Chapter 14
Fourteen
Magnus sat on the lanai in the dark, bare feet on the wet stone, listening to the waves throw themselves against the cliff face like they had a personal grudge.
The air was thick and clean, that post-storm heaviness that smelled like salt and overturned earth and something electric that hadn’t quite dissipated. Water still dripped from the eaves in an uneven rhythm.
The clouds had ripped open in patches, and where they had, the stars were absurdly bright. They made you feel small in a way that was supposed to be comforting.
It wasn’t.
The house had gone quiet an hour ago. Astryde and Gunnar had finally abandoned the billiards room, their voices trailing down the hall toward the guest rooms. The others had called it quits hours before.
The lights inside had clicked off one by one until even Grace’s laptop glow had disappeared from the living room windows behind him.
He hoped she was sleeping. She’d been at it for more hours than anyone physically should, and the day after tomorrow would demand whatever she had left.
Magnus pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw colors. Dropped them. Stared at the ocean.
“I want to come home.”
Oliver’s voice. Small and cracking and so brave, it made Magnus want to put his fist through the stone railing.
He’d watched the video once. Once was enough. The image had burned itself into a permanent place behind his eyelids.
Oliver’s chin had wobbled once before he forced it still. His fingers twisted in the hem of that Transformers jacket, small knuckles whitening, his eyes fixed somewhere just off camera.
Magnus could handle a lot of things. Blood. Fire. Pain. The helplessness of standing too far away while someone he loved was afraid was not one of them.
And Lars’s hand was on Oliver’s knee.
The air went out of Magnus’s chest.
He knew helplessness. He’d stood on firelines while the wind turned, while radio calls dissolved into static, while flame moved faster than men could run.
This was worse.
Fire didn’t choose. Fire didn’t enjoy. Fire didn’t put a hand on a terrified child and call it care.
Lars did.
If he hurts him.
The thought formed with a clarity that scared him. Not the hot, messy anger of a man losing control. Something quieter. Something that had settled into his bones like concrete setting.
If Lars lays one more hand on Oliver — if he touches Grace — I will find him. And it won’t matter what laws are between us. He dies.
The certainty of it should have been disturbing. Magnus had never been a violent man. He was a hotshot. He dug line and read smoke and hauled people out of places the fire had already decided to take. That was the whole point of his life.
But sitting here in the dark, with his son’s fear still ringing in his ears, Magnus understood with perfect clarity that there was a line. And Lars had crossed it the moment he put his hands on Oliver like he owned him.
A gust of wind pushed through the lanai, carrying a fine mist of sea spray. Magnus let it hit his face. Let the salt sting his eyes. Better than the alternative.
He should go inside. Should check on Grace. Should do something useful instead of sitting in the dark cataloging all the ways he wanted to take Lars Eriksson apart.
But he couldn’t go inside, because inside meant walking past the hall to the guest rooms where his family was sleeping, and right now the thought of facing any of them made his stomach turn.
I need you to trust me.
Even when everything in you is screaming that I’ve lost my mind.
He pressed his fist against his mouth.
Grace had a plan. A real one, under the one the team had been briefed on, and she hadn’t told him the shape of it. Only that there would be moments where her actions wouldn’t make sense, where he was supposed to hold steady when everyone else was reaching for their weapons.
He’d said yes.
Which meant his family was walking into a mission with a second layer none of them could see.
His stomach rolled. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and breathed through his nose until the stone stopped tilting underneath him.
Gunnar was twenty feet down the hall, sleeping the light sleep of a man who never fully stood down.
Three tours in Afghanistan. Wounded operators dragged out of firefights.
He’d bled for every person on his team without question.
Tomorrow, he was going to walk into the Patroclus facility on a plan Magnus knew wasn’t the whole plan.
Astryde was in the next room over, probably not sleeping at all. Her idea of rest was re-running scenarios with her eyes closed. She’d put her life on the line for an operation that had a trapdoor she couldn’t see, because Magnus had chosen not to tell her it was there.
Bj?rn. Davis. Tiikaan.
Every one of them was going in with incomplete intel because Magnus had decided Grace’s trust was worth more than his family’s full picture.
His father had raised them on transparency. Rebels faced things together or not at all.
But Dad never had to choose between his brothers and his kid.
That was the knife, wasn’t it? He could walk down the hall right now, wake Gunnar, and tell him Grace was running something under the mission the team hadn’t been briefed on.
And Gunnar would shut it down. Pull rank, bench Grace, find a different approach — something safer and slower, the kind that took three times as long.
And Oliver didn’t have three times as long.
“I want d— Magnus. I want to go home.”
