Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
IRIS
He still makes coffee the same way.
Kettle on the stove, not a machine. Dark roast grounds measured by hand into a French press. Four minutes steep. No timer because Jax has always had a clock running in his head, counting down something. Back then it was mission windows and extraction deadlines. Now it's apparently coffee.
Watching him move through his kitchen with his back to me, shoulders filling out that black thermal, I catalog everything that's changed.
More silver in his hair. The beard is trimmed closer than he wore it in the field.
His hands are steadier, if that's even possible, and he's leaner.
Like the mountain stripped away whatever softness six years of civilian life might have added to another man.
But Jax was never soft. Even in Prague, when he held my face with both hands and told me it was over, his fingers were gentle and his eyes were granite.
The kettle whistles. He pours. Presses. Sets a mug in front of me on the table without asking how I take it.
Black. He remembers.
"Eat." He puts a plate beside the mug. Bread, peanut butter, an apple cut into quarters. Simple. Fast. Calorie dense. Field rations dressed up as breakfast.
My stomach clenches at the sight of food.
Six days of gas station protein bars, truck stop coffee, burner phones bought with cash at three different Walmart locations across four states.
The last real meal was a mediocre Caesar salad at a Denny's outside Salt Lake City, which I ate in the parking lot with the engine running because I'd spotted a dark sedan twice in my rearview.
The bread is homemade. Actual homemade bread from a man who spent twenty years killing people for the Central Intelligence Agency.
"You bake now?"
"Cade's wife taught me." He sits down across from me. "Natalie. She's good people."
The casual mention of someone in his life throws me. Jax doesn't have people. Didn't, anyway. The man I knew in the field had exactly two categories: mission essential personnel and everyone else. The first group got his attention. The second group got ignored.
"Tell me about Volkov," he says.
Business. Fine. Business is easier than the way his eyes keep dropping to my mouth when he thinks I'm focused on the coffee.
"Yuri Volkov died eighteen months ago. Heart attack in his Moscow apartment, according to the official report.
" Opening the messenger bag, I pull out the first hard drive.
Encrypted, backed up twice, wrapped in a Faraday pouch I bought at a surplus store in Denver.
"Unofficial report is that his son, Alexei, has been consolidating his father's intelligence network.
Folding in old assets, reactivating dormant cells, cleaning house. "
"Cleaning house means burning anyone who could identify the network's CIA connections."
"Exactly. Meridian was Yuri's crown jewel. We spent eighteen months dismantling his weapons pipeline through Eastern Europe. Alexei wants anyone who touched that operation dead. Proof of concept, maybe. Showing his father's old contacts that the new boss doesn't leave loose ends."
Jax picks up the hard drive. Turns it over once. "How many on the original team?"
"Ten. Six analysts, four operators. Connor Park was killed in a car bombing in Arlington six weeks ago.
Metro PD ruled it a gas leak. It wasn't." Pulling the second drive from the bag, I line them up on his table.
"Sarah Walsh died in a home invasion in Seattle.
Nothing taken. Beckett went dark three weeks ago.
Nobody's heard from him. I'm operating under the assumption he's dead. "
"That leaves seven."
"That leaves me. The other three analysts already had agency protection in place from unrelated threat assessments. They're flagged in the system. They have resources."
"And you don't."
"I left the CIA four years ago. Voluntarily. My protection detail ended when my clearance expired." A sip of coffee burns my tongue. Worth it. "Private consulting pays better, but it doesn't come with a security team."
He leans back in his chair. Studies me the way he used to study satellite imagery, looking for anomalies, gaps, places where the story doesn't match the terrain.
"You drove here."
"Flew to Reno under a work name. Rented a car with a secondary card I keep for situations exactly like this one. Paid cash for gas from Reno north. Left the car two miles down the mountain road. Walked the rest."
"In those shoes."
Glancing down at my boots, a brand new pair of hikers I bought at an outdoor store in Reno because my flats wouldn't survive a mountain trail, I almost smile. "They were the only ones that fit."
