Page 120 of The ARC Unit: Breach

I looked down at Varga’s evidence inventory again when Raven nudged the laptop toward me.

“We have one useful thing already.”

Varga’s messenger bag held two paper transfer packets and several temporary identity cards. One of the photographs was familiar enough that I pulled up the Haus Eberhardt files and found the woman within a minute. She had tried to escape during an earlier transfer and been brought back to confinement. Before our raid, Cerberus moved her again under heavier restraints and the packet in Varga’s bag gave her another name and a new destination.

Raven opened the party transcript beside the record. Luca asking Kade about an Emil had sounded almost incidental when we first heard it. Now we had E. Varga collecting paperwork from Haus Eberhardt and Emil Varga carrying the next identity for a woman Cerberus had already punished for trying to run.

“I still don’t know if this proves Kade sent him,” I said.

“No,” Raven replied. “It proves Kade knew the same Emil we’re holding now. That’s enough until Varga tells us more.”

Wolf held out his hand for the screen and read the woman’s record before giving it back. “Find where they sent her.”

“And Varga?” I asked.

“He wakes up in custody,” Wolf said. “Then he tells us what we need to know.”

The doors opened before anyone could answer, and Bear came into the waiting room wearing a hospital scrub top someone had given him after his clothes became too bloody to keep on. He looked tired enough that everyone was on their feet before he reached us.

“He’s out,” Bear said. “They controlled the bleeding. The knife missed the spleen and the major vessels, so they repaired the muscle damage and they’re keeping him overnight for observation.”

Viper closed his eyes and dropped back into his chair. Hawk rubbed a hand over the back of his neck before asking when Jackal could have visitors. Wolf waited until the question was answered before looking at Bear.

“Stable?”

“Stable,” Bear said.

Wolf sat down after that. A week ago I might have missed how much the movement gave away, but I had spent the entire wait watching him hold himself together by collecting information and keeping the rest of us moving. Now his hands rested loosely between his knees while he stared at the closed doors, with nothing left to command until Jackal woke up.

Bear pointed at Viper. “They’ll let one of us in when he’s awake enough. You go first.”

Viper looked toward Wolf.

Wolf nodded. “Go.”

Viper left without arguing, and Raven closed Varga’s evidence file for the first time since we arrived. I did the same with the Haus Eberhardt records. The woman under the false name still needed to be found, and Varga still needed to talk. Neither problem was going anywhere before morning and our exhaustion was catching up to us.

Jackal was alive behind those doors, and I could finally let myself believe he was going to come back to the compound and become everybody’s problem again. I wanted that more than I had any right to after knowing him for such a short time.

I had underestimated how quickly ARC could become important to me. The work moved fast enough that everything around it did too, including the people. Somewhere between the cereal, nudity, stolen shampoo and the song he hummed while he sat beside the window with that ribbon, Jackal had stopped feeling like one of the six personnel files I had read on an airplane. Seeing him bleeding on a parking garage floor had only shown me how completely he had worked his way into the life I was building here.

He was going to come back to the compound and recover, and I was already looking forward to complaining about it.

Chapter Ten

MIA

Jackal returned to the compound two days after being stabbed and immediately proved that hospital discharge paperwork had very little power over him.

I was sitting beside Raven at the operations table when the side door opened. We had spent most of the morning working through the copy of Emil Varga’s phone that German investigators had released to ARC, and I had reached the point where strings of unfamiliar numbers were beginning to look more like hieroglyphics than evidence.

Bear came through first carrying a black pack over one shoulder and a white pharmacy bag in his other hand. Viper followed close enough behind him that I knew who had spent the drive making sure Jackal did not do anything stupid.

Jackal came in last, wearing dark sweatpants and a loose black t-shirt instead of his usual fitted clothes, probably because anything tighter would have rubbed against the bandage along his left side. He moved more carefully than he wanted anyone to notice, and although his skin had some color back, he still looked like the last forty-eight hours had taken something out of him.

The grin, unfortunately, had survived intact.

“Miss me?”