Magnus closed his eyes. He’d heard it. The hitch before the name. The tiny, terrified course correction of a child who’d been about to say Daddy and caught himself because the wrong man was listening.
Oliver knew. Seven years old, and he’d understood that calling Magnus Dad in front of Lars was dangerous.
Magnus’s eyes burned. He didn’t blink. If he blinked, it would come loose, and he wasn’t ready for that.
He was sitting in the dark on a lanai in Hawaii, and his son was in a room somewhere swallowing his name for Magnus like it was something that could get them both killed, and there was nothing Magnus could do about it tonight except sit here and keep what he’d promised Grace he’d keep.
The sliding glass door behind him opened. Closed. Soft footsteps on the wet stone.
Magnus’s shoulders tightened. He scrubbed a hand over his face, forced the rawness down, and turned just enough to see who it was.
Cooper. Not Gunnar, not Astryde — which meant Magnus didn’t have to produce an explanation or a performance. Just someone else who couldn’t sleep.
Cooper settled into the chair next to him and said nothing for a while.
Magnus didn’t know Cooper well. The man ran the Stryker Hawaii branch, a Navy SEAL who’d traded combat deployments for private.
What little Magnus had picked up in the past few days came in fragments: Cooper was competent, steady under pressure, and carried a stillness that could mean either peace or pressure carefully held in place.
“Can’t sleep?” Cooper asked finally.
“Haven’t tried.”
Cooper made a sound that could’ve been agreement. He stretched his legs out and crossed his ankles on the railing. His boots were still on. Not a man planning to sleep anytime soon either.
The silence between them was comfortable. Cooper didn’t seem inclined to fill it.
“You ever feel like you’re the wrong guy for the job?” Magnus heard himself say.
He hadn’t meant to say it. The question just fell out, and once it was in the air, he couldn’t take it back.
Cooper’s head turned slightly. “Which job?”
“This one. The mission.” Magnus gestured vaguely at the house, the operation, the whole impossible situation.
“You’ve got a team full of Pararescue, Delta Force, state troopers.
Gunnar’s cleared more hot zones than I’ve had hot dinners.
Davis could probably take the whole compound with a spork and a bad attitude. ”
A brief exhale from Cooper, almost a laugh.
“And I’m a hotshot.” Magnus let the word sit there, undecorated. “I carry a Pulaski and a drip torch. I dig line in the dirt and hope the wind doesn’t shift. That’s my tactical expertise. Dirt.”
“You’re Oliver’s dad,” Cooper said.
“Yeah.” Magnus’s throat tightened. “Which means if I screw up, it’s not just a mission failure. It’s my kid.”
The waves hit the cliff. The mist drifted. Cooper was quiet for long enough that Magnus thought the conversation was over.
Then Cooper said, “I get it.”
Three words. No elaboration. But a roughness in his voice that hadn’t been there before made Magnus turn.
Cooper stared at the ocean with an expression Magnus recognized. Not from Cooper specifically, but from every person he’d ever met who was carrying something they weren’t ready to talk about. The look said there’s a reason I can’t sleep either, but we’re not going there tonight.
“Some of us have people,” Cooper said slowly, “where screwing up isn’t an option. Where the whole concept of acceptable risk just doesn’t apply.”
He didn’t say who. Didn’t offer a detail.
Magnus nodded. “Yeah.”
“For what it’s worth,” Cooper continued, his voice leveling back to conversational, “the dirt guy usually knows things the door-kickers don’t. Fire doesn’t care about rank or clearance level. You read situations differently than they do. That’s not a liability. It’s a perspective.”
Magnus turned the words over. Felt them settle into a place that wasn’t comfort, exactly, but was close enough to stand on.
“Thanks,” Magnus said.
Cooper shrugged one shoulder. “Just saying. Don’t count yourself out because your weapon of choice is different.”
He stood, stretched, and winced at something in his lower back. “Day and a half, Magnus. Get some sleep.”
“I will. In a minute.”
Cooper paused at the sliding door. For a second, Magnus thought he was going to say something else, but he just said, “Night, Magnus,” and slipped inside.
The door closed. The dark settled back in.
Magnus sat for another few minutes, listening to the ocean rearrange the shoreline below. The nausea hadn’t fully left. It was still there, a sick, oily weight in his stomach that he suspected wouldn’t go away until either Oliver was safe or the omission blew up in his face.
But beneath it, hardening like cooling lava, was something else. Not peace. Not acceptance. Just a cold, clear decision that had finished forming somewhere between the video and the stars.
He was going to get his son back. He was going to keep Grace alive. And if Lars Eriksson stood between him and either of those things, Magnus would put him in the ground and let the fire have what was left.