The ultrasound image sat on the passenger seat, face down. I didn’t look at it. Didn’t need to. The shape was burned into my memory—that tiny, perfect peanut with its fluttering heart, the physical evidence of something I still couldn’t quite believe was real.
By the time I reached the farmhouse, the sky was fully dark—just the distant glow of Rawley’s place visible across the pasture, and beyond it, the black that meant mountains rather than open sky.
I parked in my usual spot, killed the engine, then sat in the driver’s seat with my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the dark outline of the house.
My house. The place I’d built with my own hands, on land I’d bought with money I’d saved from twenty years of careful living. The place where, until four days ago, I’d known exactly who I was and what I was doing.
Now I was someone else—or rather, I was who I’d always been, but with a different name for it. An omega, not an alpha. A person who could get pregnant, not a person who couldn’t. Someone with a completely different set of possibilities than the ones I’d spent thirty years accounting for.
I got out of the truck eventually, the ultrasound image in my pocket, and walked to the porch instead of going inside. The night was cold—proper Montana November cold, the kind that turned your breath to fog and numbed your fingertips through gloves—but I barely felt it.
Just sat on the top step with my elbows on my knees and my eyes on the valley, and tried to make sense of what had happened.
Somewhere in the world, Cruz was on a contract I wasn’t cleared to know about—running comms for Sterling’s team, jumping out of planes, doing whatever needed doing to keep the people he cared about safe.
The only person alive who could be responsible for the small peanut-shaped fact currently sitting in my pocket.
I hadn’t told him. Didn’t know if I was going to. Didn’t know how to begin that conversation, or whether he’d even want it, or what it would mean for the thing between us we had never once named out loud.
A baby changed everything. A designation that wasn’t what I’d thought changed even more. Together, they pulled thefoundation out from under a life I’d spent thirty years arranging into something manageable and solitary and my own.
Now it was none of those things. Now it was something I couldn’t recognize, built on truths I was still learning to name.
I sat with all of it in the dark until the valley went fully black, until the cold seeped through my jacket and into my bones, until the only thing I knew for certain was that whatever came next would bear almost no resemblance to what had come before.
Then I went inside, locked the door behind me, and started figuring out how to live in a world where nothing was what I’d thought it was.
Chapter Eight
~ Cruz ~
I knelt on the cracked tile floor of the safe house bathroom, one hand gripping the rim of the toilet bowl, the other braced against the damp wall, as my stomach contracted for the fourth time in ten minutes.
The porcelain was cold under my palm, the cement floor harder under my knees than it had been last night when I’d tried to sleep on it after giving my bunk to Rivera, who’d come back from the east side op with a bullet graze across his ribs.
Dawn light filtered through the narrow window above the tank, just enough to turn the single bulb’s flicker from annoying to actively nauseating.
Nothing came up. There was nothing left to come up. I’d thrown up what little I’d managed to eat yesterday at 0230, then again at 0430, then dry-heaved twice more when the smell of coffee reached me through the door.
I’d stopped bothering to pretend I was counting around day eight, when Harker had caught me in the kitchen at 0500 with my forehead against the refrigerator door, trying to decide if I could risk orange juice or if water was the only safe bet.
“You look like shit,” he’d said, not unkindly. “You want me to tell Sterling you need a day?”
I’d told him I was fine. Still telling myself the same thing, two weeks later, with my knees going numb against the concrete and my jaw clenched so tight I could feel it in my temples.
When the stomach rumblings finally stopped, I sat back against the wall and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The tile was cold through my t-shirt, damp in a way that spoke to the building’s plumbing issues rather than anyone’s cleaning habits.
Outside, the street market was coming awake—vendors setting up carts, voices calling to each other in Turkish, the mix of diesel and cardamom and something roasting that was Istanbul in the morning.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe through it—not the nausea, which was starting to fade, but the disquiet that had been sitting behind my sternum since day three of this mission.
Jackson’s silence.
Not the gradual slowing of texts that happened when one of us was busy—a pattern we’d established over the past eight months, the natural rhythm of two men who spent most of their lives on operations they couldn’t talk about. Not the missed calls or the delayed responses or even the single-word answers that meant Jackson was running on three hours of sleep and a protein bar.
Complete absence. Zero communication. The last text I’d gotten from him was nineteen days ago, a simple “copy that” in response to my ETA, sent three hours before I’d boarded the plane for Istanbul.
Nineteen days of radio silence from a man who’d stood on his porch and watched me drive away with a look on his face I was still trying to figure out.
