Epilogue
Three months after Katherine Townsend left Blackridge in the back of a federal SUV, Jasper still hated the sound of the front gate opening and closing.
The new camera system caught it from twelve angles now. He’d made sure of that.
Every vehicle that approached appeared on three primary feeds and nine secondary ones before it reached the reinforced outer gate.
Motion sensors tracked the fence line. Thermal cameras covered the wooded edges of the property.
The east service gate had been rebuilt, rekeyed, and wired into a redundant alarm system that could survive power loss, signal interference, and the kind of expensive little jammer Nathan Soot had used to turn sixty seconds into a weapon.
Jasper had installed most of it himself. Then he’d checked it, tested it, and checked it again.
He’d created a monitoring dashboard so streamlined and paranoid that Vivi had stared at it for ten seconds before saying, “That is either beautiful or evidence you need a hobby.”
He’d told her security was his hobby. She’d told him that was the saddest thing she’d ever heard from a man with his skills and access to a gym, gaming center, and a ping-pong table.
The ping-pong table that hadn’t been used since he and Katherine had played.
Now he sat in his office, late afternoon light slanting across the empty wall where Katherine’s boxes had been, and watched a compound that didn’t currently need watching. Garrett, Mack, CB, Sebastian, and Reid were out on assignment. A client transfer in Idaho had pulled them away before dawn.
The place was too quiet. Quiet left room for memories. It left room for the image of her in the federal SUV, one hand lifted against the window as the gate closed between them.
It left room for the hollow place inside him where she’d been.
His phone sat beside the keyboard, silent for the moment.
Katherine texted when she could. A line here and there.
A photo of Priss. A complaint about congressional investigators misusing the word archive.
Once, at two in the morning, she’d called and said nothing for three seconds after he answered.
He’d known then that she was exhausted and trying not to cry.
He’d asked if she’d eaten, and she’d laughed quietly.
Then she’d admitted she’d had coffee and half a protein bar since breakfast, and he’d spent twenty minutes on the phone with her while she fixed herself some soup and told him, in careful, incomplete pieces, what it felt like to sit inside the institution that had nearly erased her and insist on being heard.
She’d been doing that for three months. Testimony.
Depositions. Classified hearings. Internal review.
More testimony. More questions. More lawyers.
More people trying to make Richard Upton’s choices sound like procedural inportance instead of a deliberate cover-up that had protected a covert killer for decades.
Upton was still on administrative leave. Nathan Soot was still in federal custody. Michael Corrigan was still gone.
Katherine was still at Langley.
And Jasper was still in Blackridge, behind his monitors, exactly where she’d told him he belonged.
A soft knock sounded against his open office door.
He didn’t look away from the screens. “If this is about my dashboard, the answer is still no.”
Vivi stepped into the doorway. “I wasn’t going to ask you to simplify the dashboard.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I’m always thinking it.” She folded her arms and leaned against the frame. “I came to make sure you’ve eaten something that wasn’t coffee.”
“Coffee is not food.”
“Thank you for proving you still understand the basics.”
“I ate.”
“What?”
He paused.
Vivi sighed. “That’s what I thought. Come to the kitchen.”
“I’m in the middle of something.”
“You’re watching twelve camera feeds of an empty compound. Not the same.”
He turned his chair slowly and gave her a flat look. “You know, Garrett lets me brood.”
“Garrett is not here, and when Garrett lets you brood, it’s because he’s brooding somewhere else and doesn’t want witnesses.”
That was unfortunately true.
Vivi’s gaze softened. “Ian’s been gone for two weeks. I don’t want to eat alone again.”
Ian worked for Shadow Force International, the mother company of Shadow Point Security.
Vivi was always composed, always capable, and usually three steps ahead of whatever crisis tried to crawl through the front door.
But there was a quietness around her today.
She missed her husband, and even though she’d never admit she was lonely, Jasper knew she was.
He shut down the auxiliary dashboard, leaving the main security feed active. “Fine.”
“Try not to make it sound like a hostage negotiation.”
“It kind of is.”
“Then consider yourself rescued.”
He followed her through the quiet hall to the kitchen. The compound seemed bigger without the others. Their footsteps echoed against the polished floor. Rain had been threatening all afternoon, gathering in the gray clouds beyond the mountains without committing to the fall.
In the kitchen, Vivi opened the fridge and began pulling out turkey, cheese, lettuce, and the container of chicken salad Mack had made the previous day.
