Chapter 3
THREE
Savannah
Seventy-two hours ago, I woke up with Nathan Torres in my bed, his arm heavy across my waist, and thought I knew what my life looked like.
Three years as partners, six months as lovers, and I still got a little thrill watching him sleep. He looked younger like this, without the careful FBI mask he wore during the day. His dark hair was mussed, falling over his forehead in a way that made my fingers itch to brush it back.
"Stop staring," he murmured without opening his eyes, voice rough with sleep.
"Can't help it. You're pretty."
He cracked one eye open, mouth quirking. "Pretty?"
"Beautiful. Devastating. Handsome. Absolutely gorgeous." I traced the scar on his shoulder—a bullet graze from our second year together when a crypto-fraud case went sideways. "How'd I get so lucky?"
He rolled over, pulling me against him, and his kiss tasted like morning and promises. "I'm the lucky one, Savi. Smartest woman in the FBI, and she lets me in her bed."
"Flattery will get you everywhere."
"Good to know." His hand slid down my side, and heat pooled low in my belly. "How much time before work?"
I glanced at the clock. "Forty minutes."
"Plenty of time."
Later, in the shower, Nathan washes my back with the careful attention that made my knees weak.
I thought this might be forever.
We'd talked about it—kids someday, a house outside the city, and normal things that seemed possible despite our abnormal jobs. He'd met my grandmother before she died, charmed her completely. She'd given me her pearl earrings afterward, said, "That one's a keeper, sugar."
God, what a fool I was.
Now I'm pressed against a stranger's back on a stolen motorcycle, every nerve ending alive with fear and want, trusting him because the alternative is dying.
The wind cuts cold through my torn blouse as Sawyer navigates San Francisco's maze of streets. I catalog what I know about him: Guardian HRS operator based on the speed with which my desperate call to an old CIA contact for help.
After Nathan destroyed my career, I reached out to my contact. He gave me CJ’s name. Said he worked for a group good at extractions.
CJ got Sawyer to me, military trained from the way he moved through my apartment, comfortable with violence in a way that should terrify me, but doesn't.
His body under my hands is solid muscle, coiled power, and he smells like gunpowder and something woody—cedar, maybe pine.
There's a particular way military men hold themselves—spine straight, even when relaxed, awareness of every exit, hands that move with economy. Sawyer has all of that, plus something else—something darker.
The way he killed those men in my apartment was efficient, almost beautiful in its precision. No hesitation, no excess, just the exact amount of violence needed.
It should scare me.
Instead, I feel safer than I have in three days.
His tactical vest has dried blood on it. The thought that he waded through blood to get to me, that he stepped into my war knowing nothing about me except that I needed help, makes my chest tight with something I don't want to examine too closely.
The rappelling rope left his hands raw where he controlled our descent, and I watched him ignore the pain like it didn't exist. There are scars on his forearms—burn scars, old but extensive.
He wears a military challenge coin on a chain around his neck that escaped his shirt during the fighting. Someone else's coin, not his own, which means loss, which means guilt, which means he carries ghosts the way I'm learning to carry betrayal.
"We're clear," he says, voice carrying back to me. "Extraction point's five minutes out."
I should ask where we're going. Should demand credentials, verification, and proof that he is who he says he is. But Guardian HRS is real, and CJ came through.
And more than that, my instincts—the same ones that saved me from Nathan's needle three nights ago—say this man will keep me safe or die trying.
Three nights ago. Thursday. Nathan and I had worked late on the cryptocurrency case, and ordered Thai food to the office like we had a hundred times before.
Nathan was distracted, kept checking his phone, but I figured it was work stress. The Prometheus communications were hidden in the blockchain data we were analyzing, but I didn't know that yet. Wouldn't know until after.
We went back to his place around midnight. Nathan wanted to shower first—said the office air made him feel grimy. I was at my computer, running one more analysis on the blockchain patterns that had been nagging at me all day, when I found it.
Communications hidden in the transaction hashes, using a cipher I recognized because Nathan had shown it to me months ago as a theoretical exercise.
"Hey, babe," I called toward the bathroom, "remember that cipher you were working on? I think someone's using a variant for—"
The bathroom door opened, and Nathan stood there in just a towel, expression strange. "What did you find?"
