20. The Claiming
BOYD
The coffee smells like heaven.
Dark roast, strong enough to strip paint, brewing in the industrial machine in the corner of the war room. The smell of normal. Or as close to normal as men like us ever get.
I lean against the doorframe, watching the room.
My arm is out of the sling, though the deep fascia sutures still pull tight in the muscle belly when I move too fast. The bruising across my left side has faded into a sickly yellow-green map of violence across my torso.
I move stiffly, every breath a dull, heavy ache rather than sharp agony.
I hurt, but it’s a good hurt. The ache of recovery, not the sharp sting of survival.
I scan the room.
The pack is all here.
Bronco sits on the edge of the conference table, dissecting a breakfast burrito the size of a small child. He argues with Rook about the aerodynamics of a drone prototype.
Wraith occupies the corner, cleaning his rifle. The repetitive snick-snick of the bolt carrier group runs a rhythmic metronome under the conversation. He doesn’t talk much, but he smiles. A small, scar-twisting quirk of the lips. Contentment.
Cipher spins in his chair, vibrating with caffeine and frenetic energy, typing with one hand while gesturing wildly with the other.
But I skip over them.
I find the woman standing at the main console next to Hutch.
Iris.
She wears jeans and a black tactical pullover two sizes too big. Mine. Her hair sits pulled back in a messy knot, a pencil stuck through it. She looks tired. Those dark circles under her eyes match mine.
But she looks right.
She isn’t shrinking away from Hutch. She points at the screen, taps a file, and translates a medical coding discrepancy to the Chief of the Shadow Division with clean, practiced authority.
“The ICD-10 codes don’t match the pathology.
” She traces a line of text on the monitor.
“They list these transfers as ‘acute respiratory distress,’ but the pharmacy logs show they ordered heavy sedatives. Ketamine. Midazolam. You don’t give Midazolam for asthma. You give it to keep a patient quiet.”
Hutch nods.
“So they drug them for transport.”
“Exactly.” She meets his gaze. “It keeps them compliant. It stops them from asking for help in customs.”
Pride detonates inside me.
She didn’t just survive the fire. She walked out of it carrying the torch.
Bronco looks up. He spots me in the doorway.
“Look who finally dragged his ass out of bed.”
The room turns.
“Morning, sunshine.” Rook leans back against the table. “We were taking bets on whether you’d sleep till noon.”
“I was resting my eyes.” I walk into the room.
“You were unconscious.” Bronco points his burrito at me. “Iris threatened you with a catheter to get you to drink water yesterday.”
“I don’t recall that.”
“Convenient amnesia.” Cipher doesn’t look away from his screens. “Classic symptom of being whipped.”
“Watch it, Cipher.” I walk past his chair and flick the back of his head.
“Ow. Abuse. Workplace harassment.” Cipher rubs his scalp.
I move to Iris.
No hesitation. I step into her space and wrap my good arm around her waist.
She leans into me instantly. A reflex now. Magnetic pull. She rests her head against my shoulder, her hand rising to rest on my chest, right over the scar.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I kiss the top of her head.
“How’s the arm?”
“It works.”
“Don’t push it. You tear those sutures, I’m stapling you next time.”
“Kinky.” Bronco takes a bite of his burrito.
Wraith throws a cleaning patch at him.
Hutch clears his throat. He stands at the head of the table, the holographic map of Europe glowing blue in the dim light.
“Alright. Focus up. Thanks to Dr. Kincaid’s translation of the manifests, we have a target profile.”
The room shifts. Banter dies. The wolves snap to attention.
Hutch taps the console. The map zooms in on a location in the Mediterranean.
“The Gemini Foundation has a logistics hub in Malta. Listed as a medical supply depot. But according to the shipping logs Iris decoded, it runs as the primary sorting center for human assets coming out of Eastern Europe.”
“Malta.” Rook studies the map. “High traffic. Deeply corrupt port authority. Easy to hide things in plain sight.”
“Exactly.” Hutch points to the satellite overlay. “They move the kids from Kyiv to Malta. From there, they scatter them to buyers in the Middle East, South America, or back here to the States.”
“So we hit Malta.” Bronco cracks his knuckles. “I can have the bird ready in an hour. C-130 hop to Italy, then infiltrate by sea.”
“Not yet.” Hutch shakes his head. “We need to know who runs the hub. We need a name. We go in blind, and the snakes scatter. We need to cut off the head.”
“And Thompson?” Iris hasn’t moved from my side, but her voice cuts clean across the room. “He bought that boy. Fifty thousand dollars for a human being, and he’s still sitting on a committee. I made Andrei a promise.”
Hutch doesn’t dodge it. “Thompson’s untouchable through the Bureau.
Half his oversight committee owes him a favor.
” He lets the bad news land, then turns it over.
“So we don’t use the Bureau. Cipher already pulled the senator’s name out of the cache and walked it, sealed, to a federal prosecutor here in Denver who’s been trying to put Thompson in a cell for six years and owes nobody in that building a thing.
It won’t move fast. The day Malta breaks, her file stops being theoretical.
” He holds Iris’s gaze. “He doesn’t walk, Doctor. He just doesn’t fall today.”
It isn’t the head she wants on a pike. But something in her unknots all the same. A wheel turning, where an hour ago there was only a wall.
He turns to Cipher.
“Cipher. Status on the banking records.”
Cipher spins his chair around. The humor vanishes from his face. Frustrated. Annoyed.
“I’m hitting a wall, Chief.”
“A wall.” I frown. “I thought you said Mercer’s security was a joke.”
