Chapter 18

Trust Is A Loaded Gun.

Conner

I kept replaying that day in my fucking head. The bullet, the blood, the brains, the way those girls screamed and cried and begged for help. I remember looking around the room before I left Liam to tend to them. I remember it now, the split second that I saw one girl standing tall in the shadows, she was thin, bruised, bloodied, hair a mess, but she stood there in her underwear unblinking, unmoved by the death and chaos. I met her eyes for just a second and she didn’t flinch. She just stood there. That was her. Sage. Specter. The girl in the cage who wasn’t a victim. She had been working. My jaw clenched as 1 stared at her file again. My name. My men. Our routes. Timetables. Ops. All logged in brutal detail. I was classified as a yellow threat. A mid-level nuisance. Not worth top-level intervention. But her? She was a red. An asset. A weapon. A ghost trained from childhood under fucking Yakov. And now she’d gone rogue and handed her secrets to me.

“I didn’t stop her,” I muttered under my breath.

“What?” Nico asked, glancing up.

“That night. I saw her. I let her walk away.”

“You weren’t her target,” he said bluntly. “You’d be dead if you were.”