Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
“Then there’s no negotiation.”
“No.”
“Just the breach.”
“Just the breach.”
Knight nods. Sawyer nods. The decision settles into the room like something that was always inevitable and only needed the right information to become clear.
Sawyer leaves at six to coordinate with Dean and the BRAVO squad. The plan’s set. The timeline’s fixed.
The storage unit feels different now. Not smaller. Fuller. The addition of Sawyer’s information and BRAVO’s resources has changed the operation from a desperate gamble into something that actually looks like a real plan. I can feel it in the way Knight checks his weapon with slightly less urgency. In the way Enley runs her final checks with focus instead of anxiety. In the way my own breathing’s settled into a rhythm that’s closer to preparation than survival.
Knight takes his place against the wall for a final rest. Two hours of sleep before he needs to move. His ability to sleep before an operation is something I’ve always envied. I can plan and prepare and execute, but I can’t shut my brain off. It keeps running the scenarios, checking the variables, looking for the failure point I haven’t accounted for yet.
Enley’s at the table. The glow of the laptop softens the lines of her face in the dim room. She’s running the system she built one more time, not because she needs to but because the routine gives her hands something steady to do while her mind processes everything else.
“Arrow used to do that,” I say. I’m at the table beside her, checking the communication gear that’ll connect all nine of us during the breach.
“Do what?”
“Run systems checks when he was nervous. Before a job he’d verify every piece of his toolkit three or four times. Not because he thought something was wrong. Because the routine calmed him down.”
“Am I that obvious?”
“Only to someone who’s been watching.”
The words leave my mouth before I can redirect them. She looks at me. The laptop light catches the gold flecks in her green eyes and the last faint shadow of the bruise on her jaw. The corner of her mouth lifts in something that isn’t quite a smile yet, but could become one if either of us let it.
“Four years,” she says. “That’s how long you’ve been watching.”
“Longer.” The word’s out before I can stop it.
She smiles. The kind that reaches her eyes and changes the whole shape of her face in a way that makes the room feel warmer.
We’re doing it. The quiet human thing that lives in the space between crisis and calm. The thing that acknowledges that tomorrow night we might not all walk out of that building, and tonight’s the last guaranteed moment we have to be people instead of operators.
“Render.”
“Yeah.”
“When this is over. That conversation you mentioned. The one that doesn’t involve any of this.”
“Yeah.”
“I want it. I want it to be long. I want it to be about everything we haven’t said. And I want it to happen somewhere with actual food and a real bed and a door that doesn’t have a padlock on it.”
The image settles in my chest like something warm and solid and permanent. A room with real food. A real bed. A door that’s there for privacy instead of security. The kind of room where two people can finally say the things that concrete floors and metal walls and ticking clocks and one stolen kiss in a storage unit have been getting in the way of.
“I want that too,” I say.
She holds my gaze for three full seconds. Then she turns back to the screen and runs the system one more time. I turn back to the communication gear and test the channel one more time.
We work side by side. The physical gap between us is still measured in inches, but the distance that actually mattered—the one I’ve been maintaining for years—is gone. It left the moment I kissed her in this room and it hasn’t come back. I’ve stopped trying to rebuild it. The wall was always temporary, and the foundation it stood on was never strong enough to hold.
Eight hours.
In eight hours Knight’ll cut a fence line. BRAVO squad’ll lock down the perimeter. I’ll go down a stairwell into an underground facility. Enley’ll run the tech side from two hundred yards away. And somewhere inside that building, in cells and holding rooms, six people I grew up with are waiting for someone to come.
We’re coming.
All of us. The misfits and the professionals. The shy one and the hacker. The brother and the sister and the soldier and the friends who started in a basement with borrowed equipment and a dead girl’s photograph on the wall and turned their grief into something that saves people.
We’re coming. And Serafina isn’t ready.
Nobody ever is.
17
Enley
The clock until the breach counts down. Knight’s gone.
He left twenty minutes ago to meet Sawyer and the BRAVO squad at the staging warehouse. Their exit was the same as every other time: silent, efficient, a shadow swallowed by the dark. He shook Render’s hand. He looked at me and said, “See you on the other side.” Then he was gone and the storage unit shrank to its smallest version. Two people. Two laptops. One cot. One sleeping bag on a hard floor. And the hours counting down to something that can’t be uncounted.