"Hidden communications in our crypto case. Look, if you decode the hashes using—" I turned back to the screen, excited by the discovery.
That's when I saw the reflection on my monitor. Nathan behind me, pulling something from his gym bag.
A syringe.
I spun in my chair, already seeing the needle in his hand, the cold calculation in his eyes.
"Nathan?"
"I'm sorry, Savi. You weren't supposed to find that." He moved toward me.
"You're Prometheus." Not a question.
The pieces clicked together—his interest in my decryption work, the way he steered me away from certain blockchain addresses, how he always knew which cases to prioritize.
"It's bigger than you understand. America needs to change, and we're going to change it." He reached for me with the syringe. "This is painless. You'll just go to sleep."
I'd taken Ambien an hour earlier, desperate for sleep after three nights of insomnia over the weird patterns in our case. But it hadn't worked—never does when my mind's racing. So I was foggy but awake, and he thought I was deeper under than I was.
I let my body go limp, eyes fluttering closed. He relaxed slightly, moving closer, and that's when I rolled hard left, off the chair. The needle hit the leather where I'd been sitting.
"Savi!" He grabbed for me, but I was already moving, six years of aikido taking over. I used his momentum against him, a hip throw that sent him into the desk. The lamp shattered, papers flying everywhere.
"Three years," I gasped, scrambling for the door. "Three years of being my partner, six months in my bed, and you were using me the whole time?"
"I love you," he said, getting to his feet, syringe still in hand. "But this is bigger than us. The water supply, the infrastructure collapse, the rebirth—you'd understand if you'd let me explain."
"You're going to kill tens of thousands of people."
"To save millions." He moved to block the door. "The system is broken. We're going to fix it. I wanted you with us, but you're too rigid, too bound by rules."
I grabbed my laptop—instinct more than planning—and my go-bag that I keep by the door. "You don't know me at all."
"I know everything about you. Your coffee order, your favorite movie, how you cry every year on your parents' death anniversary, how you sound when you—"
I threw the coffee mug at his head—my FBI academy mug, ironic—and bolted while he ducked.
Out the door, down the stairs, into the night. Behind me, I heard him calling my name, but it wasn't the loving way he'd said it that morning.
It was cold and professional.
The voice of a stranger I'd been sleeping next to for six months.
The extraction point turns out to be an abandoned warehouse near the water.
A helicopter waits, rotors already spinning.
The pilot nods at Sawyer, and we lift into the darkness without questions or paperwork.
Everything about this screams black ops, off-books, the kind of extraction that doesn't officially happen.
I open my laptop as soon as we're airborne, needing to work, to focus on something besides the heat still coursing through me from that kiss.
Stupid. Reckless.
But when we landed that impossible jump, when death became life in a heartbeat, I needed to feel something besides fear.
"What are you doing?" Sawyer shifts closer to see my screen, and his thigh presses against mine.
"Checking if my distributed backups are intact." My fingers fly across the keyboard, muscle memory taking over.
Seventeen different servers, each containing fragments of the Prometheus data, encrypted with a key derived from my grandmother's birthday, my parents' anniversary, and the GPS coordinates of their crash site—things Nathan knew but would never think to combine.
The encryption is AES-256 wrapped in my own algorithm, something I developed at MIT that never made it into my FBI work because it was too complex for standard implementation.
Server one: intact. Server two: intact. Server three: someone tried to access it six hours ago but failed the authentication. Nathan's digital fingerprints are all over the attempt. He's hunting my backups, but he doesn't know me as well as he thinks.
"I hid pieces of evidence across seventeen different servers, encrypted and fragmented. Even if they find some, they won't get all."
"Smart." Sawyer’s approval shouldn't matter, but warmth blooms in my chest anyway. "Tell me about Prometheus."
I pull up the files I've been compiling for three days, ever since I stumbled onto their communications hidden in blockchain transactions I was analyzing for cryptocurrency fraud.
"Attacks on water treatment facilities in Los Angeles. The chemicals they're using will look like standard contamination at first, but it's designed to cause organ failure over time. Thousands dead before anyone realizes it's not accidental."
"You’re kidding me."