Chapter One #2
The fluorescent lights in the Stuttgart airport bathroom were cruel enough to make nine hours of travel feel personal.
I stood in front of the mirror and pulled the elastic from my hair.
My dark brown waves had survived the beginning of the flight reasonably well before one side apparently spent several hours flattened against an airplane window, and no amount of running wet fingers through them was going to make the result look deliberate.
My skin was naturally a lighter olive, though exhaustion had drained most of the warmth from it. My brown eyes looked more golden when I was tired, which was probably the only thing the flight had improved.
I leaned closer to the mirror while fixing the hair around my face.
My nose had the same slight curve along the bridge it had always had, something I’d spent enough of my teenage years wishing was smaller before eventually realizing that whenever I imagined it differently, the rest of my face looked wrong.
At twenty-seven, I had mostly made peace with it.
“Good enough.”
The man waiting beyond baggage claim confirmed my name as Mia Mercer and led me outside without offering his. After the second one-word answer, I stopped attempting conversation and slept through part of the drive instead.
When I woke, Stuttgart had given way to a dense forest. My phone had lost service and a security fence appeared beside the road a few minutes later.
The compound beyond it looked exactly like something several governments would choose if nobody involved was allowed to care whether the people living there were comfortable.
Concrete buildings sat behind the perimeter with little effort made to disguise what the property had probably been before ARC took it over.
The largest looked like an old military operations barracks, with a garage attached to one side and several dark vehicles parked nearby. Farther back, part of the grounds had been converted into a training area.
The driver stopped outside the main building, unloaded my suitcase onto the pavement and returned to the SUV before I had even finished adjusting the strap of my carry-on.
“That’s it?”
He nodded through the open window. “That’s it.”
Then he drove away.
I watched the SUV disappear toward the gate and wondered whether leaving a woman and a suitcase in the middle of a secure military compound technically counted as good customer service.
The doors behind me opened before I could decide.
I recognized Raven immediately. The thick, dark curls did most of the work, but the pistol holstered to his side confirmed it.
He came down the steps in navy cargo pants and a navy sweatshirt, looking younger than he had in the personnel photograph and considerably less like someone who’d spent his adult life working around intelligence agencies.
“Mia Mercer?”
“Raven.”
He smiled when he reached me. “You already know who I am.”
The British accent was more prominent than I expected and a quick reminder that this unit was international.
“I had nine hours and a folder.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
Before I could answer, he took the handle of my suitcase.
“I can carry that,” I said.
Raven looked at me as though this information had never been in dispute.
“I know.”
“Then why are you carrying it?”
“That’s how my mother raised me,” he responded.
I followed him toward the steps. “Your mother raised you to take women’s luggage without asking?”
“She raised me to help. Jeez, you’re making it sound much worse than it is.”
“I’ve known you for thirty seconds.”
“Plenty of time to misrepresent my upbringing, apparently.”
I laughed for the first time since landing, and Raven answered with a sweet smile. He carried the suitcase through the doors and left it beside the bottom of a metal staircase.
The inside of the building made the exterior look luxurious.
The operations floor occupied most of the ground level, with a high ceiling crossed by old steel supports and fluorescent fixtures that gave the concrete walls a washed-out gray cast. Someone had installed brighter industrial lights above the main work area, though they didn’t do much to make it feel less like a military building that had been repurposed rather than renovated.
A metal loft wrapped around one side of the room.
Beneath it stood a long operations table cluttered with laptops, folders, notes, weapons and coffee cups.
Most of the far wall had been converted into screens showing maps, surveillance photographs and exterior feeds from around the compound.
Equipment cases were stacked beneath them, and a worn couch had been shoved against another wall as though someone had decided that one piece of secondhand furniture officially made the place livable.
At the far end of the operations table, my eyes caught an undeniable presence.
Wolf.
The photograph had flattened him. In person, there was a solidity to his build that made everyone around him seem to occupy less space.
He sat slightly angled toward a paper file, one forearm resting near the edge of the table, his shoulders broad beneath a fitted black shirt.
