Page 38 of Shadow Secrets
The man wasn’t Grieves Rosen. Not Karl Denning or Paul Mattick. He was a face none of them had seen coming.
“It’s over,” she insisted because it had to be. She exhaled—long, shuddering, the release of pressure that had been building since the moment the gun appeared. She lowered the shirt from his lip. Released his jaw, only to grip his hand. Just like the previous night, she linked her fingers through his.
Then she sat back and leaned her head against his shoulder. The flannel shirt lay on her lap, spotted with his blood.
He put his arm around her again. She didn’t pull away.
In the quiet of the moving vehicle, with the mountains standing sentinel outside and the road unwinding toward the compound, Sebastian held her against his side as she tried not to think about the fact that the man at the hospital hadn’t been on Claire’s list.
CHAPTER NINE
Sebastian
The last time Sebastian had felt like this, he’d been lying on Italian marble with a bullet in his side.
The split lip was nothing—he’d taken worse in sparring. The bruised ribs would fade in a week. His body was a tool he maintained, and damage was part of the job description.
It was everything else that brought back bad memories.
He stood in the compound’s bathroom, gripping the edges of the sink, staring at his reflection in the mirror. Blood had dried along his jaw. His lower lip was swollen, the split raw at the center. His pupils were dilated, the flat operational calm he’d worn like a mask for six years replaced by something raw. Something exposed.
He hadn’t felt this since the fundraiser. Not when he’d resigned from the Service. Not when his father had written him off. Not when he’d driven to Montana and decided the rest of his life would be lived at arm’s length from every person in it. Through all of that, the thirty-second rule had held. Feel it, seal it, function.
Today, the seal had cracked. Standing in that loading area, watching the muzzle rise toward Sutton, his body had done what it was trained to do.
But the thing driving it hadn’t been training. Training was controlled, measured. What he’d felt in the half second before he’d tackled that man was animalistic and absolute—a terror so complete it had wiped every tactical calculation from his brain and left nothing but a feral response.
He splashed cold water on his face. It stung the split lip.
He never should have taken her to the hospital. He’d known the risks and done it anyway.
Because Sutton had asked. Because she’d told him Dom was the closest thing she had to family anymore, and the look on her face had bypassed every professional instinct he possessed.
If that bullet had been two feet lower?—
He shut down the thought. Pressed his palms against his eyes. Breathed.
He could still see Claire’s words in the text that had come through before they’d made it back to the compound. I warned you it was a bad idea.
She was right. He’d dressed it up in operational language—controlled environment, contained risk—but the truth was simpler and uglier. He’d let a woman he was supposed to protect walk into a kill zone because she’d looked at him with her brown eyes and he couldn’t tell her no.
He dried his face. Straightened his shirt. He changed into a clean one from his locker, ignoring the protest from his ribs as he pulled it over his head. Muscle by muscle. Conscious control.
By the time he walked into the briefing room, the mask was back in place.
Claire’s team would run the man’s prints, cross-reference databases, and produce a file in a few hours. But then Vivi walked into the briefing room, took one look at the photograph of their attacker on the screen, and said, “I know him.”
The room went quiet. The doctor stood with her arms crossed, studying the image. In the shot, the man was now stripped of the blue scrubs, photographed in Claire’s custody with scrapes on his cheek and a look of flat, professional indifference.
“That’s Axe Booker,” she said. “He’s a former NSA contractor. We briefly overlapped when I was conducting psychological assessments at Fort Meade. He was on the operational side—field work, not analysis. The kind of work that doesn’t appear in official reports.”
“Cleanup,” Garrett said.
Vivi nodded. “He took care of problems that needed to disappear quietly. He was skilled, discreet, and entirely without conscience. I flagged him in two assessments as a high-risk personality—narcissistic traits, diminished empathy, elevated comfort with violence. My recommendation was termination of his contract.” She paused. “The recommendation was overruled.”
Sebastian wanted to hit something. A man the NSA’s own psychologist had identified as dangerous, kept on the payroll because his particular brand of dangerous was useful. It was the kind of institutional failure that gave rise to true conspiracies.
Claire’s voice came through the speaker. She was letting Booker cool his heels in interrogation before she took her first swing at him. “We’ve confirmed he has one of the tattoos. It’s on the back of his neck, hidden under his hairline. Same design as one of those in Penn Crenshaw’s sketchbooks, but the placement is different from the inner bicep that Ginger showed Sutton.”
