Page 84 of The ARC Unit: Breach

His stare sharpened. “You really want to keep saying that?”

“Yes, because you keep talking about it like I disappeared for six hours. I moved behind a cabana at a party where half the guests were barefoot, not into the back of a sketchy van.”

The skin around his eyes tightened, and his shoulders settled into the rigid stillness I had started associating with the moments when his temper went quiet instead of disappearing.

“You don’t know what could have happened,” he said.

“Neither do you.”

“That’s the fucking point, Mercer.”

“No, your point is that you didn’t know exactly where I was for less than a minute and apparently that was enough to turn the entire operation into a lesson about obedience.”

Wolf pushed away from the desk.

“Hawk lost visual.”

“I know.”

“Then I lost audio.”

“I know.”

“I lost the only way to know whether you were still standing there or whether somebody had already moved you somewhere I couldn’t reach.”

“I was the one standing there. I could see what was happening.”

“Exactly. You had the room in front of you. I had to account for everything you couldn’t see.”

Wolf’s shoulders went still and I realized I should have stopped there. Any reasonably intelligent person would have recognized the shift and chosen survival. But I had spent four days proving that intelligence and self-preservation were not always related.

“We found Kade, and I spoke to him long enough for Raven to capture both Morgenstern and Südweg. Now we have a Thursday movement, and Hawk finally has a photograph that doesn’t look like somebody took it through a dirty windshield. You can be angry that I didn’t obey fast enough, but don’t stand in my room pretending the operation failed because it didn’t happen exactly the way you wanted.”

“I never said it failed.”

“You’ve barely acknowledged that it worked.”

“Because this isn’t a fucking performance review,” he sneered.

“No, it’s apparently the part where you drag me upstairs so you can explain that every good result becomes bad if I make one decision without asking permission first.”

Wolf’s voice dropped. “You made the decision after I explicitly told you not to.”

“There it is.”

“There what is?”

“The actual problem.”

He stared at me.

I uncrossed my arms and gestured between us. “You cannot stand that I didn’t do what you said. The party worked and we came home with something useful, but you keep dragging everything back to the same point: you said move, and I didn’t move fast enough.”

“You weren’t right because you got lucky.”

“I wasn’t lucky, I listened.”

“You ignored extraction criteria.”