I read it three times, each pass making my pulse tick up a notch.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” Axel said quietly. “But she sent it at midnight from an encrypted number. That’s not casual. That’s intentional.”
I set the phone down, suddenly feeling like the cabin walls were a little closer than they’d been five minutes ago. “Do you think she’s in trouble?”
“I listened to her stories. She’s always in trouble. The question is—did she leave it behind, or drag it here?”
I stared out the window. A fine mist clung to the trees. The kind that made everything feel a little more uncertain.
“What does this Greg Bishop have to do with it?” I asked.
Axel hesitated. “He’s... not exactly a civilian. He used to work with a joint task force, off-books. Think black ops mixed with diplomatic immunity. The kind of guy who has a different passport depending on the day.”
“Of course she knows him,” I muttered. “Marley doesn’t date. She infiltrates.”
That got the faintest smirk from him.
“I’ll reach out to Fraiser,” Axel said. “See if he can make sense of this. In the meantime… we play it cool.”
“Cool is not my strong suit,” I admitted.
He walked over, wrapping his arms around my waist and kissing my temple. “You don’t need to be cool. You just need to be here.”
Something about the way he said it—likeheremeant more than geography—landed in my chest with a soft thud.
“Hey, Axel?”
“Yeah?”
“If this thing with Marley ends up being big—dangerous—are you going to try and shut me out of it?”
His expression flickered. “If I could keep you safe in a padded room with reinforced doors, I’d do it.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “That’s not very romantic.”
“I didn’t say I’d lock the door.”
I laughed. And then I reached up and touched his face, the stubble rough against my fingertips. “I’m not asking to golooking for trouble. But I don’t want you keeping secrets to protect me either. We’re in this together.”
His gaze held mine. “Together,” he said, and kissed me like a promise.
32
Axel
Ihadn’t planned on tracking anyone down today.
But then again, I also hadn’t expected Marley Bennett to send a midnight text that read like a prelude to war.
The second Lark went to shower, I grabbed my laptop and opened the secure drive—something I hadn’t touched in over a year. I scanned the few names I knew Marley had been tied to in the field: journalists she mentioned, photographers, rogue stringers with questionable passports. But one name popped up again and again in proximity to chaos:Greg Bishop.
Operative. Ghost. Hero or hazard, depending on the country.
The man didn’t exist on paper. Not anymore.
But I remembered him from a mission outside Caracas. He’d shown up in the middle of a hostage extraction with nothing but a sat phone and a knife, and somehow walked out with two prisoners and a defector. Quiet. Unshakeable. Dangerous as hell.