He had glimpsed it in Mexico, buried deep in emergency contact forms he’d meant to forget. Now it was all he could think of.
He pulled up outside her building, a quiet red brick refuge tucked away from the road.
Just as he killed the engine, a dark sedan pulled away from the curb.
An Uber.
He watched the taillights vanish.
His thumb hovered over her buzzer.
He pressed.
No answer.
He pressed again, harder.
Silence, just the whisper of wind through leaves.
She was gone again.
Always moving, one step ahead or behind.
Back at the team room, tension was thick.
He caught Grizzly adjusting the collar of his jacket, the insignia slightly crooked and the edge of his sleeve rolled unevenly.
Picasso approached quietly. “Grizzly, your collar’s off, and that sleeve’s rolled too high.”
Grizzly’s hands froze mid-adjustment. “Just a quick fix, didn’t think?—”
Picasso’s gaze sharpened, a rare edge slipping into his tone, though he kept his voice low. “This team depends on attention to detail. It’s the little things that can keep you alive.”
Grizzly blinked, clearly taken aback by the unexpected harshness. The room felt heavier, and he swallowed hard, straightening his jacket without another word.
Picasso took a step back, voice returning to its usual steady cadence. “Stay sharp.”
Reef exchanged a quick glance with Falcon.
“He’s losing it,” Reef whispered.
Falcon shook his head, eyes tracing Picasso’s rigid posture.
“No. He’s suffocating. That ‘force multiplier’ Dude talked about? It works both ways. Take it away and you’re dividing by zero.”
Picasso turned away from Grizzly, jaw clenched so tight it looked like he might crack a tooth.
Reef and Falcon exchanged a knowing look.
It was time.
He was breaking and they had to keep him from taking the team down with him.
TWENTY-EIGHT
GABRIELLA
The Appalachians, usually a verdant sprawl of ancient, gentle giants, were weeping. A relentless rain system, Hurricane Peggy’s monstrous afterbirth, had stalled over the Blue Ridge for days, turning every stream into a raging torrent, every hillside into a cascading river of mud. Gabriella had seen devastation, but this was different. In Mexico, the earth had fractured, violent and immediate, leaving a stark, broken landscape. Here, in the hollows and mountain passes of North Carolina, the earth wasdissolving. Houses slid off foundations, roads vanished into the churning brown water, and the cold, damp seeped into everything, a bone-deep chill that no amount of emergency blankets could chase away.
