ONE
Eight weeks away from the team, and the war room hadn’t changed at all. It still smelled like coffee and gun oil and buzzed with the usual tension hanging over the table.
Rivers stood in the doorway a beat longer than he needed to, just soaking it in. The hum of the overhead lights. The scarred conference table. The whiteboard with scribbles of ops he’d missed.
He’d pictured this room night after night from his hospital bed, wondering if his body would ever let him come back.
As he stepped into the room, every head whipped up.
“Look what the wolves dragged in.” Their commanding officer, Cannon, was on his feet first, hand out, and Rivers crossed the room in quick strides to take his hand. They gripped each other hard, and Rivers felt the difference that eight weeks away had done to his calluses.
He turned to the table. Rome crossed his arms, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. “Glad you’re not dead, asshole. You officially back?”
“Officially back.” Rivers rolled his shoulders, testing the familiar pull along his side where the bullet had gone in. An inch closer to his spine, and this reunion would have looked a hell of a lot different.
He barely pulled out his chair to sit when Cannon’s phone lit up. Not his personal phone or the secure line for Blackout command.
The ghost-network phone. Blackout teams only. No agencies. No official channels. Not since they’d learned they couldn’t trust either.
The shift in the room was instant, and Rivers’s welcome back was suddenly over.
Cannon answered the call and thumbed it to speaker. The clipped voice of Con, SEAL Team Blackout Charlie’s leader, came through.
“We’ve got news. Chickie, go on.”
A second voice cut through the room. Henner, aka Chickie, spoke with a flat calm that told them things weren’t looking good.
“We believe the weapons stolen from Echo team’s armory have been distributed along the East Coast. May has been tracking them.”
Rorke leaned closer and caught Rivers up under his breath. The hunt for Echo’s stolen weapons hadn’t stopped while he was out. They’d chased leads even before he was shot, but they were still no closer to identifying who’d ordered the armory cleaned out.
Cannon’s jaw worked, tendon tightening under three days of stubble. “Sierra’s been on this case for months. Why are we just now learning about this?”
“Command held it back. More just came in. We’ll patch you in on a video call in a minute.” Con ended the call.
Cannon’s gaze cut to Rorke for a beat.
Rivers caught it. So did everyone else.
“Weird that Charlie’s working this when we’ve been on it longer.” Cannon’s voice was deceptively easy. “Especially when we’ve got our own intelligence expert sitting right here.”
Rorke met his stare.
“Did you know?” Cannon asked Rorke.
Whatever had been brewing between the two of them, Rivers had apparently missed it while he was gone. And Rorke sure as hell wasn’t leaning over to fill him in on that part.
“Not about this. But I do have higher clearance than you.” Rorke didn’t look up from his hands as he delivered the jab.
Rivers swung his gaze between them. Cannon’s jaw was clenched. Rorke’s stare was flat and unreadable.
Whatever was going on between Cannon and Rorke had started long before Rivers walked back through that door. Apparently, he’d missed more than mission briefings.
“Everything okay?” he asked, because somebody had to.
Across the table, Rome caught his eye, and Rivers translated the look. This isn’t the first time, brother, and I’ll tell you everything later.
Rivers filed the exchange away. The team he was returning to wasn’t quite the one he’d left.
Cannon took control again, directing their attention to the big wall monitor as the faces of Charlie team appeared. Con wore the same line between his brows as Cannon, the kind command seemed to carve into a man.
“We’ve got a new incident. May’s on scene, but her connection’s spotty. She tracked down the owner of the trucking company that handles our deliveries.”
“Bill. The supply guy,” Rivers said quietly.
Con nodded. “He’s got offices in Portland and New York City.”
Legs braced wide, Cannon faced the screen. “What else do you have?”
“He’s dead.” May’s voice carried through the war room.
For a second, nobody moved.
“We just arrived, but the FBI beat us here.”
Rivers straightened so fast his side pulled. “NYPD should be handling it. Why FBI? You sure?”
May angled the camera enough to catch two seconds of a jacket—dark, with block letters stamped across the back.
Letters that shouldn’t punch the breath out of Rivers’s lungs.
She swung the camera away. “Positive.”
May moved closer to the yellow crime-scene tape and zoomed in on gloved hands working over the body. They stripped him of his phone, keys and watch, bagging and tagging each item as a bored voice called them out for the log.
“Nice watch.” Rorke leaned closer to peer at the screen. “Swiss. Expensive.”
