Page 64 of Code Name: Grit

The simple admission surprised me. “About what part?”

“All of it,” he said, smiling sheepishly.

“I pushed back too hard,” I admitted.

He reached for my hand, his fingers warm against mine. When his lips met mine, the tension of the past day dissolved. The kiss deepened as his arms encircled me, pulling me against him as if he couldn’t get close enough. I melted into his embrace, all thoughts of arguments and danger temporarily forgotten.

“I missed you,” he murmured against my hair.

“It was only one night,” I reminded him.

“Too long,” he said, kissing me again.

By unspoken agreement, we made our way back to his camp. Once inside, words became unnecessary. His hands traced paths across my skin, each touch healing the distance that had grown between us.

17

GRIT

Iwoke to silence, my arm reaching across empty sheets where Lumi should have been. They were cold. The digital clock read zero five seventeen. Rain pattered against the windows, the remnants of last night’s storm.

“Lumi?” I called, instantly alert.

No response.

I grabbed my weapon from the nightstand and moved swiftly through the camp. Kitchen empty. Living area clear. Bathroom vacant.

Then I saw it—her phone on the living room floor, face up. My blood turned to ice.

I snatched it up, and the screen illuminated with a notification: a message from Amelia, timestamped zero two thirty-six.Urgent. Call me.

Lumi would never drop her phone and leave it. She’d never walk away from the camp in the middle of the night.

She’d been taken.

I activated the emergency protocols, dialing Tank directly.

“Go,” he answered immediately.

“Lumi’s been abducted.”

“High alert activated.”

“On my way up.”

The command centerwas already operating at full throttle when I arrived. Admiral stood at the central console, Dragon and Alice flanking him as they assessed the security feeds.

“Timeline?” Admiral asked as I entered.

“Last confirmed visual at twenty-two hundred when we went to bed. Found her missing at zero five seventeen. Message came in at zero two thirty-six.”

I handed Dragon Lumi’s phone and watched as she connected it to their system. “Message authentication matches Amelia’s protocols superficially, but the back-end routing is wrong. This is a sophisticated spoof.”

“They used her mother to get her out of bed,” I said, my voice thick with fury. Fuck. “She would have gone into the living room to make the call, not wanting to wake me.”

“Surveillance at that camp looped from zero two fifty-nine to zero three-ten,” Atticus reported, bringing up the logs. “They even disabled the alert system that would’ve notified us of a breach.”

Tank set down the phone he’d been on. “I requested NRO overhead coverage for that window. If they moved her across the lake, we can track them from there.”