Chapter 23
Brooke
I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, wearing only my towel, debating whether to wipe the fog away and see myself again. The shower had washed away the dust from the Pompeii tunnels, but it hadn’t done anything for the knot in my chest.
Six hours.
Six goddamn hours since cloning the robot dog’s memory, and we still had nothing actionable.
I dragged a hand across the mirror to see my face. The face was good. A little harder around the edges than it once was, but it was normal. My fingers found their way to the scar tissue on the left side of my neck, which disappeared beneath the fog.
After the hot water, the damaged skin looked angrier than usual—pink, shiny, and ragged.
My mind drifted to the rooftop terrace last night.
To the warmth in Rav’s eyes as he’d moved closer.
The barely-there scent of James the Bodyguard’s cologne, like citrus and cedar.
The way he’d taken my hand that had—once again—drifted toward his chest. The way he’d placed it exactly where it had wanted to go.
I’d wanted him to kiss me. God help me, I wanted him.
Be strong, Brooke.
I cleared more of the mirror, revealing the scars that spread across my collarbone and down beneath my towel. They kissed the inside of my arm, hugged my ribs, and covered my left breast.
Owen’s face flashed through my brain, the first time he’d seen it. We’d been dating for months. I’d told him about what had happened. He’d seen the results left behind by the chemical burns on my neck.
But god, how fast had he averted his eyes when my shirt came off? How carefully had he avoided touching that side of my body? How quickly had he broken every promise he’d made that he cared more about me than my body?
I let one finger trace the boundary between smooth and damaged skin down my sternum. “You’re married to the job now,” I whispered to my reflection. “That’s all you get.”
You didn’t get Owen.
And you don’t get Rav.
I took a deep breath and reached for my hair dryer, muscle memory taking over. Who cared what it all looked like, so long as my hair and clothes covered it?
Once I was done, I pulled on my turtleneck and jeans.
After hanging the towel in my and Scarlett’s room, I headed downstairs.
The rich aroma of coffee greeted me halfway down, reminding my stomach I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. In the kitchen, Mario stood at the counter, his back to me as he arranged something on a tray.
“Ah, the scientist returns to the world,” he said without turning around, somehow sensing my presence. “I worried you might have drowned in there.”
“Just trying to wash away some frustration.”
Mario turned, revealing a tray laden with slices of meats, cheeses, and olives.
Small crackers sat next to a few steaming cups of espresso.
His eyes made a quick sweep over me before returning to my face.
Lifting the tray, he said, “Your colleagues are still working, but the mind needs proper fuel, no?”
“Especially when we have nothing to show for hours of work,” I muttered.
Mario stepped closer, offering the tray. “The espresso will help with your headache.”
I accepted the small cup, surprised he’d noticed. “That obvious, huh?”
“Allora… I have three sisters,” he said with a casual shrug. “I recognize the look of a woman who carries too much on her mind.”
I sipped the espresso—perfect, with a rich crema and just the right bitter finish. The warmth spread through my chest, momentarily easing the knot.
Mario watched me with a quiet appreciation in his gaze. The subtle flirtation didn’t seem like something he could control.
And all it did was make me think of how Rav had looked on the rooftop. How his hand had wrapped around mine. How much I’d wanted to tell him everything.
“Is it to your liking?” Mario asked.
I blinked, pulling myself back to the present. “It’s perfect, thank you.”
“Come,” he said, gesturing with the tray. “I promised Scarlett I would make sure everyone has enough to eat.”
I followed him toward our operations center. Voices filtered through the partially open door.
“—using nested encryption protocols,” Brie was saying through the video call displayed on Drew’s laptop. “I’ve broken through the outer shell, but the core files use a distributed key system I’ve only seen in—”
“How much longer?” Rav interrupted, his back to Mario and me as we entered.
“I’ve extracted some data already,” Brie said, pushing her oversized glasses up on her nose. “The image fragments and timestamp data were in the more accessible sectors. But the location tracking and command protocols are buried deeper.”
“The concert is in two days,” Rav said, the muscles in his forearms flexing as he gripped the back of one of the chairs.
“I know that,” Brie snapped, then took a breath. “We’re working as fast as we can. This isn’t standard corporate security—whoever designed this knew what they were doing.”
Mario cleared his throat, drawing everyone’s attention as he set the tray down. “I cannot help with your encryption, but I can prevent fainting from hunger.”
A few grateful murmurs rose from the team as they reached for the food.
“Any progress I might have missed?” I asked, moving toward the table where a group of tablets displayed maps of the amphitheater and drainage system.
“We’ve recovered some visual data,” Drew replied, gesturing me over to his screen. “Take a look at this.”
He tapped a few keys, and a grainy image of two people appeared. Only the lower half of the closer man’s face was visible, with a distinctive scar along his right cheek; the other face was too blurry to make out.
“Who are they?” I asked, leaning closer.
