"Commander, I need five minutes of your time. Privately."
Kane studies her for a beat. His eyes flick to me, then back to Dar, the assessment happening in the space between heartbeats. He nods.
They walk to his office, and the door closes behind them, and the solid wood cuts off everything I'd use to read the situation. No visual. No audio. Just a closed door and the knowledge that the woman I care about is telling a man I respect something that could change how both of them see her.
I stare at my monitors. The cursor blinks. My fingers hover over the keyboard without typing, which is the physical equivalent of my brain running at capacity with no output.
The encrypted partition. That's what this is about. I've suspected since the weapon fell, since Dar's behavior shifted in ways too subtle for anyone but me to catch. She held something back. Insurance against the possibility that Echo Ridge would use her and discard her the way GCHQ did.
I understand insurance policies. I understand redundancies built into systems as protection against failure. I understand the impulse to keep one door open when every other institution in your life has locked theirs behind you.
My chest tightens. Not with anger. With recognition. Because I would have done the same thing.
Minutes pass. Sarah glances at Kane's closed door, then at me, and the question in her expression is one I can't answer because I don't have the data. I shake my head once. She returns to her terminal.
The door opens. Kane emerges first, his expression neutral, the professional mask he wears when he's made a decision he's certain about.
Dar follows, and her hands are moving, tapping a rhythm on her thigh, and the return of the motion tells me everything I need to know. She felt safe enough to stop performing. Whatever Kane said in there, it wasn't what GCHQ would have said.
She walks straight to me, and the directness of it, the way she cuts through the room without hesitation, makes every head turn.
Sarah pauses her typing. Stryker shifts his weight. Dylan's eyes track Dar's trajectory the way they track movement in a combat zone, measuring intent and distance.
"I held back intelligence." Her voice is quiet enough that only I can hear it, but she doesn't lean in, doesn't whisper, doesn't hide. "An encrypted partition. Committee data I kept as insurance in case Echo Ridge used me and threw me away the way GCHQ did."
My hands go still on the keyboard.
"Kane asked me what I needed to feel safe enough not to need it." She pauses. The pause is long enough that I hear the server hum cycle through two full rotations. "Nobody's ever asked me that before."
The room is full of people. Sarah at her terminal, Stryker by the door, Victoria reviewing intelligence feeds, Dylan with his rifle and his grief and his fierce, unyielding loyalty. All of them are here.
All of them can see me looking at Dar with something I should probably be better at hiding.
"I would have done the same thing," I say.
Her eyes search mine. Whatever she finds there makes the tension in her shoulders release by a fraction, a shift so small that only someone who has spent weeks memorizing the geography of her body would catch it.
I have memorized the geography of her body. In the server room. In the gym. In my bed at 3 AM when the screens are dark and her skin glows silver in the emergency lighting and her fingers tap code on my ribs while she sleeps. I know this woman in ways that have nothing to do with data and everything to dowith the slow, devastating process of letting someone past every defense I own.
"I know," she says. "That's why I'm telling you instead of letting you find out."
The honesty of it lands like a line of clean code in a corrupted file. Simple. Functional. True.
Kane returns to the central display. He stands in front of the screens showing the Committee's exposed network, the light from the monitors casting his face in the blue-white glow that I've lived inside for years.
He looks at the intelligence spread across the screens. At the team assembled in the operations center. At every person who bled and built and fought to reach this moment.
"We have everything we need," he says. "Webb's location. His network. His infrastructure. The evidence Victoria and Reagan compiled across the last two years, combined with what Tommy and Dar pulled from the Committee's systems, creates a case that can't be buried."
He pauses. Looks around the room. Makes eye contact with each of us in turn, and I've watched Kane command from behind screens for years, but I've never seen his face do exactly this. Pride, tempered with the weight of knowing what he's about to ask.
"We finish it."
The words land in the silence like a detonation. Controlled. Precise. Final.
Stryker straightens. Mercer's hand goes to Dylan's shoulder, a gesture so brief and practiced that it speaks to years of shared missions, shared losses, the kind of brotherhood that doesn't require explanation.
Victoria and Roman exchange a look that carries the weight of a decade. Sarah saves her file and closes her laptop with a click that sounds like a period at the end of a very long sentence.
