Chapter Four #3
Wolf stepped closer to the table. “If we lose audio, you leave the obstruction. If we lose audio and visual, the operation is over.”
I opened my mouth.
“That part isn’t negotiable.”
The way he said it made something in me push back before I had decided what words I wanted.
“I’m the one inside.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then I have to be able to make judgment calls.”
“You can. Inside the boundaries we set before you go.”
“Convenient.”
“Safe.”
“Those aren’t always the same thing.”
For a moment he simply looked at me. Then his voice lowered enough that the room around us seemed to move farther away.
“No. They aren’t. That’s why we’re deciding which risks are worth taking now, while nobody has a gun in your face.”
I had no clever answer to that. I hated when he did that.
◆
The next two days moved faster than the first two had.
Once the operation had a shape, the compound stopped feeling like a place where people happened to work and started feeling like a machine being assembled around a single purpose.
Hawk made another pass around the ridge.
Viper and Jackal rotated vehicles through the surrounding roads to learn where local traffic naturally slowed.
Bear packed extraction gear into the Transporter and rejected two pieces of equipment after deciding they would take too long to access from the rear compartment.
Raven ran the microphone through enough signal tests that I eventually accused him of enjoying hearing me breathe.
“Not particularly,” he said. “You sigh a lot.”
“I live with Wolf.”
“We all do.”
“Then you understand.”
Wolf, six feet away, looked up from the route package. Neither of us acknowledged him.
By the afternoon of the party, I had repeated my cover until Mia Morgan’s invented job history felt almost as irritating as my real one.
The weather had warmed enough that Raven confirmed the event was still being held around the pool.
Aster’s staff had begun arriving before noon and Hawk was already moving toward his position.
Viper left separately and Bear took the Transporter with extraction equipment and a shirt that made him look slightly less like he could carry the estate’s front gate away by himself.
I went upstairs to change.
The communal bathroom was empty for once, which felt unnerving enough that I still checked the stalls before shutting the door behind me.
My cover-up hung from a hook beside the mirror, a loose white linen shirt-dress that reached mid-thigh and looked expensive in the effortless way clothing only achieved after costing far more than it had any right to.
Under it went the bikini Raven had watched me choose from three options with the exhausted expression of a man who had not expected technical intelligence to include opinions about swimwear. I had gone with black.
The top was simple, two narrow triangles of fabric over my breasts with thin straps that tied behind my neck and across my back.
The bottoms sat high over my hips and made my legs look longer than they had ever managed on their own, while the cut across the back covered enough to remain legal without pretending modesty had been invited to the operation.
I stood in front of the cloudy mirror and looked at myself.
Dark hair fell almost to the middle of my back after I took it out of the loose braid I’d worn while working.
I ran my fingers through the waves until they settled around my shoulders, then tucked one side behind my ear.
The black bikini made my skin look warmer than it had under the bathroom’s fluorescent lights on my first night.
It also made it impossible to ignore the fact that I had curves whether Wolf liked me being in the field or not.
I turned sideways.
The bottoms stayed where they were supposed to when I moved, and so did the top. The fact that I had just performed a mobility test in a bikini before infiltrating a suspected Cerberus-adjacent pool party felt like one of those career moments nobody mentioned during recruitment.
I pulled the cover-up on and buttoned two of the lower buttons, leaving the rest loose over the swimsuit. Flat leather sandals finished the part of the cover that involved pretending I had no intention of running anywhere.
My phone buzzed on the bench.
Raven: Need you downstairs. Mic check.
I looked at my reflection once more.
“Please let nobody be weird,” I sighed.
Expecting normal behavior from this building was probably my first mistake.
The operations floor had thinned out by the time I came downstairs.
Hawk, Viper and Bear were already gone. Raven sat behind his usual spread of equipment while Wolf stood beside him in black tactical pants and a fitted long-sleeved shirt, his plate carrier waiting on the back of a chair.
Jackal was checking the magazine on his MP7 near the equipment room before he left for his sector.
He looked up when he heard me.
Then he looked down.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
I stopped on the last stair. “You have about two seconds to make the rest of that sentence survivable.”
Jackal considered his options with unusual seriousness.
