8. The Safe House
EIGHT
The Safe House
ADDY
Three days.
Seventy-two hours inside these walls, and I have memorized every crack in the plaster, every water stain on the drop ceiling, every shift in the light coming through the boarded windows.
Guardian HRS keeps safe houses scattered across the country, Frost told me when we arrived.
Nondescript. Off-grid.
The kind of places nobody looks for on a map because they don't appear on one.
This one is a squat, two-story property on a rural stretch of highway with a gravel lot and a chain-link perimeter, flanked on three sides by timber.
From the road, it looks like a surveying company that stopped caring.
From the inside, it's hardened concrete, encrypted comms, and enough tactical kit to start a small war.
A long folding table in the main room holds my terminal. There's a bathroom down the hall with a temperamental water heater, and five men who keep finding reasons to be in whatever room I walk into.
And one man who has not.
Fourteen months of forensic audit work is spread across my screens.
Ares Global Logistics is a ghost corporation built on layered shells, and the last three days have been about collapsing those layers one by one — tracing the money from the offshore accounts back through the network, building a paper chain so airtight that no prosecutor, no judge, no attorney with a $900-an-hour billing rate can poke a hole in it.
When I hand this off to Guardian HRS and the appropriate federal authorities, the evidence will be undeniable. It has to be.
That's the job.
Complete the audit.
Make the work irrefutable.
It's intricate, meticulous work, and total focus required.
Total focus has not happened in seventy-two hours.
Flint drops his mug into the dish rack at 0630 with a clatter that makes me flinch. Kade fills the entire doorway whenever he wants to ask a question he could have put in a message. Riot paces.
The team is coiled, running hand-to-hand sparring rotations in the gravel lot outside because there is nothing else to do but wait for me to finish, and waiting is apparently a skill none of them have fully mastered.
Wyatt is out there with them every morning.
He's already in the lot when I bring my coffee to the boarded window. Moving through takedown sequences with Hawk in the gray predawn, his breath fogging in the cold air, his focus locked with the same precision that tracked me through the crosshairs before he ever kicked my door open.
This morning the sky is wrong.
Not sunrise — the light that's come up is flat and greenish, sitting low over the mountains like a lid. The timber to the east is moving.
The whole tree line shifts as if something large is breathing through it from the other side.
By the time Wyatt and Hawk finish the rotation and come inside, there's the faint, clean smell of ozone bleeding through the gaps in the boards. Rain coming.
Maybe more than rain.
He takes Hawk to the ground in a clean sweep, pins him, releases. Stands. Rolls his neck.
He doesn't come inside. He never comes inside while I'm at the window. Whether that's deliberate, or whether proximity genuinely costs him the way it costs me, I can't tell — the constant low-grade burn of wanting something I can't have in a building full of people who would absolutely notice.
In the cabin, we were alone. One long night of impossible sex. Something gave way between us that neither of us expected.
Now we're in a safe house with five operators between us and every exit. The heat between us is still right there, undimmed, indifferent to operational security or Frost's careful, watching silence.
I go back to my terminal.
The moment Wyatt shuts the door behind him,the air in the room shifts. It's not a subtle change. It's gravity, the way my body leans toward him.
Craves him. Without me asking. Without me even thinking about it.
The problem is that I know what that body feels like, and I want more.
That's the part I can't shut off.
I can catalogue it from here — the way he moves, weight balanced low, controlled and economic, nothing wasted — and my nervous system supplies the rest without permission.
The weight of him. The heat radiating off his chest when he pulled me against the table in the dark. The rough drag of his hands over my body. The way he went completely still for one suspended second before control snapped entirely and he stopped being careful.
Don't. I pick up my coffee. Do not turn around.
He doesn't come to me.
Not because he doesn't want to.
I know that.
Through repetition, through paying attention, through the small involuntary tells of a man who has spent his entire adult life trying to be unreadable.
The half-second pause when he passes my chair.
The way he angles himself in a room so I'm always in his sightline.
The set of his jaw at night when Frost says we're done and Wyatt takes his position on the floor in the front room instead of anywhere near me.
