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Silence clung to the other end like frost. When she spoke again, her voice was hushed. “You found something?”
“Yeah,” he said, fingers tightening around the phone. “We pulled a thread, and it got a reaction. We’re going to pull more.”
Another pause. He could hear movement on her end. Maybe a door closing. Maybe just her stepping into her own quiet to say what came next. “Do you need someone there?” she asked. “I have people standing by.”
That made him huff a laugh. Dry. Crooked. “People?”
Caspari’s voice dropped to something darker. Full of warning. Full ofweight.“Shadowguard.”
His chest stilled. Air gone. Just like that.Shadowguard.
The word hit like a sniper’s breath, quiet, focused, final.
They weren’t standard agency. Not military. Not even CIA black ops in the way most operators understood it. They weredeeper, autonomous ghosts trained under their own doctrine, moving in and out of conflict zones without record or restriction. Deployed as assassins or protectors. Silent systems of balance. If a Shadowguard was sent after you, you didn’t see them. You just died.
“Actually…Reavers.”Reavers?Shadowguard police. They were the ones sent when someone like that went off-leash.
He only knew who they were because he’d been part of a JSOC briefing during the hunt for a rogue Shadowguard, one tied to a conspiracy that left good operators dead. JSOC wanted her head. Loudly. Publicly.
During the op brief, a man stepped into the room unannounced, Komodo. Tall, lean, bronze-skinned, hair tied back in a clean line, his presence sliced through the tension like a blade. Everything about him was deliberate, the matte-black suit with no seams, twin curved blades at his hips, night-vision glasses resting like a whisper on his head. But it was his eyes, dark, unshakable, that cut deepest. He didn’t blink. He filed. He judged.
“We police our own,” he said, voice low and lethal. “Justice is ours to carry out. Ghosts can only be caught by ghosts. You will stand down.”
Nash remembered the jolt in the room, how every SEAL had gone still. Komodo hadn’t been cold. He burned. Not with rage but with purpose. In that fire, vengeance turned to ash.
His pulse ticked once, then twice, thudding against the inside of his throat. “What the fuck? Off-book?” Reavers were fanatical about their code. Whoever had fucked with them… was a dead man walking.
There was a shift then. Something hollow cracked open in her tone. Not professional anymore. Not even close. “Yes. I know. They’re not ones to buck their protocol. But we… I lost…” She stopped. A breath, sharp and liquid. “He was important to us.”
Nash closed his eyes. Goddamn. He felt that. Felt that pain down to his soul. The kind of grief that etched itself into bone, quiet but permanent. The kind that never softened. Justsettled.
“I’m sorry, Lynne,” he said, voice rough now. “I truly am.”
She cleared her throat once. Twice. When she spoke again, the strength was back. “Don’t be sorry. Just get me what I need, Nash.” A pause. “What we all need.”
He nodded, though she couldn’t see it. “We will.”
Silence again. Then, softer. “Nash?”
He adjusted his grip on the phone. “Yeah?”
Another breath. Quieter this time. “Protect Grace…trust her.” A beat passed. “I like her sass.”
Then the line went dead.
Nash sat there for a second longer, phone still at his ear, watching the snow trace slow, dancing spirals outside the window. He closed his eyes. Grace affected him like a full-body experience. “So do I,” he murmured.
* * *
The new office was different,but Nash wasn’t going to let down his guard for a moment. Someone had attacked them under the guise of a malfunction. As Lynne had said, their convenient explanation.
Still glassed-in, still isolated, but someone had made adjustments since yesterday. The overhead fluorescents had been dimmed to a softer glow, no longer that harsh, clinical blaze that made eyes ache if stared at too long. The desk had been swapped out, this one sleeker, deeper, with dual monitors already humming quietly, waiting. Two chairs now. Matching. Ergonomic and plain, but more deliberate. There was even a potted plant in the corner. Fake, sure, but someone somewhere was trying to make a point. An apology in decor.
But what Nash noticed most was what wasn’t there.
No drones. Yet it felt like they were being handled. He didn’t like it.
Nash stepped to the windowed wall and let his eyes drift to the hallway. No movement. No shadows. Just the soft glint of polished floor and empty space where danger used to live.