Chapter Eight
~ Cruz ~
I knelt on the cracked tile floor of the safe house bathroom, one hand gripping the rim of the toilet bowl, the other braced against the damp wall, as my stomach contracted for the fourth time in ten minutes.
The porcelain was cold under my palm, the cement floor harder under my knees than it had been last night when I’d tried to sleep on it after giving my bunk to Rivera, who’d come back from the east side op with a bullet graze across his ribs.
Dawn light filtered through the narrow window above the tank, just enough to turn the single bulb’s flicker from annoying to actively nauseating.
Nothing came up. There was nothing left to come up. I’d thrown up what little I’d managed to eat yesterday at 0230, then again at 0430, then dry-heaved twice more when the smell of coffee reached me through the door.
I’d stopped bothering to pretend I was counting around day eight, when Harker had caught me in the kitchen at 0500 with my forehead against the refrigerator door, trying to decide if I could risk orange juice or if water was the only safe bet.
“You look like shit,” he’d said, not unkindly. “You want me to tell Sterling you need a day?”
I’d told him I was fine. Still telling myself the same thing, two weeks later, with my knees going numb against the concrete and my jaw clenched so tight I could feel it in my temples.
When the stomach rumblings finally stopped, I sat back against the wall and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The tile was cold through my t-shirt, damp in a way that spoke to the building’s plumbing issues rather than anyone’s cleaning habits.
Outside, the street market was coming awake—vendors setting up carts, voices calling to each other in Turkish, the mix of diesel and cardamom and something roasting that was Istanbul in the morning.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through it—not the nausea, which was starting to fade, but the disquiet that had been sitting behind my sternum since day three of this mission.
Jackson’s silence.
Not the gradual slowing of texts that happened when one of us was busy—a pattern we’d established over the past eight months, the natural rhythm of two men who spent most of their lives on operations they couldn’t talk about.
Not the missed calls or the delayed responses or even the single-word answers that meant Jackson was running on three hours of sleep and a protein bar.
Complete absence. Zero communication. The last text I’d gotten from him was nineteen days ago, a simple “copy that” in response to my ETA, sent three hours before I’d boarded the plane for Istanbul.
Nineteen days of radio silence from a man who’d stood on his porch and watched me drive away with a look on his face I was still trying to figure out.
I pushed myself to my feet, bracing one hand against the sink.
My reflection in the cracked mirror looked exactly as bad as I felt—skin too pale under the week’s worth of stubble, eyes shadowed, the kind of hollow-checked thin that came from throwing up everything you tried to eat for two weeks straight.
I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth with bottled water and the travel tube I’d packed four weeks ago in Montana, then checked my phone.
No new messages. Just the thread between Jackson and me, the last entry my unanswered “landed safely, mission running on schedule, check in when I can.” Sent the day after my arrival, almost thirty days ago.
I’d read enough operational silences to know the difference between a man who was busy and a man who had made a decision. The problem was I couldn’t tell which one this was, and that not-knowing was doing something to me I didn’t have a clean word for.
The team was running on a two-week extension—standard procedure when an arms dealer turned out to have connections to the people who’d put Eleanor Peterson in jail. Sterling had called it in the night we’d made the connection, and the powers that be had approved the timeline without a blink.
Two more weeks of Istanbul. Two more weeks of Jackson’s silence. Two more weeks of whatever was happening to my body that made it reject coffee and sleep and the basic functions that had kept me alive through ten years of covert operations.
I rinsed my mouth one more time, ran a hand through my hair, and forced myself to stand up straight. The mission clock was ticking in the background—twenty-six days down, fourteen to go—but it was the other count that ran louder in my head.
Twenty-six days. Not quite four weeks. Long enough to notice, not quite long enough to panic.
I told myself I wouldn’t text again. Wouldn’t call. Wouldn’t reach out to Rawley or Jojo or any of the people who might know what was happening at the farmhouse down the road from the main ranch.
I would wait, instead, until I could get home and ask Jackson to his face what had changed between the morning he’d kissed me goodbye and the afternoon my texts stopped being answered.
