Chapter Eight #2
“I’m fine,” I said, the words coming out rougher than I’d intended. “Just tired. Mission’s running long, sleep schedule’s off. Nothing a hot meal and eight hours won’t fix.”
Sterling looked at me the way Sterling looked at things he had already decided were not fine—no argument, no raised eyebrow, just a flat, patient wait that carried more weight than shouting ever could.
I held the stare for three heartbeats, then looked away first. Not because I was conceding the point—though I was—but because the pressure behind my sternum made it hard to meet anyone’s eyes for more than a few seconds at a time.
Sterling nodded once, like I’d confirmed something he already knew, then reached into his pocket for his phone.
He pulled up a contact, hit dial, and switched to speaker without asking my permission—another Sterling specialty, making decisions about other people’s privacy with the absolute certainty that he was right.
The call connected after three rings, Burke’s voice coming through the line unhurried and familiar. “Callahan.”
“Sterling,” Sterling said. “You on speaker with Cruz.”
A pause—Burke registering the information, making whatever calculations he needed to make. “Copy that,” he said. “What’s up?”
In the background, I could hear the sounds of the ranch—a door closing, something that might have been Danny’s voice at a distance, the soft cry of a baby that cut off almost as soon as it started.
“We’re checking in,” Sterling said. “Everything good at the ranch?”
Another pause, slightly longer. “Everything’s fine,” Burke said.
“Weather’s holding, winter prep’s on schedule.
Rawley’s got the east pasture fenced for the new colts.
Danny’s keeping up with the tech side of things.
” He paused, then added, “Jackson’s been a little under the weather, but nothing serious. Jasper’s handling it.”
I went completely still, the weight behind my sternum expanding to fill my entire chest. I heard the shape of what Burke wasn’t saying—it was in the pause before “under the weather,” in the way his voice went slightly careful around the edges, the way a man sounds when he’s been told what he can and cannot pass along.
Jackson was sick. Not hurt, not injured, but sick—the kind that warranted a pause and careful phrasing and Jasper’s “handling it” rather than Decker or someone else checking him over.
The kind that might, if I was reading between the lines correctly, explain the silence.
I didn’t push. Had no standing to push, and Burke would know better than to tell me anything Jackson hadn’t cleared.
I just stood on the stairwell landing with my hand on the rail and my eyes on the narrow window cut into the concrete wall, and tried to breathe around the sudden pressure in my chest.
Sterling took the phone off speaker and stepped to the far end of the landing, giving Burke a quick rundown of the team’s timeline and when we’d be back stateside.
I turned to the window and watched the street below—foot traffic, a vendor cart selling something that steamed in the cool air, a kid on a bicycle weaving between parked cars with the confidence of someone who’d done it a thousand times before.
Jackson was sick. Not answering his phone. Not returning texts. Not doing any of the things that had become normal between us over the past eight months.
Not doing anything except being sick, apparently, in ways that warranted Jasper’s attention and Burke’s careful phrasing.
Behind me, Sterling finished his call with a quiet “copy that” and a “see you in two weeks” that made something in my chest unlock by a fraction. Two weeks. Fourteen days. A timeline I could count down, a target I could hit, a problem I could solve by being in the right place at the right time.
When Sterling stepped back to my side, his face gave away nothing—just the careful blankness I’d seen him use on a hundred different operations, when the situation had gone sideways and the only thing keeping everyone alive was his absolute certainty that they would make it through.
“What are you thinking?” he asked, his voice level.
“I’m fine,” I said, the third time I’d said it and the least convincing version yet.
Sterling didn’t call me a liar. He just said, “You throw up every morning. You can’t keep food down. You’ve lost weight, and every time I turn around you’re asleep somewhere you shouldn’t be. That is not fine.”
My jaw tightened. I wanted to argue and knew I couldn’t, because Sterling was right and we both knew it, and the truth was that I’d been avoiding thinking too hard about what the symptoms added up to—because the answer that kept surfacing was one that would require me to completely rearrange what I knew.
“I just need to finish the mission,” I said finally. “Get back to the ranch. Figure out what’s happening from there.”
Sterling was quiet for a moment, his eyes on my face. “You mean get back to Jackson,” he said.
Not a question.
“Yes,” I said, and the word came out without hesitation, which was its own kind of answer.
Sterling nodded once, then clapped me on the shoulder with careful attention. “Then let’s finish this mission,” he said. “Two more weeks. Then home.”
I was good with that. Two weeks of Istanbul, two weeks of whatever was happening to my body, two weeks of wondering what was happening in Montana—all of it ending with me on Jackson’s porch, asking the question I’d been carrying since day three.
Sterling moved past me, heading back up the stairs toward the safe house. I stayed where I was, one hand on the rail, eyes on the street below.
The vendor had attracted a crowd—five or six people clustered around his cart, steam rising between them in the cool air. The kid on the bicycle had disappeared around the corner, moving too fast to track.
I pulled out my phone and checked it one more time—no new messages, just the unanswered thread between Jackson and me, the last entry still my “landed safely” text from nineteen days ago.
Whatever was happening—with Jackson, with my body—it would wait. Would have to wait, because the mission came first and the team came first and the fourteen days between now and home were non-negotiable.
I could make it fourteen days. I’d survived worse.
I tucked the phone back in my pocket and started up the stairs, following Sterling’s path toward whatever came next.