Chapter 14 The Truth #3
“I found out two days after the funeral. Her sister told me.” The name scrapes past my teeth. “She thought I knew. She said, ‘Hey at least you didn’t have to bury both of them.’”
“What? What a callous thing to say. You did. You buried both of them.”
“Yeah, but the baby wasn’t born. We weren’t married. It was the family’s disgrace. Therefore, it never existed.”
“Oh, Diego. I’m so sorry. It did. It definitely did.”
The highway blurs. I blink it clear.
“Both of them. My girlfriend and my …” The word won’t come. It’s been six years, and the word still won’t come.
“Your child.”
“Yeah.” The confirmation feels like a knife between the ribs. “My child. Eight weeks old. The size of a raspberry, apparently. That’s what the internet says. I looked it up. After. Like knowing the size would make it feel more real.”
“Did it?”
“No. Nothing made it real. Nothing made it make sense.” I stare at the road. “I could have had a family. A reason to come home. A life that wasn’t—” I gesture vaguely at the van, the road, the endless running. “This.”
Cassie’s hand finds mine. She doesn’t try to fix it. Doesn’t offer platitudes or comfort or the hollow reassurances that people always offer when they don’t know what to say. She just holds on.
“That’s why you said you couldn’t do it again.” Her voice is quiet. “Lose someone. Someone who mattered.”
“I went to Colombia after the funeral. Ghost found me three months later in a cartel warehouse, bleeding out, with six dead sicarios on the floor.” I pause. “I wasn’t trying to survive. I was trying to find the men who killed her. I was trying to make them pay. And if I died in the process—”
“You wanted to die.”
“I wanted to stop feeling. Death seemed like the easiest way to do that.”
“But you survived.”
“Ghost dragged me out. Patched me up. Offered me a choice.” I glance at her. “Join Cerberus and fight the right way, or spiral into the dark and die alone.”
“You chose to fight.”
“I chose to stop being Diego Martinez. I buried him in that canyon with Sofia and the baby that never was. Halo is what’s left.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. The miles unspool beneath us. The mountains grow closer, their peaks sharper against the darkening sky.
“What was she like?” Cassie asks, finally. “Sofia.”
The question catches me off guard. No one asks about Sofia. They talk around her. They reference her like a footnote. But no one asks who she actually was.
“Brave,” I say. “Stubborn as hell. She was a journalist, investigating cartel corruption in Mexico City. She thought the truth mattered more than her safety.” A pause. “She was wrong.”
“She sounds like someone I would have liked.”
“You would have hated each other.” A ghost of a smile. “You’re too similar. Both convinced you can take on the world alone. Both wrong.”
“Maybe she taught you something.”
“She taught me that love is a liability. That caring about someone makes them a target.”
“And now?”
I look at her. The woman who refused to be invisible. The woman who jumped out of a five-story window because she trusted me. The woman who’s sitting here, holding my hand, asking about a ghost I’ve never let anyone else see.
“I’m not sure about anything,” I say. “People say I’m lucky. That I’ve got a guardian angel looking out for me, but I think I’m cursed, and all I know is that I can’t lose you the way I lost her.”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.” Her grip tightens on my hand.
“I’ve watched you for days. I’ve seen what you do.
How you move. How you think. You’re not the man who lost Sofia in a canyon.
You’re the man who rappelled down a building to save me.
You’re the man who walked into my apartment with a plan and walked out with me alive. ”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“It means you’re not cursed.” Her voice is fierce now. Certain. “It means luck isn’t the enemy. It means sometimes the universe puts people in your path for a reason. And maybe—” She stops. Takes a breath. “Maybe I’m here to be another tragedy you survive. Maybe I’m here to be something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet.” She lifts my hand. Presses her lips to my knuckles. “But we’re going to find out.”
We drive in silence for a while after that. But it’s a different silence. Lighter. The ghosts are still there—Sofia, the baby, the canyon—but they’re not crushing anymore. They’re just—present. Acknowledged.
Cassie breaks the silence first.
“You didn’t kill her.”
“I wasn’t there to protect her.”
“You were doing your job. Protecting people in Syria. That’s what you do.” She squeezes my hand. “The cartels killed her. They murdered a woman and her baby because she found truth. That’s not on you.”
