Chapter 3
Thick, sulfurous smoke billowed through the kitchen, blinding the optics of the gunmen outside.
Marc didn’t give the breach team time to adapt. Rising from behind the island, he gripped his SIG Sauer with both hands, using the thermal optic mounted on the slide to target two heat signatures cutting through the shredded front door.
Two double-taps. Two heavy thuds against the floorboards.
“Move. Rear hatch. Now!” Marc barked, hauling Emma to her feet by her coat collar.
Rounds punched through the kitchen cabinets above their heads, shattering dishes and sending porcelain shards flying like shrapnel. Emma stayed low, knees scraping against the gritty floor as Marc shoved her toward a hidden trapdoor concealed beneath a utility rug in the pantry.
He yanked the iron ring up, exposing a narrow concrete chute leading down into an old stormwater runoff trench that emptied into the salt marsh behind the marina.
“Down,” he commanded.
“What about you?” she coughed, eyes tearing up from the gray smoke.
“I’m right behind you. Go!”
Emma slid into the darkness, landing hard in six inches of brackish water.
Seconds later, Marc dropped beside her with barely a sound, tossing an incendiary device up into the pantry before slamming the heavy cast-iron grate shut.
A muffled crump vibrated overhead—the safe house was going up in flames, incinerating any fingerprints, hard drives, or forensic traces.
They moved fast through the concrete pipe, hunched over in the freezing water, emerging into the tall, swaying reed grass of the tidal basin.
Cold rain stung Emma’s cheeks, but the shock kept the fatigue at bay.
Behind them, smoke poured from the pantry.
Marc had not tried to erase the attackers or destroy the house; the short-burn charge was designed to consume the locked communications cabinet before the breach team could reach it.
The bodies, weapons, and most of the structure would remain for federal investigators—if anyone inside the investigation could still be trusted.
Parked beneath an overhang of rotting timber fifty yards down the deserted shoreline sat a vintage 1993 Ford Bronco. Matte black, chipped paint, old enough to predate factory GPS and cellular telemetry, with every aftermarket transmitter stripped out.
Marc unlocked the driver’s side with a metal key, guided Emma into the passenger seat, and climbed in.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his agency-issued satellite phone, and keyed a six-character emergency code.
The display flashed once: BURNT SITE. INTERNAL brEACH. DELAYED TRANSMISSION ARMED.
The encrypted distress packet would remain dormant for six hours before transmitting through a civilian satellite relay.
It would tell Harrison Vance that Delta had fallen without revealing where Marc went next.
Marc removed the battery, snapped the circuit board in half with his bare hands, and hurled the pieces into the dark water.
“No active transmitters,” Marc said, turning the ignition. The old fuel-injected V8 engine roared to life with a deep, mechanical rumble. “From this second on, Blackridge doesn’t know where we are. Nobody does.”
Emma stared at the shattered pieces of his phone sinking into the marsh. The reality of their isolation hit her with the force of a physical blow. “If your own people sold us out… who’s left?”
“Me,” Marc replied, slamming the truck into gear and pulling onto a narrow dirt road with his lights turned off. “And until I figure out which bastard inside command traded our lives to Radek, I’m the only ally you’ve got.”
They drove west for three hours, avoiding the Massachusetts Turnpike and sticking to winding, two-lane back roads through the Berkshire foothills.
The rain turned to sleet, then to a driving, heavy snow as the elevation climbed.
The dashboard heater blew faint, lukewarm air, barely enough to keep Emma’s teeth from chattering.
She had shed her soaked wool coat, sitting wrapped in an old canvas work jacket Marc had pulled from behind the bench seat.
It smelled of motor oil, rain, and clean cedar—distinctly masculine, and strangely comforting.
Emma watched his profile in the faint green glow of the instrument panel. His jaw was clenched, shadows deepening under his cheekbones. A jagged, pale scar cut through his left eyebrow and ran down to his ear—a remnant of some distant combat zone he had never spoken of.
“You’re bleeding,” Emma said quietly, breaking hours of tense silence.
Marc glanced down at his right arm. A clean tear in his tactical jacket near the bicep was soaked dark with crimson. He hadn’t made a sound about it.
“Grazed by drywall fragment,” he muttered. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine, it’s soaking through your sleeve. Pull over.”
“We’re thirty miles from the cabin. We don’t stop.”
“If you pass out from blood loss on an icy mountain road, we both die,” she said, her voice firm, steady, leaving no room for argument. “Pull the truck over, Colt.”
Marc looked at her, startled by the steely authority in her tone. Without a word, he guided the Bronco into an abandoned logging turnout shielded by dense hemlock trees, letting the engine idle.
Emma reached into the emergency medical kit strapped beneath the glove compartment.
She unsnapped the shears, cut through the torn fabric of his sleeve, flushed the ragged furrow with sterile saline, and pressed gauze against it.
Marc didn’t flinch, though his bicep tightened beneath her fingertips.
His skin was burning hot against the winter chill. Being this close, Emma could feel the steady cadence of his breathing, see the flecks of steel-gray in his dark irises.
“You’re remarkably calm for an accountant patching up a shrapnel wound in a snowstorm,” Marc said. The low note in his voice stirred a warmth in her that had nothing to do with the heater.
“When you audit multinational cartels, you learn to detach emotion from the balance sheet,” she murmured, wrapping sterile gauze around his arm with disciplined precision. “Panic doesn’t change the numbers. It just makes you sloppy.”
Marc’s gaze lingered on her face—the flush in her cheeks, the damp strands of brown hair curling against her collarbone. “You shouldn’t have to carry this kind of weight, Stevens.”
“Emma,” she corrected softly, meeting his eyes as she taped down the bandage. “If we’re going to be hunted together, call me Emma.”
For a second, the space between them shrank. Marc’s hand rested lightly against the seatback behind her head, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from his chest. His gaze drifted to her mouth, dark and intense.
Then, he blinked, pulling his professional wall back into place like iron shutters slamming shut.
“All right, Emma,” he said, shifting the Bronco back into drive. “Let’s get off this road.”
Dawn was a dull gray smear across the horizon when the truck crawled up a steep, unplowed logging track near the Vermont border.
Tucked into the hollow of a granite ridge sat a small, weather-beaten timber cabin. Pine boughs bowed under heavy snow, completely cloaking the roof from aerial surveillance.
Marc cut the engine. The silence was absolute, broken only by the howling wind through the evergreens.
“My grandfather built this place forty years ago,” Marc said, stepping out into the knee-deep snow and guiding her toward the porch. “Off the grid. No deed on state registry. Nobody knows it exists except me.”
Inside, the air was bitter cold, smelling of aged pine and dry woodsmoke. Marc quickly built a fire in the fieldstone hearth, coaxing a bright, crackling blaze that began to chase away the chill.
Emma walked into the cabin’s single main room, taking in the sparse interior: a rough-hewn table, a cast-iron stove, and a small sleeping alcove in the corner.
She froze at the sight of the alcove.
Against the timber wall sat a single, narrow wooden bed frame, piled with a pair of thick wool blankets and two down pillows.
One bed.
Marc walked up behind her, holding two tin mugs of hot water, his eyes tracking hers to the mattress. An awkward, heavy silence settled over the room, charged with an undeniable current of heat that had nothing to do with the fire.
Marc cleared his throat, his jaw set. “I’ll take the floor by the hearth.”
Emma looked back at the cold wooden planks, then up at his broad, exhausted frame.
“It’s twenty degrees outside, Colt,” she said softly, clutching the warm mug in her hands. “You’re injured, and you haven’t slept in thirty-six hours. Don’t be an idiot.”