Page 62 of Oliver

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Oliver

Undisclosed Location – The Golden Team’s Operations Hub

The screen lit up with decrypted files, thousands of them spilling out like a dam finally cracked open. Emery stood behind Cyclone and Raven arms crossed, face unreadable as name after name filled the feed.

“I knew it was bad,” she said. “But I didn’t know it wasthisdeep.”

One name blinked red on the screen.

A. R. Langston.

“Langston?” I said, blood going cold.

Raven stepped forward. “That’s impossible. He’s a deputy director at Langley.”

“CIA brass,” Cyclone muttered. “He’s been in government for over twenty years. Flawless record. Patriot golden boy.”

“He’s also the one who assigned Vale to that off-grid facility in the first place,” Beatrice added, flipping through the file. “He scrubbed the surveillance logs. Buried every inquiry. And—lookat this—he personally signed off on the ‘emergency extraction’ plan the day after Emery vanished.”

Raven swore under his breath. “He’s not just involved. He’sorchestrating it.”

Emery sat down, quiet for a long beat. Then:

“Let’s take him down.”

Oliver looked at her. “We can’t storm CIA headquarters.”

“No,” she said. “But we can expose him.”

Cyclone spun around in his chair. “That’s a suicide mission. He’s protected by multiple levels of clearance, surveillance, and very expensive lawyers. You take one shot at him and miss, he’ll bury you under a fake plane crash and a pile of shredded documents.”

“We don’t miss,” Emery said simply.

I couldn’t help but smile. “Damn right we don’t.”

“Then we don’t go through him. We go around. We leak it to the people who can’t be silenced. Oversight committees. International press. Congressional allies.”

Cyclone raised a brow. “And if Langston tries to run?”

Oliver answered, voice dark. “Then he learns what happens when you make the Golden Team your enemy.”

Later that night

OLIVER

She sat in the backyard,laptop open, firelight dancing across her skin. I walked out, two glasses of wine in hand.

“You okay?” I asked.

“I just sent the first wave of files to an international journalist network,” she said, eyes still on the screen. “If anything happens to me, they’ll go wide.”

I handed her a glass. “You’re making enemies, Em.”

She turned to me, lips curved into something fierce. “Good. Maybe now they’ll finallysee me coming.I did nothing to these people, and they kidnapped me, and they tried to kill me.

I kissed her hard—right there under the stars.

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