Chapter 5 #4
I hold one finger to my lips. She nods. She doesn't speak, doesn't move, doesn't make a sound.
I pull on the pants I left on the floor and I'm down the stairs in the dark on bare feet, moving with the silent, controlled fluidity of a man who has cleared buildings in places where the penalty for noise was death.
The layout is mapped from last night's sweep: furniture positions, door locations, the angles of approach from every window and entry point. The patio door is at the back of the living area, glass and frame, the lock I checked twice before we went upstairs.
I hear it again. A tool against a lock mechanism, someone working the hardware with skill and patience.
I press my back to the wall beside the patio door and look through the edge of the glass. A shape. Low, dark, crouched near the lock. Moving with the economy of someone who has done this before.
I raise the Sig and thumb the light on the tac rail.
The beam hits the figure full in the face, and they bolt. Gone in the time it takes me to register dark clothing, gloves, a build that could be male or female, and the practiced speed of someone who expected to encounter a locked door and not a weapon.
I clear the exterior. Perimeter sweep, fast and thorough, every shadow and angle and blind spot. The street is empty. The neighboring townhomes are dark.
Back at the patio door, I inspect the lock. Tool marks on the plate, fresh scratches in the brass where something thin and flat worked the mechanism. Whoever was here brought the right equipment and the right training and the wrong assumption about what was waiting inside.
I pull out my phone. Rivera's number. The call connects on the second ring, because NCIS agents sleep the way SEALs sleep: with one ear open and a phone in reach.
"Rivera. Boone Aldridge. Someone just attempted to access Ireland Calloway's townhome through the rear patio door. Tool marks on the lock. Suspect fled on foot approximately two minutes ago, heading east. I cleared the exterior. No contact."
Rivera's voice is flat and immediate. "Anyone hurt?"
"Negative."
"Lock compromised?"
"Attempted. Not breached. I'm looking at fresh tool marks."
"Don't touch anything else. I'll have a team there in twenty."
"Copy." I lower the phone and stand in Ireland's living room with the Sig in my right hand and the truth settling into my chest with the weight of a tactical assessment that doesn't have a comfortable conclusion.
Whoever broke into her car yesterday just tried to get into her house.
The escalation pattern is clear and specific and aimed at the woman upstairs.
"Boone."
She's in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs in my t-shirt, the hem hitting her mid-thigh, her hair wild and her face pale in the light from the patio. She's been watching. She saw the weapon. She saw me move through her home like a combat zone.
The man who was inside her two hours ago is standing in her living room with a loaded sidearm and the flat, operational expression she's never seen on me before.
"Someone tried the patio door. They're gone. Rivera's sending a team."
She nods. Her composure holds. The fear is visible only in the set of her shoulders and the way her fingers curl around the hem of my shirt at her thigh. "The townhome isn't defensible."
The words are mine from last night, spoken back to me in her voice, and the fact that she arrived at the same tactical conclusion without being told is one more reason this woman is going to be impossible to walk away from.
"No. It isn't."
"Your place on base has perimeter security. Gate access. Military police response."
"Yes."
She looks at the patio door, the scratched lock, the evidence of someone with tools and intent standing where the water view used to be just a pretty backdrop. Then she looks at me: weapon in hand, barefoot, bare-chested, the scars she traced two hours ago visible in the low light.
"I'll pack a bag."
She turns and climbs the stairs, my shirt skimming her thighs with each step.
I stand in her living room with the Sig in my hand and wait for Rivera's team, and the operational part of my mind is already running the logistics of relocation and perimeter security and threat assessment.
But the other part, the part that writes poetry on a deck overlooking the water, is standing in the wreckage of the safe warm life she built and understanding that the man she let into her bed is also the man who just cleared her house like a war zone.
Both versions are real.
And the woman upstairs is packing a bag to come with me, and the distance I've been measuring for months just collapsed into the space between a loaded weapon and a borrowed t-shirt, and I'm not sure which version of tonight tells us more about what we are becoming.
Rivera's team arrives in eighteen minutes. I give them the exterior. I give them the tool marks. I give them the timeline.
Ireland comes downstairs with a duffel bag and a steady face and walks past the evidence team processing her patio door toward my truck without looking back.