“Mercer’s was. The Gemini Foundation is different. Their accounts sit layered through shell companies in four different tax havens. I traced the money from Senator Thompson to a holding company in Cyprus. But when I tried to breach the Cyprus server...”
He trails off and types a command.
The big screen changes.
Instead of a bank ledger, a graphic appears.
Code. Glowing green characters. But right in the middle, an image pulses.
A vine.
A digital animation of a climbing ivy plant. Tendrils coil through the binary, strangling the scrolling green lines, leaf by leaf. It spreads across the screen, locking the files down. The ivy proliferates, throttling the code with methodical patience.
“What’s that?” Iris squints at the screen.
“A signature.” Cipher glares at the graphic. “Someone is in the system.”
“The Consortium?” Rook asks.
“No.” Cipher shakes his head. “This isn’t corporate security. It’s stylistic. An independent hacker, no corporate allegiance.” He types furiously. “Whoever this is, they’re better than good. They aren’t just blocking me. They’re taunting me. Look at the timestamp.”
He highlights a line of data.
09:00:00
“They breached the Cyprus server three minutes before I did. Locked the door from the inside and swallowed the key.”
“Can you break it?” Hutch watches the screen.
Cipher stops typing. He stares at the digital ivy on the screen. His gaze narrows. A man discovering a worthy opponent after years playing solitaire.
“Ivy.” He leans closer to the monitor. “Clings. Spreads. Chokes.” A sharp, dangerous grin splits his face. “Yeah. I can break it. But I have to find her first.”
“Her?” Bronco asks.
“Coding syntax.” Cipher’s fingers drum on the desk. “Elegant. Vicious, but elegant. This isn’t a script kiddie. This is a chaos agent.”
“Find her.” Hutch taps the console. “If she has the keys to the money, she has the keys to the kingdom. We need her assets.”
“Oh, I’ll find her.” Cipher spins back to his keyboard. “And then I’m dismantling her firewall brick by brick.”
Hutch turns back to the map.
“We have our directives. Wraith, Rook, start building the tactical profile for Malta. Bronco, prep the transport logistics. Cipher, hunt the ghost.”
“What about us?” I lean forward.
Hutch looks at me. Then at Iris.
“You’re still on the injured list. And Dr. Kincaid is a civilian.”
“I’m not a civilian.” Iris lifts her chin. “Not anymore.”
A rare smile crosses Hutch’s face, softening the hard angles of his jaw.
“No. I suppose you aren’t. But you’re a witness. Right now, you’re the only proof we have that any of this is real. Until we secure the Malta hub, you two stay grounded.”
“Grounded,” I repeat the word flatly.
“Safe house protocol.” Hutch checks his monitor. “You stay here. Keep the home fires burning. Help Rook with the profiling, but don’t leave the perimeter. We can’t afford to lose you.”
He turns his gaze directly to me.
“Take the win. You got the girl. Take a breath before the next war starts.” He claps his hands. “Briefing adjourned. Get to work.”
The room dissolves into activity. Bronco argues with Wraith about ammo counts. Cipher puts on headphones, diving into the digital abyss to hunt his Ivy.
I steer Iris out of the room.
We walk out into the corridor, away from the noise, away from the war.
We step out the back door, onto the observation deck where we stood a few nights ago.
The sun sits high now. The snow reflects blindingly white under a blue sky. The air is crisp, cold, and clean.
I lean on the railing. Iris steps in front of me, leaning back against my chest. I wrap my arms around her, burying my face in her neck.
“Grounded.” She turns the word over, her hands covering mine. “Sounds boring.”
“Boring is good.” I press a kiss below her ear. “I like boring. Boring means no one is shooting at us.”
“For now.”
“Yeah. For now.”
She turns in my arms. Her fingers trace the line of my jaw, brush the healing cut on my forehead.
“You know they’re going to call us up eventually.” She turns fully. “When they hit Malta. They’re going to need a medic.”
“I know.”
“And you’re going to go.”
“I go where you go, Iris. That’s the deal.”
“The Shield and the Savior.” A slow smile edges her lips.
“The Shield and the Savior.” I brush my thumb across her cheek. “I think you just gave yourself a callsign.”
The darkness I lived in for ten years replays in my mind. The missions. The bodies. The cold nights in empty apartments. I thought that was the price I had to pay for my skills.
But she saw the monster, and she didn’t run. She handed me a weapon and told me to aim.
She walked into the carbonized wreckage of me and started triage, fixing all the bad things. Making everything right again.
“I have a question.” I trace the fine line of her collarbone.
“You can stop right there.” The warmth in her gaze lights up the dark corners of my chest.
“Stop. What do you mean?”
“You’re trying to give me an out again.”
“I have to. It’s protocol.”
“Screw protocol.” She grabs the front of my shirt. “I told you on the balcony. I don’t want safe. I want you. This.” She gestures to the mountains, to the fortress behind us, to the team inside planning a war. “I found my family. I found my pack. And I found you.”
She kisses me.
Deep. Certain. A promise sealed in blood and snow.
“I’m keeping you,” I murmur against her mouth.
“I know.”
She pulls back, resting her head on my chest. We stand there, watching the wind whip the snow off the peaks.
Inside, Cipher hunts a ghost. Bronco preps a warplane. Hutch plots the destruction of an empire.
The war is just beginning. The winter is going to be long and bloody.
But for the first time in my life, I’m not afraid of the cold.
I tighten my arms around her.
“Let them come,” I whisper into the wind.
Iris looks up at me, eyes fierce and bright.
“Let them come,” she agrees.
I look at the horizon. Ex Tenebris Lux.
From darkness, light.