FOUR
Rivers stepped out of the infirmary after cleaning every surface twice just to kill enough time to think. Outside the door, he stilled, listening for something he never thought he’d hear again.
Caryssa.
The sound of her footsteps, light and steady. Her voice, soft in a way that commanded attention.
“Rivers!”
Cannon’s bellow echoed off the concrete, and his stomach dropped.
His commanding officer could be found in one of four places—the war room, his office, the gym or the shooting range. Judging by the strength of his voice, he was in his office.
He quickened his pace and when he reached the office, Townie, Rorke and Younger loitered outside the door.
Cannon flicked a hand for him to come in.
He entered the office. “What’s this about?”
“Ms. Lane.”
Townie, Rorke and Younger piled into the office and crowded Rivers closer to the desk.
Cannon groaned as he noted how small his office was. “New plan. Everyone in the war room.”
The guys turned and filed out, picking up the rest of the team along the way until they were moving as a herd. Two months ago, the sight would’ve amused Rivers.
Today, dread burned too hot in his chest.
Jolie and Stina were sitting cross-legged on the floor with a small mountain of yarn between them and crochet hooks in hand.
Since their arrival, the women had gone through hobbies to pass the time, from growing herbs in the greenhouse aboveground to learning how to do their nails to baking bread and making pasta.
“Don’t mind us,” Jolie said without glancing up from her needle.
“I do mind.” Cannon’s voice had an edge. “This is official business. Out.”
Jolie and Stina looked at him.
“There’s no yarn in the war room. There has never been yarn in the war room.”
Stina’s brows puckered at the half-finished square in her lap. “To be fair, this was the only quiet space we could find to concentrate.”
Cannon continued to stare at her.
Suddenly, she scooped up all the skeins and hurled them through the open door. Crochet hooks clattered across the concrete.
Jolie compressed her lips. “I hope I don’t lose a stitch over this.”
“No yarn in the war room,” Stina repeated. “Got it. You can carry on now.”
Cannon issued a low growl. “That means you leave with the yarn, or you’ll be hurled out after it.”
Stina brushed yarn fuzz off her jeans in an unhurried way. Neither of them appeared bothered by Cannon’s threat as they walked out.
The door swung shut behind them, and now it was Rivers’s turn to face the heat. He was ready. “Cannon. Any way we can discuss this alone, just the two of us?”
“Apparently not.” Cannon didn’t address the rest of the team dropping into their usual spots around the table. “Unless you’re partial to the game of telephone this would create?”
The last thing Rivers wanted was a bunch of false information circulating through Sierra, morphing and growing into taller tales with each recounting.
Pushing a breath through his nose, he sank to his own seat, already feeling the weight of every eye in the room.
Before Cannon could get a word out, the door opened again and Caryssa stood there, looking as though she’d rather be anywhere else on earth.
“Sorry to interrupt. Jolie said you’d have a roll of tape.”
Cannon swung toward her. “Sorry, you can’t be here—team only.”
Her gaze flicked to Rivers—there and gone.
“That’s fine.”
Her response did more damage than any threats against his life ever could.
She whirled out of the room, and the door clicked shut. Cannon didn’t let the dust settle before he turned to Rivers and continued as if the interruption never happened.
“Start at the beginning.”
He dragged a hand over his jaw to buy himself time. “Eight weeks ago? When I was shot in the liver?”
“I think we need to go back a lot further than that.”
A few of the guys nodded, and Rivers gritted his teeth. Everyone settled in to hear what he never intended to say aloud.
Rivers closed his eyes for one beat, two beats, then reopened them. “Do we have to do this with an audience?”
Cannon sat back, completely at ease as he watched him squirm. “I’m going to need you to walk me through how you personally know the intelligence analyst sent by the FBI.”
He closed his eyes again. There was no version of this conversation that ended without every person in this room knowing more than he wanted them to.
But the men in this room—his brothers—deserved the truth.
“Her name’s Caryssa Lane. We were together.”
The air was sucked out of the room.
“Before Blackout.”
A collective sigh rippled through the team.
They each had a person in their lives they walked away from when they were handed the Blackout papers that made them dead to the world. Even if those people weren’t as close as a girlfriend or family, there were people out there mourning them.
Rorke gave him a steady look. “How together?”
His throat clicked as he swallowed the lump lodged there. “Together together.”
The room was dead silent again, but no one was amused now. Rome uncrossed his arms and Rorke’s expression shifted as he realized the teasing they’d been enjoying came with a depth of pain they all understood.
“She thought you were dead.” Cannon’s statement stabbed Rivers all over again.
He nodded. “And she just found out otherwise. Today. In the dining room. In front of the entire team.”
“Jesus, Rivers.” Rome dragged a hand down his face. “No wonder she threatened to kill you. No wonder she took down Townie when he got in the way.”
“I could have handled her easy. But I don’t hit girls.” Townie was just flexing to preserve his ego, but he shot Rivers a sympathetic look.
“Now she’s here.” Rivers blew out a breath but it didn’t help ease the tightness in his chest.
Cannon studied him for a long moment. “You good?”
Rivers thought about how Caryssa’s hand felt in his when he bandaged it.
How those little freckles on her nose stood out so sharply against her face that was too pale.
How she wouldn’t meet his gaze, and when she did lift her eyes, she looked right through him as though he was a stranger wearing a face she used to love.
He thought about six years of time he never got to explain.
His throat clamped tight, every breath scalding.
“No,” he said. “I’m not good. Not even close.”
* * * * *
Reid was shot. He could have died.
