Chapter 2
Chapter Two
KODIAK
I stood at the wall of windows in my living room, knowing sleep would be hard won tonight. Outside, the dark waters of the Chesapeake stretched to the horizon. The distant lights of a cargo ship headed for Baltimore were the only break in the darkness.
Given the work I did involved missions around the globe, often assigned within minutes of when I needed to depart, I didn’t spend much time in the house I’d acquired three years ago.
It had been a spur-of-the-moment purchase, mainly because I thought a waterfront property with good security, and far enough from DC to feel like an escape, would be a good investment.
I’d never bothered to make it a home. The furniture was functional, the walls bare, and the kitchen held little other than a coffeemaker.
Most nights, the emptiness didn’t bother me. Tonight, it did.
It was three in the morning, and Emma Sinclair, the woman I’d spent six weeks trying to forget, was twenty feet down the hall, in my guest bedroom.
Why? Because someone either wanted her dead or terrified enough to think they did. Even before Atticus said, “You’re the best. She needs the best,” I’d already volunteered to protect her. If he’d argued instead, I would’ve gone above his head.
He wasn’t wrong about my qualifications.
I’d worked for K19 Security Solutions for years.
The firm recruited former military and intelligence operatives for work that required deniability, discretion, and skills most people didn’t have.
I’d done extractions in war zones, protected high-value targets, and neutralized threats on four continents.
None of it had prepared me for Emma.
The first time I saw her, she’d walked into a room full of operatives, and I’d stopped listening to the briefing being presented.
After it ended, I’d invented a reason to talk to her.
She’d called me Agent Emeric like I was just another suit at the table.
I’d been trying to prove otherwise ever since.
Then, this past July, we’d gone undercover as husband and wife while we infiltrated a money laundering operation connected to a defense contractor.
We’d lived in a safe house, one of the most luxurious I’d ever been in.
Its two bedrooms had been farther apart than the ones here.
It hadn’t mattered. Her presence had rattled me then as much as it did now.
Each morning, Emma would sit at the breakfast table with her laptop, her hair still damp, reviewing wire transfers and shell company structures while I made coffee.
She was brilliant. Sharp in ways that floored me. She’d catch anomalies in the data that took me three read-throughs to see, and she’d explain them with a quiet intensity that made me want to listen to her talk about spreadsheets for hours.
The yacht party had been the worst. Playing the devoted spouse meant keeping my hand on her back and leaning in to share her air.
I could still picture her in the green dress she wore and feel her warm skin under my palm.
She’d laughed at one of my jokes—not a chuckle, but a belly laugh—like I’d caught her off guard.
After the case closed, I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I showed up way more than I should have. Contacted her when it wasn’t necessary for me to do so.
She’d tolerated me, but never gave me a reason to think she was interested.
I kept trying anyway, because I was an idiot who didn’t know when to quit.
Then came Atticus and Brenna’s wedding.
The Austen family had transformed their Annapolis backyard for the occasion.
Flowers covered the arbors and tables, and a makeshift dance floor stretched across the lawn.
Emma had been maid of honor, and as she walked down the aisle ahead of Brenna, her gaze met mine.
The connection lasted barely a second before she looked away, but she’d made it, and it gave me hope.
I asked her to dance during a slow song, and she agreed. For once, she wasn’t guarded. My hand rested on her waist, and she was so close I could smell her perfume. She laughed at something I said, and her breath was warm against my neck.
For one song, I believed I had a chance with her.
Her fingers curled against my shoulder, and I let myself imagine what it would be like to hold her in my arms and never let go. I needed her to choose me the way I’d been choosing her since the first time I met her.
As the song wound down, I’d worked up the nerve to ask if she’d like to get out of there, maybe grab a drink somewhere quieter, but when Emma’s attention shifted past me, I stopped myself.
I spun us around and saw Brenna’s brother, Luke, standing at the edge of the dance floor, with his arms crossed.
The look between them could have been nothing—a reflex, a recognition, the pull of someone watching you. It was the apparent connection between them that gutted me. I felt like a jerk, pining for a woman who clearly wanted someone else.
I could’ve asked her. I didn’t.
When the song ended, I left without saying goodbye to anyone. Not to her, not to the bride and groom.
