Chapter 15
Fifteen
Grace blinked against the blue glare of her laptop, her eyes burning from the hours she’d lost track of.
A single notification icon flashed on her monitor, and she froze. She reached for the mouse, and the tremor in her fingers made the cursor jump.
An encrypted file. Incoming through a channel Lars hadn’t used in years. One she’d thought was dormant, a relic from her time as his asset.
Grace’s finger hovered over her mouse. Every instinct screamed trap. Lars didn’t make contact without purpose. Didn’t send files without a reason.
She glanced toward the hallway. The guest rooms were dark, the house silent except for the low hush of waves against the cliff below. Good. She didn’t need witnesses for whatever fresh horror Lars was about to deliver.
Grace opened the file.
The decryption took nine seconds. Nine seconds during which her mind cataloged every possible attack vector, every potential threat. Malware. Virus. Trojan. Some new digital weapon she’d have to dissect and counter.
The file bloomed across her screen, and the air left her lungs in a rush.
Not malware.
Dossiers.
Five of them, arranged in neat digital folders. Each one was labeled with a name that made her stomach drop.
Gunnar Rebel. Astryde Rebel. Bj?rn Rebel. Davis Fields. Tiikaan Rebel.
Grace opened the first file. Gunnar’s service record appeared, but not the sanitized version available through normal channels. This was the real record. The classified one.
Mission reports from Afghanistan, marked TOP SECRET.
Details of operations that had been officially erased from existence.
Names of targets eliminated. Dates of extractions that had never been acknowledged.
Every dark corner of Gunnar’s career as a Pararescueman was laid bare in clinical, devastating detail.
Grace’s stomach clenched. Her mouth went sour, the cold coffee threatening to come back up. She swallowed hard and opened the next file.
Astryde’s confidential informant network from her state trooper years. Not just names — addresses, family connections, the full map of people who’d trusted her with their lives. If Lars leaked even a fraction, informants died, and Astryde was the one left standing over the bodies.
Bj?rn’s classified flight logs. Missions that officially didn’t exist, routes he’d never been cleared to speak of. In the wrong hands, they read like espionage charges waiting to be filed.
Davis’s Delta Force operations. Interrogations conducted under active-theater authorization.
Combat decisions made in seconds, under fire, with no margin for error.
All of it legal at the time. All of it defensible.
Until someone stripped the context, handed it to a hostile prosecutor, and called it war crimes.
Tiikaan’s file ran differently but landed the same. Recovery work for cultural artifacts. Cross-border operations conducted under agreements that officially didn’t exist. And Merritt was in there, too. His fiancée, pulled in beside him.
Grace stared at the screen, her mind racing. This wasn’t just intelligence gathering. This was a nuclear option. Lars had built kill files on every single person helping her. Complete dossiers that could destroy their lives, their careers, their freedom.
How? How did he get this level of access?
But she knew the answer. Lars had tentacles everywhere.
Compromised officials, bought senators, hackers on his payroll, who gave Grace a run for her money.
He’d pulled this together in days — maybe hours.
The moment the Rebels had surfaced on his radar, he’d turned his entire apparatus on them, and his apparatus was terrifyingly fast.
A message window popped up over the dossiers—Lars’s personal comm channel.
Their lives, as they know them, are over. The only way forward is through me. If you cross me, I burn you all.
Grace read the message three times, each word a hammer blow. Lars wasn’t just threatening Oliver anymore. He was threatening to destroy everyone who’d chosen to help her. To ruin the lives they’d built after leaving their service careers behind.
This was checkmate. The ultimate pressure. The move designed to fracture her fragile alliance and leave her utterly isolated.
She had to tell them. Had to show them what they were up against.
She stood up from the couch. Her legs ached from being folded under her for hours. She pressed a hand against her sternum where the guilt sat like a stone and walked down the dark hallway to Magnus’s room.
The door was cracked. She pushed it open. He was out, fully clothed on top of the covers, one arm thrown across his face. The sleep of a man who’d dropped where he stood.
“Magnus.” She kept her voice low.
He came awake all at once, the way people do when they’ve been expecting the worst. His hand shot out and caught the edge of the nightstand. His eyes found hers in the dark, and she watched the fear slam through him before he could mask it.
“Oliver’s fine,” she said quickly. “He’s fine. But there’s been a development. I need you to get everyone to the command center.”
He stared at her for two heartbeats. Then he was on his feet, moving past her into the hall without a word, his shoulder brushing hers as he went. She heard his knuckles rap on his siblings’ doors. The low rumble of his voice was too quiet to make out the words.
Grace didn’t wait. She went straight to the command center.
The room was cold, the air conditioner on high, recycled air smelling faintly of electronics and the coffee someone had made twelve hours ago.
She pulled up the dossiers on the main display, her fingers moving on autopilot while the sickness churned beneath her ribs.
File by file, name by name, she loaded them onto the screens.
She’d brought this storm to their door. Lars was attacking them because of her.
She heard footsteps in the corridor. Voices, low and rough with interrupted sleep.
She kept her eyes on the screens, loading the last of the classified documents, arranging them where they’d be impossible to miss.
Her throat was tight, her hands steady only because she’d spent a lifetime forcing them to be.