“Enzo,” Scarlett said, coming to stand beside me. “One of Fenix’s captains. He and Noah are the two highest-ranking operatives we’re aware of, each commanding their own teams.”
“The nastier of the two,” Malcolm added from across the room.
I nodded slowly. “The kidnapper and attempted murderer?”
“That’s the one,” said Malcolm.
“The timestamp shows this was recorded three days ago,” Drew continued, pointing to the time in the corner of the image. “The other figure appears to have been supervising Enzo, who set up the robot. Brie’s working on the image.”
“Three days?” I frowned. “If it’s been down there the whole time, why didn’t we run into it yesterday?”
Drew said, “The data shows it was programmed for an autonomous patrol sequence. I doubt they had an active handler nearby.”
“And no one’s come looking for it yet,” Jayce added. “Which means either they don’t know it’s missing, or—”
“Or they don’t care because it already served its purpose,” I finished with a sigh. “Anything else?”
“Portions of the mapping data,” Drew said, rubbing his eyes. He’d been in this room every waking minute, and clearly not sleeping enough. “It seems to have been scanning structural integrity points along the drainage system. Looking for weak spots, maybe places to plant charges or equipment.”
Jayce approached him and dug her fingers into his shoulders.
Drew smiled up at her with so much love and devotion that it made my heart hurt. “But not enough to tell us where they’re focusing.”
“I’m still working through the decryption,” Brie said. “I’ve isolated what looks like communications protocols—it may have been relaying data to a receiver somewhere.”
“So we have fragments.” I set my empty espresso cup down with a sharp click against the table. “An image of Enzo and someone else, some partial mapping data, and the knowledge that they’ve had a robot in the tunnels for three fucking days. That’s it?”
“It’s more than we had this morning,” Scarlett countered calmly.
“Is it? Because from where I’m standing, we’re no closer to stopping the Greek Fire than we were yesterday.
” I began to rake my fingers through my hair, stopping myself from the old habit.
People would see your neck. “We should have sent it straight to Pendragon. Their cybersecurity team could have—”
“We’ve been through this,” Rav cut in. “Brie’s the best there is.”
“At Reynolds,” I snapped. “But Pendragon has resources specifically designed for this kind of encryption.”
“Pendragon has a leak,” Rav said firmly.
“We already found the analyst who tipped off the Carabinieri.”
“Are you certain that’s the only leak?” He moved closer.
Thousands of people could die in two days because we couldn’t decrypt a robot’s memory. “If Pendragon does have another mole, then Fenix knows we’re here. They know everything we’re doing. All this sneaking around is completely pointless.”
“They know Pendragon is here. Noah told us specifically that they don’t know we are here.
We may not be your team, but we know what the fuck we’re doing.
” His voice rose. “And if Brie can’t crack the code, we’ll adapt.
We have the underground cameras in place.
We know their entry points. We’ll catch them when they move the Greek Fire in. ”
“And if we don’t?” I stepped closer to him, proving he didn’t intimidate me, and jabbed a finger at his chest. “What if they slip past us? What if the first sign we get is when people start burning alive in that amphitheater?”
He grabbed the finger, and some stupid part of me sucked in a quick breath. Not because he’d hurt me or surprised me, but because it was just as electric as the contact had been last night.
The room fell silent.
“That won’t happen,” Rav said, his voice dropping to that intimate tone I remembered too well. “Trust me, Brooke. Everything will be all right.”
The words sliced through me. He’d whispered those exact words to me the night before our final mission. Lying beside me in the dark, his fingers tracing patterns on my bare skin.
‘Trust me. Everything will be all right. I’ll protect you.’
Twenty-four hours later, I was alone in a hospital bed, covered in chemical burns, with no one able to tell me if he was dead or alive.
My throat constricted. The room suddenly felt airless, the walls pressing in. Every nerve ending screamed for escape.
“You don’t get to tell me everything will be all right,” I said, the words barely audible. “You gave that privilege up five years ago.”
His grip on my finger loosened, and his jaw slackened. The room faded away, leaving just the two of us suspended in our moment of whatever the hell this was.
But my logical brain reminded me that everyone else was still there. Pity would inevitably follow the scene we’d made, followed by the team’s curious stares. Then, the humiliation of having exposed even a sliver of our past in front of them.
Without another word, I wrenched my finger from him and strode from the room, taking the stairs two at a time until I reached the bedroom I shared with Scarlett.
I closed the door behind me, pressing my forehead against the wood as I fought to steady my breathing. My heart hammered against my ribs as if it were trying to escape.
Part of me was furious that Rav had questioned my judgment about going to Pompeii without him, as if I needed his protection, his permission. As if I hadn’t been handling dangerous situations on my own for years.
But another part—the part I couldn’t shut up, no matter how hard I tried—remembered the security of having him as my designated protector in Afghanistan. How it felt to know he was watching my back and keeping me from harm. How much I’d trusted him with my life.
Until I couldn’t anymore.