Page 75 of Deep Cover

And found the space next to him empty.

His heart stopped cold.

“Ryss!” His bellow exploded over the comms and a new spattering of gunfire. “RYSS!”

He caught the motion at the corner of his vision. Too late.

Her small shape was silhouetted against the orange glow of the burning warehouse as she sprinted toward the side door, back into the smoke and the fire and the building that had nearly buried them both five minutes before.

“No!” The word ripped out of him, closer to the raw cry of an animal than language. He abandoned his cover, ignoring the gunfire bursting behind him as every instinct inside him screamed that this was exactly how men died and not caring one goddamn bit.

“Sierra Four, hold position! That’s an order!” Cannon’s sharp, furious tone vibrated in his ear.

He didn’t stop, sprinting after her into the burning building.

And he prayed that he’d reach her before the roof took the woman he loved for good this time.

* * * * *

The heat hit her like she’d charged into a brick wall. Still, she kept going.

She’d ripped through four crates before Reid hauled her out, and the things she’d grabbed—then dropped—were already gone, consumed by the fire.

A ledger. A folder. Something with handwriting that wasn’t Bill’s.

She’d lost them, and that knowledge blazed in her stomach while she’d crouched behind the concrete barrier, ears ringing from gunfire and smoke stinging her raw throat.

Terror for the fight going on around her had kept her pinned flat to the ground for a solid three minutes but getting that information weighed just as heavy.

If it was scorched, none of this meant anything. Not the danger so many had faced—Jolie and Stina, kidnapped because of whatever they’d overheard. Phillip, killed at Antonio’s by a man no one could name. The person who answered that call from Bill, and possibly calling the shots, was still out there, still capable of harming someone else’s family, someone else’s team.

She needed a name, dammit. Concrete evidence to end this instead of just cauterizing one more wound and calling it closed until the next strike.

She needed something from this building.

The wall swam in front of her vision through the heatwaves, but flames had consumed the crates she’d been going through and left a pile of ash.

Her mind screamed against what she was seeing, but from the corner of her eye she saw a flicker. She threw up an arm and coughed into her shirt she’d drawn over her mouth, edging forward.

A flame danced over the glass walls of a cubicle in the back, still intact past the worst of a collapsed section of roof. While the crates had burned in the open, those glass walls shielded anything inside it.

She knew in her gut that the most important paperwork for this operation would be in there.

Hope lit up her whole chest before caution could stop her from moving.

She took off in a dead sprint to the back. In her ear came shouts of her name. Reid, going crazy.

It hurt, hearing him. But she couldn’t stop. Didn’t he know she was doing this for him too?

If she could hand the team something real, proof solid enough to finally close this case…maybe she wouldn’t just be the FBI liaison.

Maybe she’d be an asset to Blackout the way those ladies were for Alpha and Charlie teams.

Caryssa had felt a deep ache to belong building since movie night, mug cakes and self-defense lessons and stolen moments with the man she loved. With it rose a terrifying, reckless hope that there might be a version of this that didn’t end with her getting back on a plane alone.

What she needed to prove her worth might be sitting inside those glass walls.

The building groaned around her as she pushed through the thick smoke. She crouched lower, one arm over her face and adrenaline burning through the fear that threatened to stop her.