"You could have called the compound. Deck would've sent someone."
"And put your team on a radar they don't need to be on? Alexei's people are monitoring communication networks. Encrypted, unencrypted, satellite. Calling Guardian Peak's main line is painting a target on your front door."
"So you just showed up."
"Nobody expects the direct approach. It's why it works."
Something moves behind his eyes. Recognition, maybe.
Respect. In the field, I was the one who always argued for the simplest plan.
Jax wanted contingencies layered on contingencies.
Backup plans with their own backup plans.
But when the operation went sideways, which they always did, the simple plan was the one that held.
He stands. Moves to the window, scanning the tree line even though his sensors would catch anything within a quarter mile. Old habits. My gaze tracks the length of his back, the width of his shoulders, the way his hands hang loose at his sides but never relaxed. Always ready.
Seven years. Seven years since I've been in the same room with this man. Since I've breathed the same air. Since my body remembered what it feels like to be near someone who knows every classified shame, every professional sin, every terrible necessary choice.
I never stopped being in love with him, though I’ve never admitted that fact to anyone in seven years.
Which makes me either the bravest or the stupidest intelligence analyst in the Western Hemisphere. The jury's been out on that one for a while.
"The bed's yours," he says, still facing the window. "I'll take the chair."
"Jax, I'm not kicking you out of your own bed."
"It's not a negotiation."
"We're not in the field. You don't get to assign sleeping positions."
He turns. The look on his face is so purely Priest, the operational mask, the zero-emotion stare that used to make grown men confess state secrets, that my chest aches. "You've been running for six days. You're exhausted. You're taking the bed."
"Where's the couch?"
"Don't have one."
"You have a one room cabin with no couch?"
"Couches invite guests. I don't want guests."
The bluntness of it lands. He built this place to be alone. Specifically, architecturally, deliberately alone. One bed. One chair. One plate, one mug, one life stripped down to the absolute minimum needed to exist without requiring another human being.
And I just blew through his perimeter with a bag full of classified intelligence and seven years of unfinished business.
"Fine. The bed." Standing, I drain the last of the coffee.
My body aches. The hike up the mountain wasn't long but the terrain was rough, every step reminding me that my life for the past four years has been office chairs, client meetings, airport lounges.
"But we're reviewing the drives first thing in the morning. "
"Agreed."
Moving toward the bed, I stop. His pillow. His sheets. The quilt is dark wool, military issue if I had to guess, worn soft from years of use. The whole bed smells like him. Cedar. Just cedar. The scent lands in my bloodstream before I can brace against it.
"Is there a spare blanket?"
He pulls one from a trunk at the foot of the bed. Hands it to me without touching my fingers. Deliberate. The gap he maintains between our hands is exactly the width of a man who doesn't trust himself.
Good. That makes two of us.
"Jax."
He's already moving toward the chair, positioning it to face the door with a sight line to the window. Of course.
"We are going to talk about Prague."
His back is to me. His shoulders tighten just enough that I catch it. "Get some sleep, Iris."
"That's not a no."
"It's a not tonight."
I kick off the hiking boots. Climb into his bed fully dressed because taking off my clothes in this man's cabin while he sits ten feet away pretending he doesn't still love me seems inadvisable on every level.
The mattress is firm. The pillow dips where his head rests every night. Pulling the wool blanket up to my chin, I stare at the dark ceiling while Jax settles into the chair, and his breathing slows to that practiced, even rhythm he uses to stay alert while appearing at rest.
He's going to sit in that chair all night. Guarding the door. Guarding me. Doing exactly what he did the last time my life was in danger, making himself the barrier between me and anything that might cause harm.
Back then, the thing that caused harm was him.
My eyes close. Exhaustion drags me down fast, faster than expected, because my body knows what my brain won't accept yet. For the first time in six days, I'm safe. Not because of the perimeter sensors or the compound below or the mountain itself.
Because Jax is between me and the door.
That's always been enough.