Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
PRIEST
She talks in her sleep.
Three hours in the chair with my Sig on my thigh, watching the door, listening to the mountain settle around us, and Iris murmurs something in French.
Then Russian. Then back to English, fragments of words I can't piece together.
Her body shifts under the wool blanket, rolling toward the wall, pulling her knees up.
The analyst's mind never shuts down. Even unconscious, she's processing.
Dawn comes gray through the window. No sun yet, just the flat light that precedes it, turning the cabin from black to charcoal.
My back aches from the chair but I've slept in worse.
Spent seventy two hours in a drainage pipe outside Mosul once, folded into a space designed for a man half my size.
A wooden chair with a cushion is luxury.
By 0600, I've checked the perimeter feeds twice, texted Sully an encrypted request to run background on Alexei Volkov's known network, and started a second pot of coffee. The smell fills the cabin. Iris stirs.
Watching her wake up in my bed is a particular kind of hell I didn't prepare for.
She stretches first, arms above her head, back arching. The movement lifts her shirt and exposes a strip of skin at her waist. Olive. Smooth. A scar on her left hip that wasn't there seven years ago.
New scar. New story I don't know. The thought burns.
Her eyes open. Focus. Find me immediately, sitting in the chair by the door with a coffee mug balanced on my knee. For a half second her face is open, unguarded, and the expression there is so raw, so honest, that my chest constricts.
Then the walls go up. Professional Iris. Analyst Iris. The woman who can smile at a hostile asset across a conference table while mentally mapping his escape routes.
"How long have you been watching me?"
"Since you fell asleep."
"That was four hours ago."
"Three and a half."
She sits up, pushes hair from her face. "You didn't sleep."
"Wasn't tired."
The look she gives me says she knows exactly how full of shit that answer is. She climbs out of bed and heads for the small bathroom. The door closes. Water runs. Two minutes later she's back, face washed, hair pulled into a twist at the back of her neck.
"Drives," she says. "Now."
I bring my laptop to the table. She plugs in the first hard drive, enters a 24 character encryption key from memory, and starts pulling files. Within minutes my screen fills with personnel records, financial transfers, surveillance photos, intercepted communications.
"This is Alexei's kill order." She points to a document in Cyrillic. "Distributed through three cutout layers. The original directive references Meridian by its internal CIA code name, which means he has access to classified operational files."
"Mole."
"Or a data breach. Either way, he has the full team roster." She pulls up a second document. "Timeline. Connor was hit first because he was the easiest. Walsh second. Beckett third, though I can't confirm he's dead. The pattern moves from lowest security to highest."
"Which puts you where on the list?"
"Second to last." Her finger traces the roster on screen. "You're last."
Because I'm the hardest to kill. She doesn't say it. Doesn't need to.
"Sully's running a deep web scrub on Alexei's financial network. Should have results by tonight." Standing, I refill both mugs. "Until then, we fortify. I'm upgrading the perimeter sensors, adding trip wires on the north and east approaches. Your car needs to be moved. I'll have Wolfe handle it."
"Wolfe?"
"Our tracker. Former SEAL sniper. He can move a vehicle without being seen."
"I know who Wolfe Hendrix is. I wrote his threat assessment for a joint operation in 2018." She takes the mug. Sips. "He's good."
"He's the best."
Her eyebrow lifts. "That's a compliment. From you."
"It's an accurate assessment."
"Also a compliment. You're getting soft in your old age, Jax."
The teasing hits me somewhere behind the ribs. She used to do this in the field. Lighten the tension when things got dark. Crack a joke in the middle of a sixteen hour surveillance shift that would make me forget, just for a second, that the people we were watching would be dead within the week.
I set down my mug. "We need ground rules."
"Oh, this should be good."
"You stay within the perimeter. No solo hikes, no wandering, no going to the main compound without me. If I'm not here, the door stays locked."
"I'm not a prisoner."
"You're a target. There's a..." The word difference almost leaves my mouth. I stop it. "Those require different protocols."
