Chapter 14
ALTITUDE
SARAH
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
The codes loop in my head like a rosary. Like a prayer. Like the last words of a dying man who believed in me enough to give up everything.
My feet are numb. Everything is numb. But the codes remain.
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
The taxi stops. Henderson Executive Airport, the driver said, like it was just another fare. Like I’m just another passenger. Like I’m not sitting in his backseat barefoot in a cocktail dress with a dead man’s blood drying under my fingernails.
“This is it.”
Levi’s voice. Close. Steady.
I don’t move.
“Sarah.”
The door opens. Desert air hits my face—warm, dry, carrying the faint smell of jet fuel and dust. His hand appears in my field of vision, palm up, waiting.
I take it.
The tarmac is still warm from the day’s heat.
My bare feet register the texture—rough, gritty, real—and for a moment the numbness cracks.
Just a splinter. Just enough to let in the absurdity of this: the director of the NRO, barefoot in a green silk dress, about to board an aircraft in the middle of the night with her husband of twenty-six hours.
Her fake husband.
No. Legal husband. The paperwork is real, even if nothing else is.
Except the kiss was real. The balcony. His hands in my hair. The way I chose to close the distance, chose to press my mouth to his, chose—
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
The codes. Focus on the codes.
The aircraft waits on the tarmac. Small. Sleek. And it’s going to take us away from here. Away from Vegas. Away from room 2847 and the body I left behind.
Tell my wife … Tell her I …
I stop walking.
“Sarah?”
“He didn’t finish.” The words come out strange. Hollow. “He was going to say something to his wife. He didn’t finish.”
Levi’s hand tightens around mine. “I know.”
“I can’t remember her name. His wife. I worked with him for six years, and I can’t remember his wife’s name.”
“Margaret.”
I turn. Stare at him.
“His file. I read it.” His jaw is tight. “Margaret Costa. They’ve been married thirty-two years. Two kids. Three grandchildren.”
Thirty-two years. And now she’s a widow because Ray Costa decided to trust me.
“We need to move.” Levi’s voice is gentle but firm. “Can you keep walking?”
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
“Yes.”
I walk.
The cockpit is dark.
Instrument lights glow soft green and amber, casting strange shadows across Levi’s face as he runs through preflight checks. His hands move with certainty—flipping switches, checking gauges, adjusting things I don’t have names for.
He’s different here.
I’ve seen him in chaos mode—spinning keys, cracking jokes, deflecting everything serious with a grin. I’ve seen him in tactical mode—clearing Costa’s room, getting me out of the hotel, cold and efficient as a machine. But this is something else. Something quieter. Something almost reverent.
This is his sanctuary.
I strap into the copilot seat. The leather is cool against my bare legs, the silk dress riding up in ways I can’t bring myself to care about. The queen pendant rests against my collarbone, silver and steady.
“Clearance is filed.” He doesn’t look at me. “We’ll be wheels up in five.”
“Where are we going?”
“Away from here. First priority is distance.” His hands keep moving. Confident. Competent. “There’s a small airfield about ninety minutes out. Middle of nowhere. We’ll land there, grab a few hours of sleep, then continue to the rendezvous.”
“With your team?”
“Yes. I’ll contact Ghost once we’re airborne. Secure channel.”
Sleep. He thinks I can sleep. He thinks I can close my eyes and not see Ray Costa’s blood spreading across the hotel carpet, not hear the wet rattle of his final breaths, not feel his grip on my wrist as he whispered …
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
“Ready?”
No. Not even close.
“Yes.”
The engines whine to life. The aircraft shudders, then settles into a steady vibration that I feel in my teeth. Levi’s voice crackles through the radio—call signs and numbers, the language of pilots and towers, meaningless to me.
Then we’re moving.
The runway lights blur past. The tarmac falls away. And suddenly we’re climbing, the nose tilting up, the world tilting down, Vegas becoming a glittering sprawl beneath us.
From up here, the Strip is visible. The Wynn, bright and beautiful, where an hour ago I stood on a terrace wrapped in his arms. Where two hours ago I was dancing with my fake husband and feeling something real.
Where three hours ago, Ray Costa said yes, and I thought—I actually thought—that we were going to be okay.
The city shrinks. Becomes a smear of light against the desert black.
Costa is down there. In that city. In that room. Alone.
Something cracks in my chest. Sharp. Sudden. I press my hand against my sternum. Hold it together by force.
“Breathe.”
Levi’s voice, steady in the dark.
I breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way they teach you in crisis training. The way you learn to keep functioning when everything inside you wants to shatter.
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
The codes. Costa’s last gift. The only thing that makes his death mean something.
I breathe. I remember. I don’t break.
Not yet.
The cockpit is quiet except for the engine’s hum.
Below us, the desert stretches infinite and dark—no cities, no roads, just empty black interrupted by the occasional cluster of lights that might be a town or might be nothing at all.
Above us, stars. More than I’ve seen in years.
The light pollution of DC, Vegas, and every city I’ve lived in has hidden them, but up here, at this altitude, they’re overwhelming.
A million points of light that don’t care about Phoenix or Hard Lock codes or men who die in hotel rooms.
“You can let go up here.” Levi’s voice is soft. His eyes are on the instruments, but he’s talking to me. “No one to see. No one to judge. Just you and the sky.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
The question is simple. The answer isn’t.
“Because if I start, I won’t stop.” The words come out before I can censor them. Raw. Honest. The ice cracks a little wider. “I’ll fall apart, and I don’t know how to put myself back together. And Ray didn’t die for me to fall apart. He died so I could finish this.”