His head and lower face were hidden beneath a black balaclava, leaving only his brown eyes visible under dark lashes.
There was something unnerving about the stillness.
Raven moved constantly. Even standing beside me, there was an ease to him that made his attention feel fluid. Wolf barely seemed to move at all.
As I walked forward toward the table, a faint smell reached me. Clean soap underneath something darker that took me another second to recognize.
Cigarette smoke.
Not fresh enough that he’d been smoking inside. Just enough caught in his clothing to tell me he’d had one recently. Wolf tracked my suitcase beside the stairs before fixing his attention on me.
“Do you expect all of us to wait on you hand and foot?”
His deep voice paired with the question came so casually that it took me a second to realize he was serious. I stared back with my mouth slightly open.
Raven looked over his shoulder. “I carried one suitcase.”
Wolf didn’t acknowledge him. His attention stayed on me.
I glanced at the bag by the stairs. “H-he took it.”
“And you let him,” he retorted without a pause.
There wasn’t even enough emotion in the answer to call it rude. He stated it like a problem he’d noticed and expected me to correct. I folded my arms and got myself under control. If this was how he wanted to start things, fine. We could do this his way.
I tilted my head to the side. “I didn’t realize not carrying my own luggage counted as insubordination.”
Wolf closed the file in front of him and finally gave me his full attention, his eyes settling directly on mine.
“You came here as an analyst. If you can’t get your own bags through a door, I’m not interested in finding out what else you need done for you.”
There were several responses available to me. I chose the one least likely to get me sent home before I had technically arrived.
“I can carry my own bags.”
“Then do that next time.”
Wolf reopened the file, which ended the conversation as far as he was concerned.
Raven leaned slightly toward me and whispered, “That… is Wolf.”
Wolf’s eyes lifted and Raven immediately walked away.
I followed him farther into the room, still trying to decide whether Wolf had specifically disliked me before I arrived or if this was simply his personality. Just then, a voice came from above us.
“Ssibal, that went well.”
I looked up to see Jackal leaning over the railing of the loft. He looked almost exactly like the second photograph from his file. Straight black hair fell around his forehead, and the tattoos along his neck were easier to see from below.
Raven looked up at him. “She’s been here forty-five seconds.”
“I know. I’m impressed.”
I glanced at Jackal. “You’re enjoying this?”
“Immensely.”
“Jackal,” Wolf said without looking up.
Jackal’s expression became solemn as he walked downstairs. “Boss doesn’t like happiness before noon.”
“It’s almost evening,” I said matter-of-factly.
“Then he’s running behind.”
Wolf didn’t answer.
I was beginning to understand how this worked.
Raven settled into a chair at one of the computers and woke the screen with a tap of the keyboard. I was moving toward him when an open folder near Wolf caught my attention.
ROMANIA
The pages beside it weren’t part of the official report I’d read on the plane.
These were handwritten. Someone had reconstructed the operation in much more detail, filling the margins with names and notes.
I set my carry-on on an empty chair and leaned closer without touching anything, but Wolf noticed anyway.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You stopped.”
I glanced back at the page. “Did you make this?”
Wolf leaned back slightly.
“Why?”
“Because I think you started in the wrong place.”
The tapping from Raven’s keyboard stopped behind me. Wolf looked at the page, then slowly back up at me.
“Explain.”
I pulled the reports from my carry-on and opened the Romanian operation. “Your timeline starts when ARC received the order to move on the warehouse. The other reports do the same thing.”
Wolf said nothing, which I was beginning to understand meant he expected whoever was speaking to keep going until he found a reason to stop them. I slid the Romanian report across the table, careful to leave a few inches between it and his notes.
“The warehouse was already being cleared before you got the final order to go there. In Prague, the target started behaving differently before ARC was officially assigned.”
Wolf lowered his eyes to the page.
I continued in a softer voice, “Look, maybe somebody inside ARC is warning Cerberus. I’m not saying they aren’t. But if the people you’re following start reacting before ARC even knows it’s going after them, then your timeline starts too late.”
Raven rolled his chair closer and looked at the report.
“You’re thinking the information leaks before it reaches us.”