I spent six weeks tamping down all thoughts of her. I didn’t check her social media, didn’t ask Brenna how she was doing, and told myself I’d moved on.
Now, here I was. She was asleep in my house, and I was standing in the dark like an idiot.
I turned away from the window, went into the bedroom, and stopped at the nightstand. The drawer was cracked open, and I slid it farther. A photo sat on top of a set of dog tags. I closed the drawer without picking them up.
Some things were better left alone at three in the morning.
Two hours later, I rolled out of bed, returned to the kitchen, and dove into the data Alice had sent overnight—access logs, network routing tables, timestamp records.
She and her husband were the founding partners of K19 Security Solutions’ newest division, Sentinel Cyber.
I’d never met anyone at her level of tech capability, and I’d spent years in intelligence.
But whatever she wanted me to see in these files, I couldn’t figure it out.
I pushed away from the table when footsteps sounded in the hallway.
Emma padded in on bare feet. Even though she’d just gotten out of bed, her chin-length blonde hair fell straight as if she’d styled it, and without makeup, the freckles across her nose were visible.
She was lean, the way runners were, with long legs and a waist so narrow I could wrap both hands around it.
None of that was why I couldn’t look at her.
It was her eyes. They were blue like the sea, and when they landed on me, it was as though she could see everything I wasn’t ready for her to know.
We’d had mornings like this during the two weeks we spent undercover. We’d shared a kitchen the same way, as if we’d done it a hundred times before. That had been pretend. Now, she was here for real.
“Coffee’s ready.” I moved to the far counter to get out of her way.
“Thanks.”
I sat down and made myself focus on the screen in front of me.
“Alice sent data overnight,” I said. “I can’t make sense of it.”
She set her mug down and stood behind me. Within seconds, she sighed, then pulled a chair closer to me.
“Whoever’s doing this isn’t just monitoring my access.” She rested an elbow on the table. “They’ve built the masking to mimic normal network traffic. That takes time.”
“You got that from the raw logs?”
“It’s what the logs aren’t showing that matters.”
My phone buzzed with a text from Atticus.
“Videoconference at eight,” I read out loud. “Alice has updates.”
“Okay.”
When the call connected at the designated time, Alice led.
“I’ve been stripping away layers since last night,” she began. “Whoever built this had months, maybe years, to fine-tune it. I can confirm Emma’s being watched, but I can’t tell you by whom. At least not yet.”
Atticus’ window on the screen enlarged. “Then, we work the problem from our end while you work it from yours,” he said.
“Admiral and Alice have signed off, and K19 Sentinel Cyber is fully on board. Brenna spoke with Soledad this morning, and we’re authorized.
DOJ has requested offices near yours, with an adjacent conference room, so Kodiak and Luke can go in with you later today. ”
“Emma, what all do we have on the fraud so far?” Alice asked.
“My backup drive with all the transaction records I’ve been compiling is at work,” Emma said.
“It’s in a biometric safe in my office. And I’ve got a locked drawer full of annotated printouts—the deposit patterns and my notes on the shell company connections.
There’s two weeks of work I’ve kept off any networked system. ”
“We’ll need all of that,” said Atticus.
I didn’t like taking her into a building where the person responsible for what had happened at her townhouse could be someone she worked with, but it was the only way.
“Once there, I’ll have to brief my staff and get ahead of any questions about K19 being in the building,” Emma said. “The Acting Treasury Secretary will want to hear the Morrison details herself. I can pull the drive and files then.”
“The Morrison memo hit this morning. Half the building’s going to be watching you walk in,” I warned.
“Good. Then, I’m doing what the Treasury liaison on a continuing DOJ investigation would do—showing up with her team and returning to work. It would raise more suspicion if I didn’t.”
Again, I didn’t like it, but she had a point.
“Fine.”
“Unless you think you need more backup.” She smirked. “I could ask Atticus to send a team if you don’t feel like you can handle it.”
Atticus coughed. Alice didn’t bother hiding her laugh.
“I can handle it,” I said.
“You sure? It could be very dangerous. Two whole weeks of handwritten notes in there. Some of them are even color-coded.”
I scowled. “Are you done?”
“For now.” She turned from me to the screen and smiled.