Caryssa turned the information over in her mind for the tenth time since she’d caught the casual mention of Reid and a bullet, unable to decide what made her angrier—that he’d nearly died again, for real this time, or that according to every official record, he already had.
Reid Rivers had a death certificate on file. She’d seen it with her own eyes.
She shoved her hair off her brow. She didn’t even know if the shooting was true. Nothing here came with proof.
This place was hooded car rides and a room full of secondhand furniture and two women who treated her as if she were the enemy.
Fine. If no one would tell Caryssa where she was, she’d figure it out herself.
In the kitchen, she’d spotted a whiteboard mounted on the wall. A column of names ran down one side, with numbers and tallies beside them that looked unmistakably close to bets.
She’d just been committing the names to memory when Reid had turned around and blown her entire understanding of the last six years to pieces.
But one glance was all she needed.
Now, sitting at a desk with the secure connection Jolie had rigged for her, Caryssa pulled up the names one at a time. She only had last names, and in some cases, nicknames, to work with.
Cannon. Townie. Rome. Monk. Rorke. Younger. O. Rivers.
Her heart flexed at the last name she once thought would be her own.
Chewing her bottom lip, she searched through file after file. It didn’t take too much digging to find what she was looking for.
Deceased.
Deceased.
Deceased.
Every single one of them, according to every database she had access to, was dead.
Not missing. Not off-grid. Dead, with dates and causes of death filled in, stamped with the finality that had tormented Caryssa when it came to Reid. Only O was a wild card, since she didn’t have a name to go off.
Now, it tormented her even more. At least dead had an ending instead of this giant question mark hanging over her head and her heart.
The men on this list were alive, breathing, talking about being shot. But every official record on earth said otherwise.
What sort of place was this?
She picked up her phone, and before she could talk herself out of it, she called Doyle. He answered on the third ring, and she could tell by his breathless tone he was on the treadmill he hit nightly after work.
“What kind of base did you send me to?” she demanded.
He was quiet for a second. “Blackout.”
The word meant nothing to her.
He was quiet for a second. “The kind filled with the men who take the most dangerous operations nobody else can touch. The kind where nobody’s expected to make it to retirement. They can’t have families. Won’t be missed when something happens to them.”
His words struck her like daggers, and she pressed her hand to her chest for three whole heartbeats before she recovered. The phone dug into her ear.
“You knew this when you sent me here.”
“Your assignment is to draw connections, Lane. These men can provide intel.”
She pushed out a breath. What else was there to say? She was here to do a job. She could work on her existential crisis afterward.
“On it.” She hung up without saying goodbye, which wasn’t her style. But nothing about today was.
She dropped her face into her hands and let the pieces click into place. Grief clogged her throat. Fury came right behind it.
He’d rather be dead than married to her. That was the only thing that made sense. The man wanted out of their relationship bad enough to fake his own death.
Rather than tell her he’d changed his mind, he’d let her mourn him for years. Rather than sit across a table from her and say the words I don’t want this anymore, he’d broken her.
She dug through her memories, searching for evidence to support this claim. Some sign she’d missed, some hesitation, some look he’d given her. But she came up with the exact opposite.
Reid had been the one talking about buying a house together. He’d been the one who told her one more mission and he was out. He’d held her hand and stared down into her eyes and made the promise.
The door opened without a knock.
She jerked her head up. The instant she saw Reid stood in the opening, she jolted to her feet, spine snapping straight.
Her senses zapped, and the room seemed to whirl around her.
My god. Look at him.
His hands were loose at his sides and his angular jaw—god, that jaw—was set as if he was holding back whatever he wanted to say.
“Ryss. I want to explain—”
She bounded across the room, and instead of the words that had been building since the moment she saw him, she threw herself into his arms and kissed him.
He let out a low noise that drew her even closer and slanted his mouth over hers. His kiss was familiar in a way six years hadn’t managed to erase. Chemistry hadn’t died, even if everything else between them had.
Underneath the caress ran a sharp current that hurt. Even as she kept kissing him, she knew this wasn’t going to lead anywhere except to a bigger ocean of pain.
He’d made his commitment to the government, not to her. He’d chosen a mission over telling her the truth, and no kiss in the world was good enough to let him hurt her again.
Rage landed in her brain again. She twisted his shirt and whipped it over his head. Breathing hard, she stepped back to study him. The years on him, the new muscle, the abs cut sharper than she remembered.
Her vision swam, and she forced herself to focus on the one thing she needed to confirm.
There it was on his side, pale pink and puckered, exactly where he said it was.
The scar. When I was shot in the liver, he’d said.
He hadn’t lied about that, at least.
Chest heaving, she wrapped her arms around her middle. “You can go now.”
Reid blinked at her, genuinely thrown, hands hovering in the air where she’d been a second ago. “What?”
“You’d rather be dead than married to me.” She said it in a flat, final way. “You can go.”
“Ryss, that’s not—”
“You can go,” she said with more force and twisted away before her face betrayed more than she’d already given away by kissing him in the first place.
She couldn’t love him anymore. She just couldn’t.
Grief and a lie of this magnitude burned it right out of her. And if she couldn’t love Reid, she’d have to hate him instead.
Hate was manageable. Hate didn’t ache the way this did, standing three feet away from a half-dressed man she’d buried and mourned—and apparently still wanted.
If she hated him hard enough, maybe some part of her would stop wanting to be anywhere near him at all, let alone in his arms.
She just wasn’t sure, standing there with her back to him and her heart slamming from the kiss, that hate was going to be enough to do it.