“I should have—”
“Done what? Read her mind from the other side of the world? Predicted cartel hit squads?” Her voice sharpens. “You’re not God. You’re just a man who loved someone and lost her. That’s a tragedy. It’s not your fault.”
Something cracks open in my chest. Something I’ve kept sealed for six years.
And since we’re sharing …
“You’re not invisible.” The words come out rough. Raw.
“What?”
“You said you thought you had to be perfect to matter. To be seen.” I glance at her. “You’re the loudest person in my world. You have been since you hit me with that pepper spray.”
She laughs—wet, shaky.
“That’s a terrible meet-cute.”
“It’s ours.”
I lift her hand. Press my lips to her knuckles.
“You matter. Not because of your cases or your grades or your goddamn spelling bee trophies. You matter because you’re you. Because you fight. Because you don’t quit. Because you see things other people miss and you refuse to look away.”
“I’m starting to believe that.”
“Good. Because I’m going to keep telling you until you do.”
The road narrows as we cross into West Virginia. Gravel under tires. Trees pressing close on both sides, their bare branches scratching at the sky like skeletal fingers. The last of the daylight bleeds out behind the ridge line, turning the world to shades of gray and shadow.
“Should be the next turn. Blackwood Road.”
I slow the van. Kill the headlights. We creep forward, the engine a low murmur in the gathering dark.
The turnoff appears—a dirt track cutting through the trees, marked only by a faded sign half-swallowed by undergrowth. I drive past and stop the van a quarter mile out. Kill the engine.
Binoculars up. I scan the perimeter, moving systematically from left to right. Looking for the things that shouldn’t be there. The shadows that move wrong. The glints of metal that might be cameras, tripwires, or worse.
The facility appears through the trees: Chain-link fence topped with razor wire, rusted in places where the weather has eaten through the galvanizing.
Industrial buildings—prefab metal, institutional gray, the kind of anonymous architecture that screams government contract.
Three structures visible: a main building, a smaller outbuilding, and what appears to be a generator shed. No lights. No vehicles. No movement.
The gate is open. Swinging slightly in the wind.
“What do you see?”
“It’s been cleared.”
“How can you tell?”
“No guards. No patrols. Gate’s not just unlocked—it’s abandoned. Look at the weeds growing through the gravel by the entrance. That’s at least a week of neglect. Maybe two.” I lower the binoculars. “Whoever was here left in a hurry.”
“Or they want us to think that.”
“Maybe.” I check my weapon. Magazine seated. Round chambered. “Ghost said recon only.”
“And?”
“And that was before we drove six hours to find an empty facility.” I look at her. “Whatever Stratton was storing here, they moved it. But people in a hurry leave things behind.”
“Evidence.”
“Maybe.”
She meets my gaze. Steady. Ready. Not the frightened attorney from DC. Something harder. Something forged.
“We go in. Together.”
“Cassie—”
“You need someone watching your back. And I need to see what I almost died for.”
I stare at her for a long moment. The woman who pepper-sprayed me in a Georgetown apartment. The woman who climbed down a fire escape under gunfire. The woman who jumped out a window because I asked her to trust me. The woman who somehow became the only thing in my life worth protecting.
I reach into the pack. Pull out a flashlight. Hand it to her.
“Stay behind me. Move when I move. Stop when I stop. If I say run, you run. No arguments.”
She takes the flashlight. Our fingers brush.
“No arguments.”
“I mean it, Cassie. This isn’t a courtroom. There are no objections, no sustained, no approach the bench. If something goes wrong in there, you do exactly what I say, exactly when I say it.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Because yesterday you logged into a monitored system against direct orders. Yesterday—”
“Yesterday, I learned what happens when I don’t listen.” Her voice is quiet. “I saw those men come through the door. I saw what they would have done to me—to us. I’m not going to make that mistake again.”
I study her face in the fading light. Looking for doubt. Looking for the fear that might make her freeze at the wrong moment.
All I see is determination.
“Okay.” I open my door. “Let’s go.”
We step out of the van into the gathering dark.
The air is cold, sharp with the smell of pine and dead leaves and something else underneath—something chemical, faint but present. The facility looms ahead of us, its metal walls catching the last light of day.
The gate swings in the wind. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Waiting.
I pull my weapon. Check the safety. Look at Cassie one more time.
“Stay close.”
We move forward into the dark.
The facility waits—silent, abandoned, holding secrets neither of us is prepared to find.