Page 186 of Operation: Defiance

Chapter Forty-Four

Asher

Sunlight stretches across the room, catching in the steam wafting from the coffee mug at Raine’s elbow. She frowns at the laptop screen, scrolls, clicks, and frowns again. I don’t interrupt her. Between the tension in her shoulders and the way her thumb keeps drifting to her index finger, she’s deep in her own head.

Breakfast was quiet. I woke with her hand resting over my heart. She shifted before she opened her eyes, pulling her arms tight to her own body. But the warmth that touch left behind hasn’t faded.

I run a hand through my hair, still damp from my shower, then pick up my tablet. The dryer tumbles quietly in the background, the sound a low undercurrent to the music playing from the living room speaker.

Taking a seat on the couch, I check the email accounts for more than a dozen active aliases. The first few are empty. Quiet. Nothing out of the ordinary. Eddie’s inbox has a single new message. Someone asking for “immediate and discrete relocation support.” The kind of work I’ve done dozens of times under different names. But the wording of the message rubs me the wrong way. Particularly the last line.

Please reply with your current rates and precisely how soon you could be in Jakarta.

“Eddie” doesn’t do relocation support. He’s strictly digital infiltration and extraction. Shit. Between the fraud alert and this…Eddie’s burned, and I need to shut him down. Now.

Ten minutes into the work, Raine inhales sharply enough to worry me. “What is it?” I ask.

“There are more files today.” She sits back in the chair, pressing her fingers together until the tips turn white. “That archive folder I accessed last night? There were twenty-four entries. Now, there are thirty-one. The new ones are all time-stamped within the past six hours.”

“As in more people GSD’s touching? More people connected to you?”

She nods once. “I…maybe?” A heavy breath, slow and controlled, heaves her shoulders. “I have to check Jonas’s file first.”

I set the tablet down and move to the chair next to her. Her voice isn’t entirely steady, and though she’s present in her body, a tiny tremor runs through her fingers as she scrolls through a page of institutional status updates. The last one was made at nine-thirty this morning.

Subject non-compliant with reassignment directive. Active search authorization issued.

“He got your message. He’s in the wind.”

“And they’re hunting him for it.” Her chin dips, and she curls inward until her spine hits the back of the chair. “His mom is still alive. Or was, the last time I talked to him. And he has a sister. GSD will use them as leverage.”

“You said he was competent.” I cover her hand with mine. “He wouldn’t have run without a plan.”

Raine rolls her right shoulder until a wince tightens lines around her eyes. “You’re right. I can’t hold that worry and find the pattern in these new updates. This can’t all be about me. If they tried to eliminate every single person I’ve ever worked with…someone would notice.”

The tremor in her fingers vanishes as she closes Jonas’s record and returns to the top level directory.

After another minute, when I don’t move, she angles her head so her gaze locks onto mine. “I’m okay, Asher. Really.”

I can see the truth in her eyes. I’ve never met anyone who can reorient themselves as quickly as she can. It’s remarkable, and it catches me off guard every single time. She rests her hand on my thigh, squeezes gently, then turns back to the laptop.

That she can touch me at all is a fucking miracle after what she went through. Every time she does, whatever this is between us—attraction, connection, something more I’m not sure I’m ready to name—strengthens. There’s no way I’ll ever be able to walk away from her. Not unless she asks me to.

“If that changes…” I say, returning to the couch to burn everything with even the most tenuous connection to Eddie Stewart.

“I’ll tell you.”

Raine

This shouldn’t happen.

Seven new files since last night. That makes thirty-one people whose records have been updated since I escaped.

Coherent Path’s protocols kept me so disoriented, I couldn’t build a perfect map of the facility in my head. Just enough to get us out of there when Asher found me. But…it didn’t feel that big.

“Asher?” I don’t turn, my focus locked on the screen. “The black site. Did you get a sense of the size?”

“Above ground, they’d dressed it up as a forest service outpost. Bland concrete, federal green signs… Nothing unusual except for the razor wire over the chain-link fencing. The offices on the main level were empty. One elevator inside, with two armed guards checking IDs, a second, bigger one around back. That’s how we got out. No cameras over that one.