Page 16 of Avenging Jessie (Black Swan Division Thrillers #3)

Sixteen

Spence

The moment Jessie slid out of the car, he knew.

It wasn’t the “I have to pee” line—though that had been a nice touch—it was the way her body language had shifted half a second before she said it.

He’d played along and kept scrolling through the camera feeds, buying himself a moment before confirming what he already knew.

She was making a play without him.

His first instinct was the obvious one—call her out, order her to stand down, drag her into the trunk if he had to, like he’d threatened. But the second thought was stronger. This is who she is now.

Jessie was not the same swan who would run a plan into the ground before breaking ranks. Not the same partner who would back your play even when she hated it.

Brewer and Hagar had carved out pieces of her and replaced them with hard edges. He’d seen it in her eyes since they’d rescued her from Brewer—the calculation, the constant weighing of odds. And now here she was, betting it all on herself.

He leaned back in the seat, staring at the empty road.

Meg would read me the riot act.

Declan would tell me not to indulge her.

Flynn… Flynn would pull her off the op without hesitation.

But none of them were here. Just him.

He’d been where she was—hell-bent on a course no one could talk him out of. And when someone had tried, it had almost cost him everything.

In one area of his life, he continued to do it. Victoria. He would never stop searching for her, never stop hunting down the man who’d taken her.

Seconds ticked by. An eternity. Nearly as fast as his code could run a program, he ran through his options. His own personal code of morals and responsibilities.

Then he made the call.

He wasn’t going to pull her back. He wasn’t going to blow her cover by storming in after her.

He was going to make damn sure she got through that door without catching a bullet to the head.

Spence’s fingers flew over the keys, the laptop already patched into the exterior feeds. The building’s security network was airtight inside, but the perimeter? That he could touch.

He pulled up the live stream from the west side service entrance. The camera swept in slow, mechanical arcs, overlapping its field of vision with the one mounted at the corner of the loading dock.

Jessie wasn’t in the frame yet. Good. If he could see her, someone else could, too.

He dove into the control menu and slid the feed into maintenance mode. The camera froze for a second—then resumed, but with a five-second loop of empty asphalt instead of real time. It would buy her the window she needed

She thought she was doing this solo. Fat chance.

He would always have her back. The decision was made right then and there. Even she went against his orders. Even if she went rogue.

He was all in.

He toggled to his secondary screen and powered up the thermal imaging scanner lying on the dash. A wash of heat signatures bled across the monitor in molten oranges and reds.

His pulse spiked. There—cutting low along the tree line, body heat muted by the damp night air. She was fast, fluid, and deliberate. Not reckless in her movements.

He tracked her until she dropped out of range, swallowed by the facility’s blind spot. That was the last time he’d see her until she was inside. By then, if she screwed up, it would be too late to pull her out clean.

Spence swore under his breath, grabbed the thermal gun, and sprinted to the trunk. There, he grabbed a Kevlar vest and loaded it with extra mags, a sidearm, and a knife.

Because if Jessie walked into hell, he was damn well walking in after her.

He slipped the vest over his head, the heavy weight distributing itself across his shoulders. Every mag, every weapon in the pouches, was a reminder of exactly how sideways this could go.

The logical move was to stay in the car, keep eyes on her through thermal, and be her safety net from a distance, just like she’d suggested.

That’s what Meg might do if she’d okay’d this, what Declan would demand if it had been his idea.

Hell, it’s what Flynn would have ordered if he were still around to give orders.

But again, this wasn’t their call. It’s mine.

And Jessie—bloody Jessie—was already inside, rushing toward a target who’d gutted her life once and still had the proverbial knife in his hand.

Spence racked the slide on his Glock, holstered it, and grabbed a suppressed SMG. A rifle would be better for long distance, but if they ended up in the server rooms, he’d need something compact.

He checked the thermal one last time—no sign of her now. She’d cleared the perimeter.

His gut twisted. This was where good leaders trusted their people. He slammed the trunk shut and stalked into the shadows.

The treeline swallowed him whole, the damp earth muffling his boots as he moved.

He kept low, letting the black of his vest and jacket blend with the tree trunks.

Even in the near-silence, his senses went razor-sharp—the faint hum of the facility’s backup generators, the metallic tang of rain on steel, the distant hiss of tires on wet asphalt from the main road.

He skirted the arc of the parking lot lights, using the natural slope of the land to stay invisible. Ahead, the west side service entrance glowed faintly under a single halogen bulb, just enough illumination to silhouette anyone standing there.

Jessie was nowhere in sight. That meant she’d gotten past the guard post, and he didn’t have to watch her try to improvise with a bullet in the mix.

He cut toward a cluster of utility sheds at the edge of the property. Maintenance outbuildings, they were likely filled with electrical panels, spare equipment, and maybe a way into the building that didn’t require walking through a security checkpoint.

Every step, his mind ran through contingencies. The breach points, fallback routes, and how long it would take before his looped camera feed was noticed.

The west wall loomed closer. Spence pressed himself into the narrow strip of shadow beneath it, one hand on his Glock, the other fishing out a micro-drone from his vest. The object was the size of a matchbox, but its live feed might allow him to track Jessie without triggering the internal sensors.

