Chapter 37 #2
The voice says something about a timeline.
About assets. About a window closing. The distortion makes certainty impossible, turns every syllable into a Rorschach test where the listener hears what the listener wants to hear, and I know that, I know the science of auditory pareidolia, I know that wanting something to be true is the fastest way to misread evidence.
But the cadence underneath the static has a rhythm I've heard in briefing rooms and on encrypted calls, the particular way one man used to pause between his second and third points.
A breath that wasn't hesitation but emphasis.
Jax's pen hits the table. He doesn't pick it up.
Asher's hand closes around the edge of his tablet, and the pressure blanches his knuckles white.
Cole goes completely still.
And Damian, who has been silent at the far end of the table since Cole started talking, shifts in his chair. Not much. Hands sliding from the armrests to his thighs, his shoulders rolling back a fraction. From Damian, it's a seismic event.
Roman.
The name forms before I can stop it. Sympathetic nervous system activation, body ahead of brain. I shut it down immediately.
The audio ends. Thirty-seven seconds of ghost in a room that can't decide what to do with them.
We can't confirm it. We can't dismiss it. And none of us will forget it.
Heat closes around my fingers.
Evie's hand. She moved during the audio, shifted one seat closer while the room was focused on the speakers, and now her bandaged palm presses against my knuckles under the table where no one can see it.
She doesn't squeeze. She doesn't look at me.
She just holds on, her thumb resting against the side of my index finger, and her skin against my cold hand is the only thing in this room that doesn't require analysis.
Mira pulls her phone from her jacket. "Sasha." One word, directed at no one and everyone. She types with her thumb, a single message, then holds the phone against her thigh and waits. The response comes in under a minute. She reads it, and her eyes lift from the screen to meet the room.
"He doesn't confirm the voice. He doesn't deny it." She sets the phone face down on the table. "He says the channel the file arrived on has been dormant for eleven months."
Vanessa is moving again. The stillness broke the moment the audio ended and now she's pulling the file apart, fingers rapid across the keyboard, leg bouncing, posture loose, chasing a ghost through code that was designed to be unchaseable.
I turn my hand over under the table, lace my fingers through Evie's, and squeeze.
The room has cleared by the time Xander pushes off the wall near the exit, arms crossed over that massive chest, watching the last of the team disappear down the hallway with an expression that sits somewhere between thoughtful and amused. When it's just the three of us, he rolls his shoulders.
"You know what I love about this job?" He fills the space Vanessa left behind, big and loose, the way everything about him is oversized. "Every time I think the explosion is the complicated part, somebody finds a bigger bomb hiding underneath the first one."
He claps me on the back hard enough to shift my weight forward, and the grin he gives me is real, tired around the edges but real.
"Get some sleep, Saint. You look like you've been defusing something all week, and I'm the only one on this team qualified to do that."
I stand. My legs have been locked in the same position for ninety minutes and the blood rushes back into my calves with a prickling heat I ignore.
The main display still glows with Cole's network map, Kazakov's name at the center of a web that branches into four countries and probably more, connections illuminated in lines of blue and red that look like a circulatory system.
My hand finds the console. The power-down sequence is three switches in order, and I take each one slowly, watching the map shrink as screens go dark. Kazakov's name disappears last, the blue light holding for a half-second longer than the rest before it blinks out and the wall goes black.
"That voice."
Evie hasn't moved from her chair. Her eyes are different. Just looking at me the way someone looks when they watched an entire room full of killers stop breathing at the same time and understood that whatever caused it mattered more than anything else on the agenda.
"Who is he?"
I lean against the console, crossing my arms because my hands want to do something and I'm not going to let them.
The room is empty enough that I can hear the low hum bleeding through from the Intelligence Hub, a vibration that lives in the bones of this building the same way certain people live in the bones of the team that works here.
"Roman Thorne. He built this." I gesture at the dark screens, the empty chairs, the room itself. "Recruited me out of special ops when I had a fake name and no reason to trust anyone offering me a job. Gave me a callsign, a team, and a reason to stop running."
The words come out unhurried, the vowels I grew up with, not a slip I need to catch.
"He's been missing. Confirmed dead by every metric we have, except none of us have stopped looking, and now there's thirty-seven seconds of static that sound like a man who taught me how to save people instead of just patching them up. "
Evie is quiet for a moment. Then her mouth curves, not the Blanchard smile, not the camera smile, the real one with the dimples that only appears when she's not trying.
"So he's basically your Odette." She tilts her head. "Faked his death to get everyone's attention and now you're all doing exactly what he wanted."
The sound that comes out of me is closer to a laugh than anything I've made in this building.
"That is disturbingly accurate."
"I know my type." She stands, slow because the ankle still catches when she puts weight on it too fast, and the overhead light finds the edge of the bandage behind her ear where the stitches are healing.
She's five-foot-two in a room built for operations that span continents, wearing my crew neck with the sleeves pushed past her wrists, and she's the steadiest thing in it.
But she's standing in this room. After everything she heard today, after the network map with her father's name on it, after thirty-seven seconds of a ghost that made every operative in this building go quiet, she's standing here.
With me. And that's not nothing. That might be the only thing that isn't nothing.
I push off the console and cross the space between us because my body is done waiting for my brain to authorize the movement.
My hand finds the back of her neck, gentle around the bandage, and I press my mouth to her forehead and hold there, breathing her in, and she smells like my soap and the antiseptic from her palm dressings and underneath both of those the salt-and-cotton scent that's just her.
"Allons." The word comes out low against her skin. I don't correct it. "Let's go home."
She laces her bandaged fingers through mine, and we walk out of B4 together, through the door, down the hall, into the elevator, out to the street, into the car, and home to the townhouse where the bedroom door stays open now.
The war will be there tomorrow. Tonight we walk forward, and that's enough.