Silence. The engines hum. The stars wheel slowly overhead.
“That’s not how it works.”
“What?”
“Grief.” He adjusts something on the console. His voice is distant but not cold. “You don’t get to schedule it. You don’t get to hold it off until it’s convenient. It comes when it comes, and if you don’t let it, it finds other ways out. Worse ways.”
“Speaking from experience?”
The pause is longer this time. Heavier.
“Yeah.”
I want to ask. The question burns on my tongue—who did you lose? What noise are you running from? What happens at three AM that keeps you awake?—but I don’t. Not tonight. Not when my own grief is a living thing clawing at the inside of my chest.
Instead, I ask something smaller.
“The quiet you find up here. What does it mean?”
He doesn’t answer right away. The aircraft banks slightly, adjusting course, and the stars tilt and resettle outside the window.
“It means the noise stops.” His voice is different now.
Rougher. “All the noise in my head—the things I should have done, the people I couldn’t save, the voice that tells me I’m not fast enough, never fast enough—up here, it goes away.
It’s just me, physics, and the next ten seconds. Nothing else exists.”
The next ten seconds. I understand that. Living in the immediate present because the past is unbearable and the future is uncertain.
“I don’t know how to do that.” The admission costs me something. “My brain never stops. It’s always calculating, always planning, always running scenarios. Three moves ahead. That’s what my father taught me.”
“Your father taught you a lot of things.”
“Yes.”
“Not all of them are worth keeping.”
The words land somewhere soft. Somewhere I’ve been protecting.
“No. Not all of them.”
His hand leaves the controls. Reaches across the dark space between us. Finds mine.
The contact is simple. His fingers wrapping around mine, warm, solid, and present. Nothing more. But something in me breaks loose—a small piece of ice, calving off the glacier, floating free.
I don’t pull away.
We fly in silence, hand in hand, while the desert scrolls beneath us and the stars watch and the codes loop endlessly in my head.
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.
Ray’s last gift.
I won’t waste it.
“There.”
The word pulls me out of something that wasn’t quite sleep but wasn’t quite consciousness either. A gray zone. A holding pattern.
I blink. The cockpit is the same—dark, humming, star-scattered—but something has shifted. The engine pitch is different. We’re descending.
Below us, a cluster of lights in the vast dark. Tiny. Isolated. A small town, a truck stop, or just a few buildings clinging to the edge of nowhere.
“Airfield’s just past that.” Levi nods toward the lights. “Private strip. No tower, no customs, no questions.”
“How do you know about it?”
“Cerberus maintains a network of bolt-holes. Safe locations for extraction and regrouping.” A ghost of his usual grin crosses his face. “Ghost is paranoid. It’s useful.”
We’re descending faster now. The stars disappear as we drop below some invisible ceiling, and the desert rises to meet us—scrub and sand and the faint gleam of a runway that shouldn’t exist.
The landing is smooth. Barely a bump as the wheels touch down, the aircraft slowing, the world outside the window becoming real again instead of abstract.
We roll to a stop near a small hangar. No lights except a single bulb over a door. No people. Just silence and darkness and the smell of sage when Levi opens the cockpit door.
“There’s a motel about a mile up the road.” He’s moving now—post-flight checks, securing the aircraft, becoming efficient again. “Nothing fancy. But it’ll have a bed and a shower.”
A shower. I look down at my hands. Costa’s blood is still there. Dark crescents under my fingernails. I’ve been feeling it this whole time—the wrongness of it, the weight—but I couldn’t let myself see it.
Now I see it.
My stomach heaves.
“Sarah?”
I’m out of the aircraft, stumbling across the tarmac, falling to my knees on the cracked concrete. The heaving produces nothing—there’s nothing in me to expel—but my body keeps trying anyway, like it can purge the memory of blood and dying words and promises I don’t know how to keep.
Then Levi’s there. Behind me. One hand gathering my hair back from my face. The other resting between my shoulder blades, warm and steady.
He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t offer platitudes. Just stays.
When it passes—the heaving, the shaking, the worst of it—I sit back on my heels. The desert is cold now, the night air biting through the silk dress. My bare feet are filthy. My hands are worse.
“I need to wash my hands.”
“Okay.”
“I need to wash Ray’s blood off my hands.”
“Okay.” His voice is close. Gentle. “We’ll find you a sink. Some soap. Clean clothes if they have them.”
“I can’t wear this dress anymore.”
“I know.”
“I was wearing this dress when I kissed you.” The words come out fractured. Wrong. “On the balcony. When everything was … When I thought—”
“I know.”
“I can’t—”
“I know.” He’s in front of me now, crouching, his face level with mine.
His eyes are dark in the darkness, but I can see the steadiness in them.
The anchor. “You don’t have to figure it out tonight.
You just have to get to that motel. Get clean.
Get horizontal. The rest we’ll figure out in the morning. ”
“The team needs to know about Costa.”
“I’ll contact Ghost once we’re airborne.”
“Phoenix will be hunting us.”
“Let it hunt. We’re ghosts out here. Nothing but desert and stars.”
I look at him. This man I married on a mission. This man who pulled the pins from my hair and kissed me like I was something precious. This man who held my hand through darkness and let me not be okay.
“Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero.”
His eyebrows rise.
“The code.” My voice steadies. Something in me solidifies. “I haven’t forgotten. I won’t forget.”
“I know you won’t.”
“We’re going to burn it down.”
“All of it.”
“Every last byte.”
He stands. Offers his hand.
I take it.