Chapter 5
Two days in the safehouse, and Cargo was running out of ways to stay busy.
He'd fortified every entry point. Set up early warning systems in the tree line—nothing fancy, just tripwires connected to cans that would rattle if disturbed.
Checked and rechecked the weapons he'd cached here months ago, confirming ammunition counts and cleaning mechanisms that didn't need cleaning.
Now he was reorganizing supplies for the third time while Rebecca watched from the kitchen table with an expression that hovered between amused and concerned.
"You're going to wear a hole in that floor," she said.
"Floors don't wear out from walking."
"No, but the person doing the walking might." She set down the coffee she'd been nursing. "Sit down, Cargo. You're making me nervous."
He didn't sit. But he did stop pacing, turning to face her across the small cabin.
"You're not nervous," he said. "You're bored."
"I'm both." She leaned back in her chair, and he noticed she'd found clothes that fit better—probably from the emergency supplies he kept stocked. Dark jeans, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She looked almost comfortable, which was dangerous because comfortable led to careless.
"Boredom is survivable," he said. "The alternative isn't."
"So you keep reminding me." She studied him with those observant eyes that missed nothing. "What's really bothering you? Besides the obvious."
You, he wanted to say. You're bothering me.
Because she was. Every time she moved through the cabin, he tracked her.
Every time she spoke, he listened for stress or fear or anything that might indicate she wasn't as stable as she seemed.
Every time she looked at him with those dark eyes, he felt his carefully maintained walls crack a little further.
"Intel came in this morning," he said instead. "Slade's operation is scrambling. He's got his people searching everywhere you might have connections."
"I told you—I don't have connections."
"Everyone has connections." Cargo pulled out a chair and sat across from her. "Former addresses. Old jobs. Anyone you dated before Warren. They'll check everything."
"Good luck with that list." Her voice was flat. "Six foster homes before I aged out. Three states, twelve jobs, zero relationships that lasted longer than Warren's eight weeks of lies. I'm a ghost, Cargo. There's nothing to find."
He filed that information away—the foster homes, the rootless wandering, the pattern of impermanence that matched his own in uncomfortable ways.
"That actually helps," he admitted. "Fewer threads for them to pull."
"Silver lining to a shitty childhood." She pulled her coffee closer. "What about you? Any threads they could use to find this place?"
"This property belongs to a civilian contact. No paper trail to the club, no connection to my name." He'd made sure of that years ago, when paranoia was just starting to become his operating system. "Even if they dig into my background, they won't find this."
"Your background being Delta Force?"
He went still. "How do you know that?"
"I notice things, remember?" She smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes.
"The way you move. The way you check sight lines every time you enter a room.
The tattoo on your forearm—I saw it when you were making coffee.
Most people don't recognize the unit insignia, but I dated a guy who was obsessed with special operations stuff. He had books."
"Dated a guy with books. That's your source?"
"My source is observation." She held his gaze. "But I also asked one of the women at the compound. Caroline, the vet? She mentioned the brothers are all former special operations. Said you were Delta."
Caroline. Forge's woman, with a mouth that ran faster than operational security required. Cargo made a mental note to mention discretion to his brother.
"Former Delta," he corrected. "Twelve years. Armorer—I kept the Unit supplied with equipment."
"And then you left."
"And then I left." He didn't elaborate. Didn't need to revisit the cache, the breach, the dead operators who still showed up in his dreams.
Rebecca seemed to sense the boundary, because she shifted topics without pressing. "So what's the plan? We hide here forever while your brothers dig into Slade?"
"We hide here until we have actionable intelligence. Then we move."
"Move how?"
Cargo hesitated. He didn't usually explain operations to civilians. Didn't share tactical thinking with anyone outside the brotherhood. But Rebecca wasn't just any civilian anymore—she was central to this mission, and her knowledge of Slade's operation had already proven valuable.
"Supply chains have weak points," he said slowly. "Every operation depends on people, equipment, information flowing from one place to another. We find the weak points, we exploit them. Cut Slade off from his resources, isolate him from his support network."
"And then?"
"And then we eliminate the threat."
She nodded, unsurprised. "The faces I remember from Warren's orbit—would those help? Identifying the people in his network?"
"They might." He'd been planning to ask, but she'd beaten him to it. "What do you remember?"
"There was a man who came to the apartment twice.
Thick build, military bearing, treated Warren like a subordinate.
" She closed her eyes, pulling up the memory.
"Warren called him Glen. They argued about timing—Glen wanted to move faster, Warren said they needed to wait for a specific training rotation. "
Glen. Houser's first name was Glen.
"Anyone else?"
"A younger guy. Lean, nervous energy. He handled paperwork—I saw him shuffling manifests once when I walked in unexpectedly. Warren introduced him as his shipping coordinator." She opened her eyes. "Ty something. I never got his last name."
Ty Merrick. The logistics brain Ghost had identified from the manifests.
"And there was an older man. Cold. Professional. He came to the warehouse the day Warren took me there." Rebecca's voice tightened. "He looked at me like I was a problem to be solved. Warren told me later he was 'security consultation,' but the way he carried himself..."
"Former military?"
"Former something. Private contractor, maybe. The kind of person who's done things in other countries that don't have names." She shivered. "He scared me more than Warren did."
Anton Graves. The cleaner who handled witness elimination.