“How do we get access to that evidence?” Cannon asked.
On the screen, Charlie’s tech expert glanced up from his computer. “Give me a few minutes. I might be able to get eyes on the Bureau’s case file.”
Cannon stared at him.
His mouth twitched. “Legally, of course.”
“Keep us informed.”
The camera kept panning across the scene. Every flash of an FBI jacket hit Rivers in a place the bullet never had.
Is it her?
The question drummed under his ribs, over and over. For ten seconds, he couldn’t breathe right and his palms were damp against his knees where he gripped them.
“May.” He spoke before he could stop himself. “Hold there a second.”
The camera paused on another FBI agent. Brown hair, pulled back in a low ponytail, jaw turned slightly away from the lens. Rivers stared until his eyes burned dry, trying to build a face out of nothing but a jawline and the curve of a shoulder.
For one long second, he was sure—fucking sure. Then he wasn’t sure at all.
“You good, Rivers?” Cannon’s question broke his focus.
“Yup.” His voice came out steady. Being in a hospital bed taught him how to sound fine when every nerve in his body was screaming otherwise. “Fine.”
But if any of them could look past the mask he slapped on to cover what was underneath, they would catch his heart slamming against his ribs, trying to beat its way out.
* * * * *
Caryssa Lane had learned to read her boss’s footsteps coming before he even reached her door.
Today, he came down the hallway of the Washington, DC field office fast enough to have her looking up from her monitor.
Doyle didn’t knock. He never had, not in the three years she’d worked under him.
“There was a murder in New York.” His thin gray hair was standing up in the middle where he ran his hands.
She returned her attention to her screen. “Not newsworthy.”
Murders happened in New York roughly as often as taxis honked. If Doyle was standing in her doorway over a homicide, he’d need a better opener than that.
“They found a burner phone on the guy.” He stepped into her office and dropped a folder on the corner of her desk. “He had a government contract. His trucking company drove supplies to military bases.”
That got her attention. She leaned back in her chair and eyed him, too seasoned to let her surprise show.
“There’s an ongoing investigation,” Doyle went on. “Weapons stolen from a military armory have been turning up on the black market. Some have already been used in attacks by underground terrorist cells.”
Nothing like this had crossed her desk, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t buried deeper than her clearance reached. Some military units were buried deep enough that she wouldn’t know they existed.
Doyle’s eyes that matched his steel-gray hair pierced her. “I need you in Portland. You’ll be picked up there and taken to a secure location.”
She tilted her head. “What kind of secure location?”
“You’ll be briefed when you get there.”
Meaning either he couldn’t tell her or wouldn’t.
Before she could press, he continued. “We scanned the dead man’s phone. One of his calls traced back to Antonio’s Ristorante in Chicago.”
She didn’t need the file. She’d read it enough times, usually alone at two in the morning after promising herself she wouldn’t open it again. Four months ago, an agent she’d called a friend had walked into that restaurant undercover. His cover was blown, and he never walked out.
“Let me review the footage again,” she said, because that what a good agent would do. No matter what was happening two inches under her skin, she was experienced enough to keep her tone neutral.
Doyle continued briefing her as she pulled up the clip, feeling hollow. She peered at the screen and tried for the thousandth time to make sense of the grainy angle of a security camera that had seen better decades.
The footage wasn’t good—hell, it never was in these places—and she watched a shape move through the frame in a jacket two sizes too big, a hat pulled low. Nothing usable. Even the identity they’d eventually pinned on him had been wrong.
“They never got him,” Doyle reminded her as if she needed it.
She nodded. “The waitress was implicated.”
“Yes. She’s in protective custody.”
Caryssa cocked a brow at her boss. “And there’s some connection between this dead supply driver and the waitress or the restaurant?”
“That’s what you’re going to find out, Lane. You don’t have clearance for the base itself. Once they pick you up, you’ll wear a hood until you reach your destination.”
She didn’t blink. “Okay. I’m up for anything. You know that, Doyle.”
She meant it. That was the thing about having nothing left to lose—it made every request, including wearing a hood over her head, completely reasonable, because there was nothing on the other side of the scale to weigh it against.
“No questions? No arguments?”
“None.” She was already pushing away from the desk.
“Lane—” He raked his fingers through his hair at the front, leaving it standing in a thin tuft that oddly reminded her of a baby.
“I said no arguments.” She cut off his inevitable “are you sure?” They both knew her calendar held nothing more pressing than laundry.