Page 63 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Wolf stepped closer to the table. “If we lose audio, you leave the obstruction. If we lose audio and visual, the operation is over.”

I opened my mouth.

“That part isn’t negotiable.”

The way he said it made something in me push back before I had decided what words I wanted.

“I’m the one inside.”

“I’m aware.”

“Then I have to be able to make judgment calls.”

“You can. Inside the boundaries we set before you go.”

“Convenient.”

“Safe.”

“Those aren’t always the same thing.”

For a moment he simply looked at me. Then his voice lowered enough that the room around us seemed to move farther away.

“No. They aren’t. That’s why we’re deciding which risks are worth taking now, while nobody has a gun in your face.”

I had no clever answer to that. I hated when he did that.

◆

The next two days moved faster than the first two had.

Once the operation had a shape, the compound stopped feeling like a place where people happened to work and started feeling like a machine being assembled around a single purpose.

Hawk made another pass around the ridge. Viper and Jackal rotated vehicles through the surrounding roads to learn where local traffic naturally slowed. Bear packed extraction gear into the Transporter and rejected two pieces of equipment after deciding they would take too long to access from the rear compartment. Raven ran the microphone through enough signal tests that I eventually accused him of enjoying hearing me breathe.

“Not particularly,” he said. “You sigh a lot.”

“I live with Wolf.”

“We all do.”

“Then you understand.”

Wolf, six feet away, looked up from the route package. Neither of us acknowledged him.

By the afternoon of the party, I had repeated my cover until Mia Morgan’s invented job history felt almost as irritating as my real one.

The weather had warmed enough that Raven confirmed the event was still being held around the pool. Aster’s staff had begun arriving before noon and Hawk was already moving toward his position. Viper left separately and Bear took the Transporter with extraction equipment and a shirt that made him look slightly less like he could carry the estate’s front gate away by himself.

I went upstairs to change.

The communal bathroom was empty for once, which felt unnerving enough that I still checked the stalls before shutting the door behind me.

My cover-up hung from a hook beside the mirror, a loose white linen shirt-dress that reached mid-thigh and looked expensive in the effortless way clothing only achieved after costing far more than it had any right to. Under it went the bikini Raven had watched me choose from three options with the exhausted expression of a man who had not expected technical intelligence to include opinions about swimwear. I had gone with black.

The top was simple, two narrow triangles of fabric over my breasts with thin straps that tied behind my neck and across my back. The bottoms sat high over my hips and made my legs look longer than they had ever managed on their own, while the cut across the back covered enough to remain legal without pretending modesty had been invited to the operation.

I stood in front of the cloudy mirror and looked at myself.