I pushed myself to my feet, bracing one hand against the sink. My reflection in the cracked mirror looked exactly as bad as I felt—skin too pale under the week’s worth of stubble, eyes shadowed, the kind of hollow-checked thin that came from throwing up everything you tried to eat for two weeks straight.
I splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth with bottled water and the travel tube I’d packed four weeks ago in Montana, then checked my phone.
No new messages. Just the thread between Jackson and me, the last entry my unanswered “landed safely, mission runningon schedule, check in when I can.” Sent the day after my arrival, almost thirty days ago.
I’d read enough operational silences to know the difference between a man who was busy and a man who had made a decision. The problem was I couldn’t tell which one this was, and that not-knowing was doing something to me I didn’t have a clean word for.
The team was running on a two-week extension—standard procedure when an arms dealer turned out to have connections to the people who’d put Eleanor Peterson in jail. Sterling had called it in the night we’d made the connection, and the powers that be had approved the timeline without a blink.
Two more weeks of Istanbul. Two more weeks of Jackson’s silence. Two more weeks of whatever was happening to my body that made it reject coffee and sleep and the basic functions that had kept me alive through ten years of covert operations.
I rinsed my mouth one more time, ran a hand through my hair, and forced myself to stand up straight. The mission clock was ticking in the background—twenty-six days down, fourteen to go—but it was the other count that ran louder in my head.
Twenty-six days. Not quite four weeks. Long enough to notice, not quite long enough to panic.
I told myself I wouldn’t text again. Wouldn’t call. Wouldn’t reach out to Rawley or Jojo or any of the people who might know what was happening at the farmhouse down the road from the main ranch.
I would wait, instead, until I could get home and ask Jackson to his face what had changed between the morning he’d kissed me goodbye and the afternoon my texts stopped being answered.
The nausea was fading now, leaving behind the exhaustion that sleep didn’t touch—the kind that sat behind my eyes and made me short with people I had no business being short with.
I’d lost my temper with Harker yesterday over a misrouted equipment request, had snapped at Nguyen this morning when he’d asked if I wanted first shift on comms.
Not like me. Not the controlled, methodical operator Sterling had hand-picked for this team five years ago.
The kind of behavior that got people sent home early.
I tucked my phone into my pocket and opened the bathroom door, stepping into the narrow hallway that connected the safe house’s three rooms.
The main space was quiet—Sterling at the table with the satellite imagery, Harker and Nguyen sleeping in rotation on the pullout couch, Rivera at the window with binoculars, watching the street below.
They’d figured out something was wrong. Of course they had—five men living in four hundred square feet for three weeks, watching each other eat and sleep and move through the specific routines that kept them alive under pressure.
They’d noticed the vomiting, the weight I’d dropped, the circles under my eyes that no amount of coffee seemed to touch.
They’d just been kind enough not to mention it.
I moved to the kitchen area—a hot plate and a mini-fridge tucked into the corner—and started a pot of coffee I probably wouldn’t finish. The small kindness of normal routine, acting like nothing was wrong when everything felt like it was coming apart.
Behind me, the mission continued—satellite imagery, radio traffic, the careful calculation of risk and reward that had kept us all alive through a dozen contracts more dangerous than this one.
Ahead of me, fourteen more days of Istanbul, fourteen more days of whatever was happening to my body, fourteen more days of wondering what had happened in Montana to make Jackson go completely silent.
I’d find out when I got home. Would stand on his porch and ask the question I’d been carrying since day three. Would listen to whatever answer he gave me, and figure out what came next from there.
For now, though, I had coffee to make and comms to run and a mission to finish—one step at a time, one day at a time, one dry heave at a time if that was what it took.
The coffee finished brewing. I poured myself half a cup, added enough sugar to mask the bitterness, and carried it to the table where Sterling was working. He looked up when I sat down, his eyes moving over my face with the careful assessment I’d seen a hundred times before.
“Morning,” he said, his voice neutral.
“Morning,” I replied, and lifted the cup in a toast neither of us believed. Outside, Istanbul came fully awake—traffic building, voices rising, the rhythm of a city going about its business while five men in a walkup apartment plotted how to dismantle an arms dealer’s network without getting themselves killed in the process.
I took a sip of coffee and tried not to think about how it would probably be coming back up in twenty minutes. Tried not to think about the silence from Montana, or the look on Jackson’s face when I’d kissed him goodbye, or the fourteen days still stretching between now and home.
One step at a time. One day at a time. One dry heave at a time.
I could make it fourteen days. I’d survived worse.