He launched it low, letting it skim just above the grass. The tiny motor was a whisper under the rain.

The service door’s keypad was a sterile blue rectangle in the dark. A few feeet away lay an unconscious guard. Jessie’s work, no doubt.

Spence crouched low, rain dripping from the edge of his hood, and slid a thin bypass tool from his pocket.

Four seconds to pop the cover. Another three to clip into the wiring. His laptop, slung across his chest on its strap, was already running a brute-force overlay. Numbers cycled in rapid succession on the screen.

Click.

The light shifted from blue to green.

Spence eased the door open an inch and stopped.

No movement. No sound but the hum of a vending machine somewhere down the hall and the distant vibration of HVAC units pumping climate-controlled air through the building.

He slipped inside, tugging the door shut behind him, and immediately hugged the wall. His eyes adjusted to the gloom—fluorescent strips buzzing overhead, their light patchy from bulbs that hadn’t been changed in years.

The micro-drone’s feed popped into the lower corner of his laptop screen.

Grainy thermal imaging painted the interior in shades of white and gray.

It caught a heat signature. Jessie’s moving in a slow, calculated pattern.

She was avoiding open spaces, keeping to the walls, checking corners before crossing. She was headed to the row of offices.

He moved in the opposite direction toward the doors to the basement server hub. If Hastings was here for data, that’s where he’d be.

Stopping at one of the unattended guard stations, he stuck a USB into its computer. A special little code on it would have the place under Spence’s control shortly, from the security cams to the fire alarms and suppressants.

Leaving it to do its job, he conducted another camera sweep on his scanner, froze the feed, and looped it just as before, buying himself a few more minutes before security noticed the blind spots. If they were even paying attention.

Somewhere ahead, a door clicked shut, the sound echoing down the corridor.

Spence’s jaw tightened. That hadn’t been Jessie.

Hastings? Possibly. Or a guard.

Either way, it was time to find out what exactly this data center had to do with Brewer’s plan for the drones.

Jessie’s thermal outline on Spence’s scanner paused, then shifted toward a branching corridor—the same one his map said would loop her within thirty feet of the west stairwell.

And just beyond that stairwell…another heat signature.

Taller. Broader. Moving at a measured pace like a man who owned the place.

Hastings. Had to be.

Spence’s gut knotted. If she kept going, she’d cross his path in under a minute.

They weren’t wearing comms, so there was no way for him to alert her outside of intercepting her.

The temptation to call her off was strong, but another part of him—the one that had been doing this far too long—wanted to see what Hastings would do if he stumbled across her.

How he’d play it. Whether she’d take him down or end up dead herself.

Of course, he wouldn’t let that happen.

His ability to step back and see a bigger picture on missions—to look at them like a game on his computer—allowed him to stay unemotional even in the tightest and most dangerous situations.

That made him an asset to the swans as much as his tech skills.

Thanks to growing up under Ian Bastion’s thumb, he’d learned early on to detach from any outcome because he could pretend it was a game.

Not with Jessie.

He eased forward, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete.

The feed zoomed tighter on Hastings’ heat signature as the two shapes drew closer.

Jessie paused at the corridor’s mouth, no doubt scanning for cameras or guards.

She didn’t know Spence was watching her every move, his pulse hammering in his ears.

Thirty feet.

Twenty.

Spence’s finger twitched above the keys. He could use the building’s internal comm system to warn her. Call her off or let it run?

The choice burned in his chest like acid. She could end up in Hastings’ hands, or they might get the kind of proof they’d been chasing for months.

Jessie stepped forward, crossing the invisible threshold.

His fingers dropped to the keyboard. Just as he was about to force the fire alarms to go off, she stopped, backtracked.

He let out a breath.

The taller figure passed within a few feet of her. Jessie went on the move again, trailing him. If she played it right, she’d stay in the shadows.

Spence followed, only a few yards behind her. They cut through a maze of narrow hallways, past more closed doors.

The air grew cooler, tinged with the metallic bite of recycled ventilation. Somewhere below, a deep thrumming pulsed like a heartbeat—the unmistakable sound of high-density servers running at full throttle.

From the end of a long corridor, Spence watched as Hastings swiped a keycard at a reinforced steel door. A red light blinked to green, and the lock disengaged with a heavy thunk.

Jessie slipped out of a shadowed hall between him and where Hastings had entered and raced down to use a keycard on the lock. No doubt stolen from the downed guard outside.

She never looked back, or she would have spotted Spence. His long legs ate up the space, and he caught the door on the barest edge of it closing and eased it open enough to slide in.

A stairwell yawned before him, spiraling down into blue-lit gloom. The noise of the machines swelled, and voices—faint, quick, energized—echoed up from below.

Spence descended one step at a time, keeping to the inside edge to minimize noise. From this vantage, he had both of them in sight: Jessie hugging the far wall, Hastings striding straight into an open den.

More voices and the smell of…pizza? Spence’s hand went to his sidearm. Whatever waited in that basement, it wasn’t just hardware.