He sleeps on the floor in the front room with his sidearm within reach. I sleep on the cot in the back room. The twelve feet of hallway between us might as well be a mile of open ground.
Five other people in this building at all times. No privacy. None.
He knows it. So do I.
The Guardian team isn't oblivious — Frost clocks it every time Wyatt crosses the room and his trajectory adjusts toward me before he reroutes. Frost doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. The weight of his silence on the subject is its own full sentence.
As for the relationship between Wyatt and Frost, it's a live wire.
I've been stepping around it for three days. So has everyone else. But the charge between those two men doesn't dissipate. It gets denser the longer they're in the same building, a specific and loaded kind of silence that other people's voices can't fill.
On day two, I'm determined to find out why.
It's mid-morning. Frost is running comms in the back room, Riot is on the roof checking the antenna array, Kade and Hawk have gone out to sweep the road.
That leaves Flint at the kitchen table, field-stripping a sidearm with the unhurried attention of someone who does it the way other people do crosswords.
I refill my mug and sit down across from him.
"You're going to ask me something." He doesn't look up.
"What's the history between Wyatt and Frost?"
The disassembled components are laid out on a cloth in front of him. He picks up the barrel, runs a cleaning rod through it, sets it back down. Takes his time.
"Not my story to tell."
"I'm not asking you to tell it. I'm asking you to confirm what I've already figured out."
He looks up at that. Something in his expression shifts — a slight recalculation. He sets the cleaning rod down.
"What have you figured out?"
"Wyatt took a contract four years ago that went wrong. The target turned out to be someone he shouldn't have killed. Frost found out, and that was it. Four years of nothing." I keep my voice even. "What I don't know is why it mattered enough to sever everything."
Flint is quiet for a long moment. His hands stay flat on the table.
"Still not my story to tell."
"I read the folder." I keep my voice level.
"I know it was a federal witness. A man in protection.
Wyatt didn't know. He thought the target was what the broker told him.
I know what happened to the investigation after.
" I pause. "What I don't know is why there's a glacial chill between Wyatt and Frost."
The mug is warm in my hands. I stare at it.
"Frost has a source inside the Marshal Service.
Always has." Flint picks up the barrel again.
His voice stays level, but the flatness of it costs him something.
"He called Wyatt. Gave him the file. Full name, photo, everything about the man he killed.
The family." He resumes cleaning. "Wyatt didn't deny it.
Didn't try to justify it. Just went quiet and stayed quiet.
Frost made the call that he couldn't have someone on his team — or in his family — who was capable of that. "
"He didn't know Wyatt was hunting the broker who set him up?"
"Frost knows that now. Didn't know it then, and even now—" He stops.
Sets the barrel down carefully, like he's making a decision about how much to say.
"It's not about whether Wyatt knew. It's about the fact that Wyatt spent years making money killing people.
At some point you run out of ways to call it righteous.
Frost drew a line. Wyatt ignored it." He meets my eyes.
"That's not something you unfracture with one phone call or one op. "
"But isn't that what you do?" I gesture at the walls, the gear stacked to the ceiling, the building we're all sitting inside. "You all work for Guardian HRS. You take jobs. You kill people doing those jobs, and you make money doing it. Why is this different?"
The data I laid out for Frost on the hood of that truck surfaces in my mind. Me telling him without knowing any of this — without knowing any of the history — that Wyatt had been working the same case from the other direction. That he had spent four years hunting the broker who burned him.
"He didn't tell Frost any of that. The four years of tracking.
He was just going to let Frost keep thinking the worst of him.
" Flint reassembles the sidearm in one practiced sequence, slides the magazine home, sets it on the cloth.
"That's on Wyatt. He doesn't argue his own case.
Never has. Frost handed down the verdict and Wyatt accepted it. "
"Because he thought Frost was right?"
"You'd have to ask Wyatt. Whatever the reason, it sure as hell didn't help anything that Wyatt's been silent about the whole thing for four years." He picks up the sidearm and checks the sight. "Not telling Frost the truth, keeping it secret all these years — that's almost as bad as the hit."
"Is Frost going to be able to work with him?"