Cargo processed the information, adding her observations to the intelligence Ghost and the brothers had gathered. She was confirming their targets, filling in details about relationships and dynamics that surveillance alone couldn't provide.
"You're good at this," he said.
"At what?"
"Intelligence gathering. Reading people. Filing away details without knowing why they matter." He leaned forward. "Most witnesses remember emotions, not specifics. You remember specifics."
"Foster care taught me that details save your life." She shrugged, but he caught the flash of something painful underneath. "The wrong detail about a foster parent could get you moved. The right detail could get you out of a bad situation. I learned to pay attention."
"And you paid attention to Warren."
"Not enough to realize he was selling weapons to terrorists." Her voice went bitter. "Some observer I am."
"You weren't looking for that." Cargo found himself wanting to ease the self-recrimination in her eyes. "You were looking for red flags about whether he was safe to date. Different criteria."
"The red flags were there." She looked down at her coffee. "I just didn't want to see them."
"What red flags?"
"The way he never introduced me to anyone from his real life.
The phone calls he always took in the other room.
The locked drawer." She laughed without humor.
"The fact that a successful defense contractor was dating a bartender who lives in a one-bedroom apartment with secondhand furniture.
That should have been the biggest red flag of all. "
"Don't do that."
She looked up. "Do what?"
"Blame yourself for being targeted by a professional manipulator." Cargo's voice came out harder than he intended. "Slade's been running this operation for years. He knows how to find vulnerable people and use them. That's not your failure—that's his skill set."
"It still feels like failure."
"Most things do." He held her gaze. "But you got out. You ran when you realized the truth, grabbed evidence, came to someone who could help. That's not failure. That's survival."
Something shifted in her expression. The bitterness fading, replaced by something warmer.
"You're surprisingly good at pep talks," she said. "For someone who looks like he eats nails for breakfast."
"I don't give pep talks." He stood, needing to move, needing distance from the way she was looking at him. "I state facts."
"Facts like I'm not a failure?"
"Facts like you're still alive when a man with professional cleaners wanted you dead." He moved to the window, checking the tree line out of habit. "That's not nothing."
His phone buzzed before she could respond. Static's number on the screen.
"Talk to me," Cargo answered.
"Houser's making moves." Static's voice was tense. "He's using base resources to search for your girl. Running her name through every database he can access—DMV, utilities, employment records. Checking connections she might use to disappear."
"She doesn't have connections."
"Then he's going to come up empty and get desperate." Static paused. "Ghost says Houser's been making calls. Trying to triangulate her last known position. If anyone saw her leave Slade's apartment, saw what direction she went..."
Cargo's grip tightened on the phone. "How long do we have?"
"Unknown. But Houser's not subtle. He's leaving a trail someone's going to notice eventually—either Slade's people find her, or military counterintelligence figures out a supply sergeant is running unauthorized searches." Another pause. "Either way, clock's ticking."
"Keep eyes on him. I want to know if he leaves base."
"Already on it." Static's voice hardened. "Ghost wants to move on this. Says we should take Houser out before he gets lucky."
"Tell Ghost I agree." Cargo looked at Rebecca, who was watching him with sharp attention. "Set up the ambush. We move as soon as Houser gives us an opening."
He ended the call and found Rebecca already on her feet.
"Houser," she said. "That's the Glen I mentioned? The supply sergeant?"
"Yeah. He's searching for you. Using military databases, pulling every string he has."
"And you're going to stop him."
"We're going to stop him." Cargo moved toward the weapons cache in the back room. "Permanently."
She followed him, watching as he began laying out equipment on the bed. Rifles, handguns, ammunition, body armor. Everything needed for an operation designed to end with a body.
"Can I help?" she asked.
He paused, looking at her. In the dim light of the back room, she looked smaller than she was. Softer. The kind of woman who should be worried about nursing school applications and tip percentages, not military hit squads and weapons caches.
But her eyes were steady. Her hands weren't shaking. And when she'd picked up that gun in his shop two days ago, she'd handled it like someone who'd survive using it.
"You can help by staying here," he said. "Staying safe. Letting us handle the threat."
"And if the threat finds me while you're gone?"
He reached for a compact 9mm—the same model he'd given her that first night—and pressed it into her hands.
"Then you handle it the same way you handled everything else in your life." He held her gaze. "By surviving."
She looked down at the weapon, then back up at him.
"Cargo."
"Yeah?"
"Come back." Her voice was quiet but fierce. "Whatever happens with Houser—come back."
Something cracked in his chest. That careful distance he maintained, the walls he'd built after Afghanistan—they weren't holding the way they were supposed to.
"I always come back," he said roughly. "I'm too paranoid to die."
She almost smiled. "That's not reassuring."
"It's all I've got." He turned back to the weapons, forcing himself to focus on the operation ahead. "Rest while you can. I'll let you know when we're moving."
He felt her watching him for a long moment before she retreated to the main room.
Houser was hunting her. Using every resource at his disposal to track down a woman whose only crime was noticing something she shouldn't have.
But Houser had made a mistake. He'd forced Rebecca to run—and she'd run straight to Cargo. Straight to the one man in Fayetteville who took the protection of his inventory personally.
Tomorrow, Houser would learn what that cost.
Tonight, Cargo would make sure everything was ready.
He didn't lose things that mattered.
He wasn't about to start now.