“I was just going to say intelligence has really improved its recruitment materials.”
Raven sighed and rubbed his eyes with one hand.
I pointed at Jackal. “One day I’m going to watch Bear throw you through a wall and do nothing to stop it.”
“That’s fair.”
Wolf looked over.
His attention traveled from my face to the open cover-up, lower across the visible black bikini and bare legs, then returned to me with enough control that anyone who had not spent three days studying every tiny reaction might have missed it.
Unfortunately, I had.
I became immediately aware of the way the bikini top pressed against my chest and the amount of skin visible between it and the low edge of the bottoms. Jackal glanced toward Wolf and whatever he saw there inspired the smartest decision of his life.
“I’m leaving.”
Raven looked at him. “You still have nine minutes.”
“Suddenly motivated.”
He slung the MP7, gave me an innocent smile that fooled nobody and headed for the garage.
Wolf reached toward the equipment on the table.
“Cover-up off.”
For a second I thought I had misheard him.
“Excuse me?”
“I need the transmitter against skin and under the fabric. Take it off.”
Wolf picked up the transmitter, a thin black unit barely larger than two stacked coins with a narrow wire leading to the microphone.
“You could buy me dinner before ordering me to strip in your operations room.”
Raven stayed frozen as Wolf looked directly at me.
“It’s a cover-up, Mercer.”
“Still technically removing clothing.”
“Take it off.”
My stomach tightened at the tone, and I hated that three words from him could get a physical reaction out of me.
I undid the two buttons and slid the linen from my shoulders, folding it over the back of a chair instead of giving either man the satisfaction of seeing me hesitate. Raven glanced up once, immediately verified that the equipment in Wolf’s hand still existed and looked back down at his screen.
Wolf did not look away.
For several seconds he took in the bikini like he was assessing another piece of mission equipment, except no piece of mission equipment had ever made the air feel this fucking warm.
“Turn.”
I did.
The edge of the table pressed lightly against the front of my thighs while Wolf stepped behind me. I heard the soft movement of fabric, then the faint metallic sound I had started recognizing before I understood why I kept recognizing it.
Click.
Something on his tactical belt shifted as he leaned closer. My attention dropped toward the sound on instinct even though I couldn’t see the belt behind me.
“Hold your hair up,” he said.
I gathered the waves in one hand and lifted them from my back. Wolf’s fingers touched the strap tied behind my ribs. The contact was brief and completely professional.
My body treated it like neither of those things.
He pinched the wire between two fingers and routed it beneath the bikini strap, working slowly enough that it would lie flat instead of showing through the thin fabric.
His knuckles brushed the side of my rib cage once, then again when the wire slipped.
I felt the rough edge of his sleeve against my bare back as he moved closer to see what he was doing.
I stared at Raven’s monitor because staring at anything else seemed dangerous.
Raven watched the audio levels.
“Say something.”
“This is humiliating.”
A green line jumped across his screen.
“Excellent signal,” Raven confirmed.
“Glad my suffering is technically impressive.”
Behind me, Wolf’s hand moved lower.
“Transmitter goes here.”
His fingers touched the back of my waist just above the bikini bottom.
I looked over my shoulder. “Here where?”
“Side.”
“That’s not a location.”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“I’m going to clip it inside the waistband at your right hip.”
There was a fractional pause after he said it and I recognized it for what it was: room to object.
I turned forward again. “Just do it.”
Wolf dropped to one knee in front of me, close enough that the movement forced my attention down to him whether I wanted it there or not. From that angle, his shoulders looked even broader beneath the black shirt, his mask hiding everything except his eyes as he tipped his head back and met mine.
“Hold still.”
Easier said than done.
His hand settled at my hip first, steadying the fabric while the other reached for the transmitter.
Then two fingers slipped beneath the edge of my bikini bottoms. Barely but just enough to lift the fabric away from my skin and seat the clip properly, but my body reacted as though he’d put his whole hand there.
Every muscle across my stomach pulled tight.
His fingertips were warm against the curve of my hip, rougher than I expected, while the transmitter itself was cold enough to make me inhale sharply. The contrast sent goosebumps racing over my skin and down my thighs even though the room was perfectly comfortable.