Page 32 of Wraith: Lethal Impact

The broker holsters the revolver. He reaches out, thin fingers sweeping the diamonds off the desk and into his pocket.

"Thirty minutes." He stands, backing away from the terminal. "If the routing bounces, that's your problem. I wipe the drives at minute thirty-one."

He turns and disappears down the dark aisle of server racks, leaving us alone with the humming machines.

My lungs finally demand air. I exhale a shaky breath. My knees go weak, and I grab the edge of the metal desk to steady myself.

I did it—de-escalated the threat and secured the objective. Beneath the tremor in my hands, pride blooms warm. I talked a man with a gun into standing down.

The sniper is staring at me.

I turn my head. He hasn't moved. His gray eyes are fixed on my face, studying me with an intensity that makes the skin on the back of my neck prickle. He's looking at me like he's never seen me before. The dismissive, protective arrogance is gone.

"You stepped in front of a loaded weapon." His voice is a low rumble under the noise of the servers.

"I bought us the terminal." I lift my chin, refusing to shrink under his stare. "If you'd attacked him, he fires. The noise compromises us. You're a sniper. You're supposed to avoid close-quarters collateral."

"I had the angle." He takes a step toward me. The distance between us vanishes. "I would have broken his firing arm before his finger twitched on the trigger. You never step between me and a threat. Never."

"You don't have a monopoly on survival." I hold my ground. "I'm not a package you carry from point A to point B. I'm part of this. I handle what I can handle and lean on you for the rest."

He stares down at me. The tension crackles in the narrow space between our bodies, thick and electric. Nothing like the stifling protectiveness of the motel room. This is respect.

A muscle ticks in his jaw. "Let's get logged in."

He turns to the terminal, pulls the broker's chair back, and drops into the seat.

I stand next to him, my shoulder brushing his Kevlar vest. The proximity sends a jolt of heat through my spine. His scarred fingers fly across the greasy mechanical keyboard.

"What's the next step?" I stare at the green text scrolling across the screen.

"We route through an encrypted onion proxy." His eyes stay on the monitor. "We need to wake the ghost."

The screen goes black. A blinking cursor appears in the top left corner.

He types a rapid sequence of commands. Specter-Nine. Override sequence Delta.

The screen flashes white, blinding in the dim basement. Lines of code pour down the monitor in a waterfall. The server racks around us hum louder, processors spinning up as the connection forces its way through layers of international firewalls.

A video window snaps open in the center of the screen, the audio feed muted. A silent uplink.

The feed is degraded and artifacting. A woman sits in a dark room lit by the glow of multiple monitors. She wears a headset, her hair pulled back in a messy knot. She looks exhausted, but her eyes are sharp, darting across information I can't see. I have no idea who she is, but the fractional drop in his shoulders tells me she's someone he trusts.

A black chat box overlays the bottom of the video feed. Green text spools across it.

< Hutch ordered you to stay dark for forty-eight hours. You're breaking comms protocol.

His scarred fingers fly across the keyboard, his posture rigid.

< The protocol is burned. The Consortium hit the Grand Solarium. They're burning every bridge connected to the op.

The woman on the screen pauses. Her eyes drop to read the incoming text. Her expression hardens.

< It's a bloodbath, Dax. If you're on the grid, they'll find you. Why are you calling me from a dirty relay in the Bangkok underbelly?

Dax. His name is Dax. The name is an anchor in the chaos. The ghost holding the gun is a man.

< Because they extracted the wrong target. They grabbed a dancer named Andrea. I need a trace on her location.