"I will."
"If I tell you to run?—"
"I'll run. I promised."
Her eyes on mine. Green-blue. The color I've been memorizing since the first night she slept in my bed. Her lips part. The air between us thickens. I can feel her holding a word behind her teeth. The shape of it presses against the silence like a hand against glass. I can almost hear it.
She doesn't speak. She rises on her toes and kisses me again. Softer this time. A promise, not a goodbye. When she pulls back, her eyes are bright. Not tears. Resolve.
"Let's go get my brother."
I hand her the Beretta. She takes it. Checks the safety. Tucks it into the holster. Ready. She's been ready since the phone call. Maybe since the night she knocked on my door and chose this life with her eyes open.
The teams assemble in the garage. Greeks and Irish checking each other's equipment, exchanging nods across the history and the grudges and the particular stubbornness of men who have decided to stop killing each other and start killing someone else. The alliance made operational.
Lex catches my eye across the garage. Nods. Cormac nods. Declan, holstered and moving toward his vehicle, nods.
"Harbor facility. Two-minute countdown from breach. Stay on comms. Stay alive."
Three vehicles. Three directions. Cormac's team peels north toward Dorchester. Lex goes east toward the waterfront. My vehicle heads south toward the harbor.
Siobhan sits beside me in the back seat. Vest over her sweater. Beretta on her thigh. She stares out the window at the city passing in streaks of streetlight and shadow. Her hand rests on her stomach. Brief. Instinctive. She catches herself. Moves it to her knee.
I notice the movement. But I don't think anything of it.
The harbor facility rises against the dark. Concrete and steel and the particular silence of a building pretending to be empty.
"Together," she says.
"Together."
The vehicle stops. The door opens on the February cold.
And we go.
Chapter 27
Nico
The Raid
* * *
The door goes down at 2:07 am.
Stavros hits it with the breaching ram. The lock shatters and the frame splinters, and then we’re inside, and the world reduces to what it always becomes in these moments: movement and threat.
Left corridor: clear. Right corridor: shadow shifts. I put two rounds into the shadow before it resolves into a shape. A body drops. The Glock kicks against my palm. Beside me, Siobhan flinches at the sound but keeps moving. She stays low, tight to the wall, Beretta up, muzzle discipline perfect. The way I taught her. The way she learned in twelve days what most soldiers learn in twelve weeks.
We push through the harbor facility in pairs. Stavros and his team take the left wing. I take the right with Siobhan and two Greek soldiers flanking. The building is a converted warehouse: high ceilings lost in darkness, industrial shelving rising like canyon walls on either side, concrete floor stained with oil and things I don't examine. Overhead lights are dead. We move bytactical flashlight. The beams cut the dark in sharp white lines that turn every corner into a decision.
A door. Locked. I signal. Stavros kicks it. Storage room. Empty. We move on.
Another door. Open. A hallway beyond it, long and narrow, the kind of space where two men with rifles could hold off a dozen. I check the angles. Clear. We advance.
The comms crackle. Lex's voice come in clipped."Waterfront complex cleared. No hostiles. Warehouse was empty."
Cormac, a second later."Dorchester same. They pulled out. Cleaned everything."