The nausea was fading now, leaving behind the exhaustion that sleep didn’t touch—the kind that sat behind my eyes and made me short with people I had no business being short with.
I’d lost my temper with Harker yesterday over a misrouted equipment request, had snapped at Nguyen this morning when he’d asked if I wanted first shift on comms.
Not like me. Not the controlled, methodical operator Sterling had hand-picked for this team five years ago.
The kind of behavior that got people sent home early.
I tucked my phone into my pocket and opened the bathroom door, stepping into the narrow hallway that connected the safe house’s three rooms.
The main space was quiet—Sterling at the table with the satellite imagery, Harker and Nguyen sleeping in rotation on the pullout couch, Rivera at the window with binoculars, watching the street below.
They’d figured out something was wrong. Of course they had—five men living in four hundred square feet for three weeks, watching each other eat and sleep and move through the specific routines that kept them alive under pressure.
They’d noticed the vomiting, the weight I’d dropped, the circles under my eyes that no amount of coffee seemed to touch.
They’d just been kind enough not to mention it.
I moved to the kitchen area—a hot plate and a mini-fridge tucked into the corner—and started a pot of coffee I probably wouldn’t finish. The small kindness of normal routine, acting like nothing was wrong when everything felt like it was coming apart.
Behind me, the mission continued—satellite imagery, radio traffic, the careful calculation of risk and reward that had kept us all alive through a dozen contracts more dangerous than this one.
Ahead of me, fourteen more days of Istanbul, fourteen more days of whatever was happening to my body, fourteen more days of wondering what had happened in Montana to make Jackson go completely silent.
I’d find out when I got home. Would stand on his porch and ask the question I’d been carrying since day three. Would listen to whatever answer he gave me, and figure out what came next from there.
For now, though, I had coffee to make and comms to run and a mission to finish—one step at a time, one day at a time, one dry heave at a time if that was what it took.
The coffee finished brewing. I poured myself half a cup, added enough sugar to mask the bitterness, and carried it to the table where Sterling was working. He looked up when I sat down, his eyes moving over my face with the careful assessment I’d seen a hundred times before.
“Morning,” he said, his voice neutral.
“Morning,” I replied, and lifted the cup in a toast neither of us believed.
Outside, Istanbul came fully awake—traffic building, voices rising, the rhythm of a city going about its business while five men in a walkup apartment plotted how to dismantle an arms dealer’s network without getting themselves killed in the process.
I took a sip of coffee and tried not to think about how it would probably be coming back up in twenty minutes. Tried not to think about the silence from Montana, or the look on Jackson’s face when I’d kissed him goodbye, or the fourteen days still stretching between now and home.
One step at a time. One day at a time. One dry heave at a time.
I could make it fourteen days. I’d survived worse.
* * * *
I was halfway down the concrete stairwell of the safe house when Sterling appeared at the landing below, one shoulder braced against the wall, arms crossed, positioned so I’d have to physically move him to get past.
Not an accidental encounter. A deliberate block, Sterling-style—no words, no preamble, just his attention and the absolute certainty that he was exactly where he meant to be.
I stopped two steps above him, one hand on the metal rail bolted to the wall.
The stairwell was narrow and dim, paint peeling off the walls in long strips, a bare bulb two flights up casting everything in flat yellow light.
Behind Sterling, the door to the street stood half-open, morning traffic noise filtering up the stairwell in bursts.
We stood like that for a long moment—me on the stairs, Sterling on the landing, neither of us willing to be the first to speak. Finally, Sterling straightened, uncrossed his arms, and looked at me with the same focus I’d seen him bring to a dozen different crisis points.
“You’re throwing up every morning,” he said, his voice flat and unhurried.
“You’ve lost—“ he paused, eyes moving over my frame with careful assessment, “—fifteen pounds, minimum. You’re sleeping in chairs and on comm boards at odd hours, and yesterday you snapped at Reyes’s second-in-command over a logistics call that didn’t warrant a raised voice, let alone the one you gave him. ”
He delivered it like he was reading from a list—no embellishment, no theater, just the facts as he’d calculated them. The kind of assessment I’d seen him make a hundred times before, on operations where knowing exactly what was happening meant the difference between coming home and not.