“You look pale.”
“It’s nothing. I just haven’t had much sun lately.”
Stone wasn’t convinced, but thankfully didn’t pry.
“Then let’s take a walk down by the water. Just us. Salt air. Sunlight. Do you remember what those feel like?”
“Later, maybe.”
“Later,” Stone repeated. The word carried weight. Disappointment.
They sat in silence. The crackle of fire. The distant hum of the Pacific. Steam rising from cooling mugs.
Dave let his eyes drift to the book Stone had picked up. The man wasn’t reading; his thumb traced the same page, back and forth, lost in thought.
It should’ve broken the quiet. Somehow, it deepened it.
Dave realized—grudging, undeniable—that Stone’s presence didn’t intrude. It settled. Like silence was something they shared, not escaped.
He forced his gaze back to his own book, though he hadn’t read a word.
Then came another knock—Clinton’s rhythm, sharp and sure.
Dave exhaled, already standing. “And there it is.”
Stone stayed seated, gaze steady, book resting on his lap.
As Dave reached the door, he allowed himself one fleeting thought—the beach, Stone beside him, sunlight instead of crisis.
The two of them.
Just us,the words hung in the air, an unspoken question in Stone’s eyes.
A nice thought. But in his world, nice thoughts never survived long past the threshold.
Clinton waited in the hallway, glass of water ready. Dave accepted it in silence. Six months under him, and the kid already knew his habits—that quiet anticipation that marked a good advisor. Precise. Efficient. It helped that he’d spent two years shadowing Dave’s last man before retirement.
Efficient. Reliable. Exactly what Dave required in his orbit.
Three days later…
The Nevada air carried a dry bite, the kind that came with early winter in the valley.
The cool high desert stretched wide and empty around Nightfall Drifters Ranch, the sky painted in swirling purples and fading gold.
Out here, the silence wasn’t polished like it had been at Dave’s estate—it was raw, edged with wind sweeping across dry grass and the distant cry of a hawk.
The government had snapped up another five hundred thousand acres around the original one eighty-six, pushing the fence line deep into nowhere. Most of Nevada was BLM land anyway—forty-eight million acres of it, wide and empty, government-owned on paper but belonging to no one. It made the place even quieter. Even the Chinooks coming and going barely stirred the air out here.
Stone told himself he had come because Dave had asked him to. The former SecDef wanted eyes on the younger assassins, a fresh evaluation of their progress, and Stone had agreed. That was the official reason.
The truth was harder to name.
After their last conversation in Santa Barbara—the half-smile at his words ofjust us—the promise of a walk by the water that never came.
Stone needed distance.
The distraction of work. A place where he could bury what he didn’t want to think about.
