Page 18 of Code Name: Reaper
The comment made my chest tight. “She was my mentor.”
“And?”
I took another sip of coffee, buying time. But the way he was looking at me—patient but determined—told me he wasn’t going to let this go. “My parents died in a car accident when I was three. My grandparents—my father’s mom and dad—raised me. When my grandfather died during my first few weeks at the academy, campus security brought me to Mercury’s office. Before she said a word, I sensed why I was there. She delivered the news with kindness, held me while I sobbed, then helped me arrange emergency leave for the funeral.” I paused, remembering. “She even traveled with me to Newport News, saying she had a meeting scheduled at Langley. Not that she left my side to attend one.”
“She went to the funeral with you?”
I nodded. “We’d barely met, but she stayed with me through everything. When we returned to the academy a week later, I was ready to quit. She convinced me to stay.”
“How?”
“She told me my grandparents would have wanted me to finish what I’d started. That I had potential she’d rarely encountered in her years of teaching, and throwing it away would dishonor their memory.” I shook my head and brushed away an unexpected tear. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I’d dropped out.”
“You were fortunate to have her in your life.”
“In the months that followed, I struggled—not academically, but emotionally. She was there for me whenever I needed her. I can’t count the number of times I broke down in her office, but she never made me feel as though I was bothering her. Instead, she handed me tissues and waited until I was ready to talk.” The memory was crystal clear—Mercury’s patient presence, the way she’d made space for my grief without trying to fix it. “That was the beginning of a relationship that became very important to me.”
“She cared about you.”
“She saw someone who needed guidance, who was hungry for the kind of purposeful work that could channel grief into usefulness.” I paused, considering how much to reveal.
“That level of personal investment is unusual.”
“I mentioned it to her years later. She said something about how my situation reminded her of her own losses. Then, I thought she meant fieldwork—ops gone wrong, people she couldn’t save. I’m no longer sure that’s what she meant.”
I reached for my phone, opened the photo app, and scrolled until I found the image I’d been puzzling over. I turned the screen toward him. “This is Jekyll and Mercury.”
He moved his chair closer to my side of the table and leaned over to examine the photo, his shoulder pressing against mine. “They look close.”
“Look at their body language—the way he’s got his hand on her lower back, how comfortable they are together.” I paused, studying the image. “This was taken thirty years ago.”
My mind raced through the mathematics in a way I hadn’t considered until now. I was twenty-nine.
I watched Reaper’s face as he studied the photo, noting how his expression grew increasingly thoughtful. There was something in his eyes—a recognition that made me think he was connecting the same unlikely dots I was. But whatever conclusions he was drawing, he kept them to himself.
“What happened in Montenegro?” His abrupt change of subject took me aback. “You said you witnessed Prism’s betrayal during the villa assault.”
“The timing of that attack felt wrong from the beginning. Too coordinated for a standard FSB op. The way they found us, exactly when and where we were most vulnerable—” I paused. “I suspected a leak.”
“So what did you do?”
“I made a split-second decision. Instead of following the extraction protocol, I slipped out the kitchen entrance into the forest. From my position behind the trees, I watched the villa burn. I saw your team escape, and Typhon’s team fight their way to the vehicles. But that wasn’t all.”
His jaw tightened. “What else?”
“As I was about to leave, I saw a figure on the ridge. Someone with high-powered optics who’d been watching the attack unfold. Someone who’d known exactly when and where to position themselves.” I met his gaze. “It was Aldrich. And she wasn’t alone—Nikolai Vasiliev was with her.”
“That’s when you decided to track them.”
“From that moment on, I became their shadow. That’s how I got the surveillance photos and the encrypted correspondence. I followed them for three days until they almost caught me and I had to disappear.”
“That’s how you knew to warn me about Prism. You saw firsthand that she’s working with the Russians.”
The tone of his voice, the way he prompted me to talk, patiently listening without interrupting, made me wish it could always be like this between us. And that wasn’t good.
I needed conflict. Safe ground where we could argue about tactics instead of dancing around an attraction we couldn’t act on. But before I could manufacture some trivial complaint, his phone that sat on the kitchen table buzzed with an incoming text.
Reaper reached for it and checked the display. His entire demeanor immediately shifted.
