claimed he drove like a suicidal raccoon and nearly got us all killed. Matt told us both to shut up.

A successful mission, all things considered.

I pull into my apartment lot and kill the engine, but the music keeps playing for another few seconds, vibrating through the leather seats while I sit there staring through the windshield at the yellow security light above building two.

My fingers tap once against the steering wheel in time with the drums. Once.

Twice. Then I shut the system down completely and the quiet folds in.

We got the girl back.

That should be enough to let my brain power down.

A father with more money than common sense hired Grayline after his ex-wife vanished with their daughter.

Matt took the case because Matt has a soft spot for anything involving kids, even though he pretends he doesn't. Wheels handled transport. Bullet watched our backs from a rooftop three blocks over. I sat in front of six screens for the better part of eighteen hours tracing toll cameras, burner purchases, and one very stupid social media check-in that gave away the mother’s location.

People always slip. Always. You just have to know where to look.

That part of the job never gets old. The search. The patterns. The moment a lie starts unraveling because somebody somewhere thought they were smarter than the system they were trying to beat.

They never are. I smile to myself as I reach over and grab my keys.

The government figured that out before I did.

One day I was nineteen, half asleep, living on gas station coffee and proving to myself that no firewall built by federal employees was actually secure. The next, I was in a room with two humorless men in pressed suits being informed that my choices were prison or patriotism.

I picked patriotism.

Mostly because I am far too pretty for prison.

A laugh escapes me as I climb out of the car, the sound bouncing off the empty lot.

Rachel says it’s weird that I laugh at my own jokes. Rachel also owns decorative towels no one is allowed to use, so her opinion is frequently invalid.

I lock the car and start toward the building, rolling my shoulder once. It aches all the way down into my spine, but it is the good kind of ache. The earned kind. The kind that comes after a mission closes clean and everyone walks away breathing.

Three years ago, when the military spit the four of us back into civilian life with enough classified trauma to fill a landfill, Matt decided retirement looked boring.

He called us all to his kitchen table. Said he wasn't interested in watching us scatter into separate corners of the country pretending we knew how to function like normal men. He had a plan. Matt always has a plan.

Grayline became his answer to the problem. A private security and operations company for the jobs no one else can touch without lawyers, warrants, or body bags. We take the calls that come in hushed voices. We do the work people are too scared, too desperate, or too connected to ask for publicly.

Most days it feels a lot like our old life with less paperwork and significantly better coffee. I prefer it. In the military I was useful. At Grayline, I am necessary. There’s a difference.

Second floor. End unit. Minimal neighbors. Good line of sight from the parking lot. I chose it because the internet infrastructure in the building is decent and because Cindy liked the hardwood floors.

Cindy.

My hand tightens around my keys as I take the stairs. She texted me earlier asking if I was going to be home tonight.

Home yet? Miss you. A red heart.

I think of the memory of it and try to summon something warm.

I like Cindy. That sounds terrible, but it’s true.

She’s easy to be around when she isn’t asking too many questions about where I disappear to for days at a time. She smells expensive. Laughs at things that aren’t funny. Leaves half-empty wine glasses all over my kitchen counter and complains that my place has no personality.

Rachel likes her because she says Cindy “softens the corners.”

Matt asked me last month if this one was serious. I told him I had no idea what serious was supposed to feel like.

He looked at me over his coffee mug like I had personally offended his marriage.

The truth is, I’ve seen serious. I’ve seen the way Matt watches Rachel when she’s not looking. The absent minded way his hand reaches for hers like there has never been a question in his mind that she belongs there.

That kind of certainty feels fictional. Manufactured. Like one of those software updates everyone else downloaded and mine somehow skipped.

Maybe this is as close as I get. Maybe some people aren't built for all-consuming. Maybe comfortable counts.

I hit the landing and head for my door, too deep in my own head to register anything except the fact that I need a shower, sleep, and probably whatever leftover Chinese food Cindy usually steals from my fridge.