She leans back in her chair. Crosses her arms. The movement pulls her shirt tight across her breasts and I force my eyes to stay on her face, which is its own problem because her face is the one I see every time I close my eyes.
Blue eyes. That jaw. The slight asymmetry of her lips where the bottom one is fuller than the top.
"What else?"
"We keep things professional. You're here for protection. I'm providing it. That's the scope."
"Professional." She says the word the way someone tastes wine they're not impressed with. "You and I were never professional, Jax."
"We were professionals who made a mistake."
The words land hard. Her chin lifts. The softness that was creeping into her expression vanishes.
"Is that what you've been telling yourself for seven years? That what we had was a mistake?"
"What we had compromised the operation."
"The operation succeeded."
"Because I removed the compromise."
"By removing me." Her voice stays even but her hands grip the mug tighter. "You didn't remove a compromise. You removed the only person on that team who gave a damn about whether you came home alive."
My throat closes. Because she's right. And wrong. She's right that she was the only person who cared about Jaxon Stone the man, not Priest the operative. Wrong that removing her was anything other than the hardest thing I've ever done, including the classified things that should have been harder.
"Iris."
"Don't." She stands. Moves to the window. Her back to me, arms wrapped around herself. "You don't get to say my name like that and then call what we had a mistake."
The silence stretches. Outside, a bird calls. Something small in the pine canopy.
I should let it go. Keep the professional distance. Maintain the boundary that keeps her safe from me and me from the terrifying fact that having her in my cabin for twelve hours has already undone six years of practiced detachment.
"It wasn't a mistake."
She turns. Surprised. Iris Blackwood is almost never surprised, which means I've spent too many years letting her think I regretted us.
"I said it wrong." The words scrape out. "What we had wasn't a mistake. What I did to end it was. But I'd do it again."
"Why?"
"Because you're alive." The honesty feels like pulling a bullet out of my own chest with no anesthesia.
"You're alive because I pushed you away from the work, from me, from everything that could have gotten you killed.
And I'd make that choice again every single time even though it's been the worst seven years of my life. "
Her eyes are bright. Wet. She blinks it away because Iris doesn't cry. Didn't cry in Prague when I ended us. Didn't cry when she briefed a room full of generals on an operation that cost four good men their lives.
But she's close right now. Close enough that one more honest word from me would break the dam.
So I give her the out. Walk to the door, grab my jacket.
"I'm going to set the trip wires. Stay inside."
"Jax."
My hand is on the door handle. Her voice stops me the way a bullet never has.
"Thank you for telling me the truth."
I nod once. Step outside into the cold mountain air. The door closes behind me and I stand on the porch for ten full seconds, breathing, trying to put myself back together.
The rosary tattoo on my wrist catches my eye. Ink and prayer, neither of which has been enough to make me forget her.
Twenty minutes into the tree line, setting sensors along the north approach, my phone buzzes.
Deck:
Sully flagged unusual encrypted traffic originating from a server cluster in Frankfurt. Possibly connected to your request. You good up there?
Me:
I have a guest. Former colleague. She's got a target on her back.
Deck:
Need backup?
Me:
Not yet. I'll brief the team tonight.
Deck:
Copy. Sunday dinner is at the lodge. Vivian says bring your guest. Not optional.
Bring my guest. Iris sitting at a table with Deck and Vivian, with Cade and Natalie, with the family this team has somehow built while I was up on my mountain pretending I didn't want one.
Bringing Iris to Sunday dinner feels dangerous. More dangerous than Alexei Volkov. More dangerous than anything on those hard drives.
Because the team will see how I look at her. Mace already knows from years ago, but the rest of them will take one look at me standing next to this woman and they'll know everything. Every feeling I've buried. Every prayer I've wasted asking for the strength to stay away from her.
I finish the trip wires. Walk back to the cabin.
Through the window, she's at the table bent over my laptop. Hair falling loose from the twist. Profile sharp in the morning light. Lips moving as she reads, a habit she's had since the first day I met her in a basement briefing room in Langley.
My hand rests on the door handle.
Sunday dinner it is.