Page 143 of Broken Oath

“Can you identify the sender?”

“No. But the encryption signature matches the messages from the woman with the silver sword.”

She had warned them.

Someone inside Rook’s chain of command had stopped the message from reaching him.

The mountain hadn’t happened because she failed to act.

It happened because someone powerful enough to control military communications had already taken control of the mission.

Rook felt something shift inside him.

For months, he had wanted to drag the mystery woman out of the shadows and demand answers.

Now he wanted something else.

To look into her eyes when he told her the mountain wasn’t her fault.

The thought caught him off guard.

It was too personal.

Too intimate for a woman whose name he didn’t know.

But she had called him James.

Not his rank.

Not his call sign.

His name.

As though she remembered the man he had been before the mountain buried him.

Rook looked at the frozen image of her face.

He wasn’t looking at an informant anymore.

He was looking at another survivor.

Someone carrying the same war.

Alone.

And for the first time, Rook wanted answers for her almost as badly as he wanted them for himself.

12

ROOK

Rain tapped steadily against the warehouse windows.

The operations room glowed beneath blue monitor light. Coffee cups sat abandoned across the central table. Weapons rested beside laptops. Stacks of files covered every available surface.

Nobody looked rested.

Nobody expected to.