The hallway light above apartment 2B flickers once as I slide the key into the lock.

I make a mental note to call maintenance tomorrow, shove the door open, and step inside.

It takes me half a second to notice the shoes.

Brown leather. Expensive. Polished. Not mine.

I stop with the door still open behind me, cool night air slipping across the back of my neck while my brain searches for an explanation that makes sense.

A neighbor dropped by. A friend from work. Wrong apartment.

The possibilities line up and die just as quickly as they come because from farther down the hall I hear it.

A laugh. Soft. Breathless. Followed by the unmistakable thud of my headboard tapping against drywall.

Every muscle in my body locks.

I don't feel that cinematic rush of anger people talk about. No heat. No immediate heartbreak. Just a strange, absolute stillness, like someone reached inside my chest and hit pause.

My fingers tap once against the keyring. Then twice. Then I set them down carefully on the entry table and start walking.

The hall feels longer. Narrower too, the walls pulling inward with every step. Another sound drifts toward me. Cindy. A moan I know I’m supposed to recognize as intimate but all I hear is information. Mattress springs. Rustling sheets. A male grunt.

My bedroom door is cracked. Two fingers press against the wood and ease it wider.

There she is.

Blonde hair fanned across my pillow like some staged romance scene. My dark sheets twisted around pale thighs. Some guy bent over her, his back to me, and it takes me a second to place him—rooftop bar, sometime last month, one of the finance douchebags she kept insisting was “actually hilarious.”

No one notices me at first. Which somehow makes it worse. Not the cheating. The carelessness. The assumption that this space was secure. That I was stupid enough not to see.

Cindy looks up. Her entire body jerks. “Oh my God—Keaton—”

I don't answer. My gaze moves around the room instead, cataloging without permission. Her red dress on the floor. A wineglass sweating onto my nightstand. My laptop bag shoved half beneath the bed where someone must have kicked it.

Tiny details. Meaningless details.

Except they aren't meaningless because suddenly every object in the room feels like proof that there were signs. There had to be signs. Pattern changes. Delays. Missed cues. Some fracture in routine I should have caught before it ever got this far.

Cold slides down my spine. Not because I love her. That realization is almost laughable in this moment. But because I didn't know.

Eight months with this woman in my home, in my bed, smiling at me from across restaurant tables, texting me little red hearts when I was gone, asking me how missions went like she gave a damn—and I did not know.

I should have known. The thought hits hard enough to make my jaw clench.

I should have seen a shift somewhere. A text answered too slowly. A canceled plan. A look that lingered in the wrong place. Something.

Anything.

Instead, I stand there staring at the evidence of my own oversight while she scrambles for the sheet and says my name again, louder this time, panic cracking through every syllable.

“Keaton, wait—”

I turn and walk out. Bare feet slap behind me seconds later.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she says, which is such an objectively stupid sentence that under different circumstances I might have laughed. “Please, just let me explain.”

I stop in the living room and face her. I really look at her. Her flushed cheeks. Wild hair. Bare shoulders hidden poorly beneath a dark sheet. Eyes darting too quickly as she searches for a story she can make believable.

A lie forming in real time. And somewhere in the quietest, most detached corner of my mind, something shifts with mechanical precision.

Not because she cheated. Because she did it successfully. She looked me in the face for months and fed me exactly the version of reality she wanted me to accept, and I took it without checking the code underneath.

Human error. Mine. Unacceptable. I reach for my keys.

“Keaton?”

My hand closes around the doorknob. She sounds scared now. Good. I glance over my shoulder.

“You can keep the sheets,” I tell her.

Then I leave. By the time I reach the parking lot, I’m laughing. Not loudly. Not because anything is funny. Just one short, disbelieving sound as I unlock my car and slide behind the wheel. I sit there in the dark with my hands at ten and two, staring at my own reflection in the windshield.

Trust is a design flaw. I don’t know why I never saw that before.