Chapter 1
Building 4, north exterior wall, 2:30 AM.
I hooked my fingers into the concrete and steadied my breath.
Seventeen seconds—that’s how long it took the security camera to sweep from the boundary between Buildings 4 and 5 and back again. I’d had that number memorized since the day I first laid eyes on this building’s blueprints, nine months ago.
“Five seconds to camera switch.” Andy’s voice came through the headset. “Ready, Princess?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Asked three times, ignored twelve. Statistically, I’m winning.”
I planted my foot on the window frame.
Third floor, unlocked window. Whoever designed this building never imagined anyone would climb this high with their bare hands. They were wrong.
Cold slapped my face the moment I stepped inside. That particular server-room air—metal and dust and electronics, air that had never touched human warmth. Only the emergency lights bled red across the floor.
I dropped low and moved between the cabinets. No footsteps. The sound-dampening pads on my boot soles saw to that. Small things kept you alive—that was the first lesson training had taught me.
“Behind the third cabinet in row D,” Andy said again.
He was right. The file case was wedged into the narrow gap behind the cabinet, almost invisible.
I pulled out my camera and started shooting. One frame. Two. There weren’t many pages. Too few, if anything.
“Andy, is this it? There’s barely any—”
“That’s it. That’s all of it. If the coordinates are in there, that’s everything we need.”
I fired the shutter three more times. My watch read 2:44. Three minutes to extraction. That should be enough. It had to be enough.
The server room stayed dark, and time was not on my side.
2:47 AM. The watch face glowed faintly in the dark. I pressed my back against the emergency stairwell door and held my breath. Nothing came through the headset but silence.
“Andy. You there?”
No answer. Ten seconds. Twenty.
The Andy I knew would’ve cracked a joke before I even finished asking—three minutes, Princess, something like that. But the radio gave back nothing. Not even breathing.
The gunshots came right after. One. Two. Then silence again, deeper than before.
Andy.
The name surfaced in my mind, and in the same instant I made myself set it aside. There would be time to grieve later—if there was a later.
My finger froze on the shutter. The papers I’d just photographed carried coordinates the military’s next target for a sweep operation.
Buried in those coordinates was the name of the village where Lily was hiding. If the intel was right, this single sheet of paper weighed exactly as much as my sister’s life.
Just three more minutes. I wanted to beg for it, but I already knew the answer.
The security bulkhead down the corridor groaned open. Footsteps—more than one set, and all of them heading for my floor.
Only Maddox knew this timetable, this route. The moment his name surfaced, something in my gut turned to ice.
This wasn’t a leak. I’d been sold, whole and entire. But there was no room to hold that thought right now. I shoved the camera into my waistband and yanked the stairwell handle.
The door didn’t move.
Locked from the outside. From the very start.
I spun and ran the other way down the corridor. Fluorescent lights flickered cold overhead, server cabinets lining both walls like gray tombstones closing in on me. Behind me, someone shouted my name—my rank and my name together.
“Lieutenant Donovan! Stop!”
My stomach seemed to drop out entirely. Lieutenant. They already knew I wasn’t just some intruder. They’d known, and they’d been waiting.
The corridor ended in a dead end—a steel vent, nowhere left to go.
I raised my pistol and aimed it back the way I’d come. My hands weren’t shaking, and somehow that felt stranger than if they had been. Two rounds in the magazine. At least six sets of boots closing in.
The math was fast. Simple as arithmetic. Two rounds couldn’t stop six men. And if I was taken alive, they would pull that village’s name out of me eventually.
One way or another. I knew exactly how much I could endure—and I knew endurance had a limit. Enough pressure, long enough, and any person breaks and talks. I’d seen it happen with my own eyes.
Not Lily.
Lily’s face rose up in my mind.
I hadn’t meant to think of her. The moment I decided to die, my brain apparently pulled out whatever I couldn’t bear to lose, on its own.
Lily at seventeen. She’d been seventeen when I first started this work. When I told her I’d be gone for days at a stretch, she never asked a single question. Instead, she tied a red thread around the left cuff of the uniform I was about to wear.
When I asked her why, she looked down and said simply:
Because you can see it.
Red shows up even in the dark, she said. So I wouldn’t get lost.
That thread was still there, inside the left sleeve of my fatigues. It had come undone three times, and three times I’d retied it. It was still there.
Lily. You don’t have to see me anymore. It’s better this way—better if you never have to look for me again.
Then there was only one answer left.
I let the pistol fall. The clatter of metal against the floor rang long and hollow down the empty corridor.
And with my tongue, I found the small thing that had lived in my mouth for the past six months. A way to finish it without my hands—a way no one could stop by binding my wrists.
Lily. I’m sorry. Live well.
I drew one breath and clenched my jaw.
The instant my teeth closed around it—something bitter and cold just beginning to spread from the root of my tongue—hands seized me from behind.
A gloved palm clamped hard over my jaw while another hand gripped the back of my neck and wrenched it sideways.
My head snapped around, and the force in my bite scattered before it could finish. It didn’t shatter completely—only a third of it, maybe, cracked inside my mouth.
I had no chance to see whose hands they were. I only knew that this grip was nothing like the boots filling the corridor.
No hesitation in it. A hand that seemed to have known, from the very start, exactly this moment, exactly this spot.
Then my mouth was covered. By someone else’s mouth.
It couldn’t be called a kiss. At least, not by that name. But my body knew no other word for it.
His mouth came down over mine entirely, dragging out the bitter, cold thing I hadn’t yet swallowed, pulling it back toward himself. I gasped for air and tried, on reflex, to shove his shoulders away, but my hands wouldn’t obey.
Something about that cold mine a moment ago, now becoming his left my mind blank white. I knew I should resist.
I could feel the strength for it draining away somewhere I couldn’t reach.