Jasper eyed it. “That better not be the one with grapes.”
“It is.”
“Grapes don’t belong in chicken salad.”
“You and Ian are both wrong about this.”
“Ian agrees with me?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Then there’s hope for him.”
She handed him bread. “Make yourself useful.”
He took it and started assembling sandwiches. Vivi worked beside him in comfortable silence for a minute, slicing a tomato and pretending not to watch him.
He felt her looking anyway. “What?” he asked.
“How’s Katherine?”
His hand stilled on the mustard.
Vivi didn’t apologize. The question had been coming all week, and they both knew it.
“She’s good,” he said.
“Just good?”
“She’s busy.”
“Ah.” One word, but it held so much more.
He spread mustard across the bread with more precision than the sandwich required. “She texts when she can. Calls when she has a window. The investigation is chewing up most of her time. I worry about Priss, alone so much.”
“She’s probably causing all kinds of havoc.”
“She’s probably not eating or sleeping.”
Vivi was quiet for a beat. “We’re still talking about Priss?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
He set the knife down.
Vivi’s expression turned gentle, but not pitying. “You’re worried about Katherine.”
“She doesn’t eat enough when she’s working.”
“Sounds like someone else I know.”
He ignored the jab. “She sleeps worse. She gets inside her own head and forgets she has a body until it starts failing.” He looked toward the windows, jaw tight. “She says she’s fine.”
Vivi arranged tomato on her sandwich. “The word people use when they are absolutely not fine but still capable of filing paperwork.”
“That’s Katherine.”
“It’s also you.”
He didn’t answer.
Vivi let him have the silence for a moment, then nudged the plate of tomato slices toward him. “You should go see her.”
“I’m going to.”
She lifted a brow.
“I have three weeks of vacation saved,” he said. “Once I finish the final layer on the security upgrade, I’m taking it.”
“The security upgrade that already has more redundancy than a presidential bunker?”
“The east service gate still needs another failsafe.”
“You’re overcompensating.”
“Soot knocked the camera and local sensor feed offline for sixty seconds. That’s unacceptable.”
“Soot is in custody.”
“Someone else could have the same tech.”
“And someone could drop from the sky in a helicopter and land on the roof wearing tap shoes. That doesn’t mean you never leave the compound again.”
He gave her a look. “If someone attacks this compound in tap shoes, I’m blaming you.”
“I’ll accept that risk.” Her phone buzzed on the counter. She picked it up and checked the screen. Must have been Ian from the way her expression lit up.
He finished his sandwich while she typed a reply. She slid the phone into her pocket, picked up his plate, and shoved it into his hand. “There’s a problem in the common room.”
He looked down at the sandwich, then back at her. “What kind of problem?”
“The gaming system isn’t working.”
He frowned at her. “I’ll fix it later.”
“Ian’s on his way,” she said. “I want the console fixed before he gets here.”
“Ian’s been gone for two weeks. I doubt the first thing he’ll want to do when he gets home is play video games.”
“You don’t know that. Take your sandwich and fix the console.”
“I’ll do it after I eat.”
“Take the sandwich with you. Go.”
He studied her for another second.
She smiled. “Please?”
He took the plate. “Sure, boss.”
He left the kitchen with the plate in hand. Halfway down the corridor, he slowed. The common room door stood partly open. Light spilled across the floor. Something clicked softly inside.
Jasper stopped breathing and pushed the door open.
Katherine stood on the far end of the table, paddle in one hand, ball in the other, her dark hair loose around her shoulders and a smile trembling at the edges of her mouth.
On the couch, Priss sat with imperial dignity, watching him through narrowed eyes.
Katherine lifted the paddle. “Rematch?”
The plate nearly slipped from Jasper’s hand. He set it on the nearest table, then crossed the room so fast that Katherine barely had time to set down the paddle before he reached her.
He pulled her into his arms, careful for exactly one second before she wrapped herself around him and held on.
Her face pressed into his neck. His arms locked around her. He breathed her in and felt three months of discipline, worry, patience, and half-lived days break apart inside him.
She was here. She was solid and warm and laughing against his shirt while he held her too tightly and didn’t care. “You’re here,” he said, because apparently all his words had been stripped down to the obvious.
“I’m here.”
“When did you get in?”
“Twenty minutes ago.”
“Vivi knew.”
“She arranged it. She gave me the new code to get in the service gate and said she’d distract you from the monitors.”