She didn’t want to turn around. Didn’t want to see their faces when they realized what Lars had on each of them. But the room was filling behind her. She could feel the weight of their presence, the shift in the air as bodies occupied space, and she couldn’t hide behind the monitors forever.
“What is it?” Gunnar’s voice was clipped, suspicious, probably expecting another “mistake” from her.
Grace turned.
The files were already on the screens behind her, each folder ominous in its simplicity. Five names. Five targets.
She heard the sharp, collective intake of breath. Watched as recognition hit them one by one.
Gunnar’s face turned to stone. His jaw clenched so hard that Grace heard his teeth grind from ten feet away. He stepped closer to the screen and read. Whatever Gunnar had walked in here afraid of, the reports were confirming it line by line.
“How did he get this?” Astryde’s voice was low, vicious, her hands curling into fists at her sides.
Grace opened the first document, letting them see the depth of Lars’s intelligence. Every secret they’d thought was safely buried was now exposed.
“Lars pulled this together fast,” Grace said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. “The moment he knew you were involved, he turned everything he had on you. This is what he does. Finds pressure points. Exploits them.”
Bj?rn’s face had gone pale. “These flight logs could put me in Leavenworth.”
“Not just you.” Davis stepped forward, his expression grim. “These interrogation reports. Some of those calls were legally ambiguous even at the time. With the right prosecutor, they’d look like war crimes.”
She popped Lars’s message over the dossiers, his ultimatum stark and clear.
The silence that followed was suffocating. Grace felt it pressing against her sternum, heavier than the guilt she’d carried here.
She stood and leaned against the desk.
“This is because of me.” She let the words land, didn’t soften them. “He’s targeting you because you’re helping me. Your families. Your careers. Everything you’ve built.” She paused, making herself look at each of them. “If you want out, I understand. No judgment. I’ll find another way.”
The silence stretched. Grace could hear the ventilation cycling, the faint hum of the servers, her own pulse thick in her ears.
Magnus’s voice cut through it, low and even.
“Hey.” He waited until they looked at him. “You’ve got wives. Kids. Tiikaan, you’ve got Merritt.”
He stood at the edge of the group, arms crossed, his weight settled and certain. “This is my fight: mine and Grace’s. None of you signed up to have your lives burned down. If you need to walk away, I get it. You’re my family. I’m not going to let Lars take you down because of me.”
Tiikaan was the first to speak. His voice was quiet, measured. “Merritt’s in this file. Lars dragged her into something she has nothing to do with.” He paused, then his jaw set. “That makes it personal. I’m in.”
“My informants have families too,” Astryde’s eyes were flat and hard. “If Lars burns those names, people die. I’m not walking away from that.”
Bj?rn looked at the flight logs on the screen for a long moment, then he straightened. “I didn’t fly those missions to let some arms dealer hold them over my head. I’m in.”
Davis didn’t say anything. Just nodded once, his expression set.
Gunnar hadn’t moved from his position in front of the screen. The silence around him was charged, a held breath before detonation.
Then the laugh came. Low. Humorless. The sound of a man who’d stared down worse odds in worse places, and who’d just been told to be afraid.
“He thinks that’s a threat?” Gunnar turned, and his face held a slow, dangerous smile.
Not the grin of a man about to break. The expression of a predator who’d just been handed a target list.
“That’s not a threat.”
No one breathed. Grace didn’t. Magnus went still beside her.
Then Astryde exhaled sharply and decisively through her nose and moved to the console. “He’s right. This doesn’t change the mission. It just raises the stakes. Lars showed us everything he’s willing to use against us. Which means we know exactly what we need to destroy.”
“Your arena, Grace.” Gunnar’s voice was rough but level. “Tell us how we take his teeth out of this.”
The room turned to her. Every face. Every set of eyes. Even Astryde, whose hostility hadn’t softened so much as settled, was looking at her now with the flat assessing attention she gave to a problem that had to be solved. They were waiting. For the fix. For her to be what they needed her to be.
It gutted her.
She’d finally earned a bit of their trust. She was going to use that trust, and then she was going to burn it.
Grace made herself face the display, not them.
“I can’t make this go away.” She kept her voice steady. “He has copies. Dead drops. Lawyers holding envelopes I’ll never trace. Anyone telling you they can erase a file once it’s been duplicated is selling you something.”
She pulled up the trace she’d run while Lars’s message still burned across the screens — the Singapore relay, the dead-end in Kuala Lumpur, the partial directory listing blinking at the anchor point of his release infrastructure.
“What I can do is slow him down. He staged these dossiers on his own master server before he pushed them to us. That gives me a foothold in the pipeline he’d use to release.
I can corrupt backup copies. Degrade the distribution channels.
Plant enough noise that any attempt gets messy — delayed, contested, fragmented.
And I can watch it. The second he moves to pull the trigger, we’ll know. ”
“How long does that buy us?” Davis asked.
“Days. A week, if I’m careful. Not forever.”
“And the permanent fix?”
Grace finally let herself look at them. “The permanent fix is finishing him. Everything I do between now and then is buying us the days to get there.”
Gunnar’s jaw worked. He looked at the server node on the screen, at the team, then back at her.
“Then buy us the days.” It was the closest thing to an acknowledgment Gunnar had given her, and she’d take it.
And it would make betraying them easier to execute.