Page 20 of Code Name: Hunter (Club Opus Noir #2)

VIVIAN

T he safehouse bedroom is dim, lit only by the dying glow of late afternoon spilling through high-set windows.

Dust dances in the sunlight like ash suspended in amber, slow and soundless.

I lie still on the bed—splayed, boneless, utterly spent.

But sleep doesn’t come. My body aches in the best possible ways: the sore stretch of muscles used, the faint burn along my wrists where Logan held me, the deeper thrum of satisfaction lodged low in my hips.

Every inch of me is marked by him. Every nerve threadbare.

My heel digs into the mattress, the springs giving a faint, protesting creak.

A breath I didn’t know I’d been holding slips out, slow enough to fog the edge of the mirror across from me. I track the swirl until it fades.

Physically, I feel claimed. Emotionally? Exposed.

The contradiction knots in my chest. Safety and surrender.

Control and chaos. It shouldn’t feel like this.

Shouldn’t feel like comfort. But Logan’s hands never promised me tenderness—they promised truth.

And that’s worse. Because now that I’ve let him touch the parts I buried, I can’t pretend I’m still made of steel.

Because I’m not. I’m stitched together with wire and secrets, and he’s unraveling them, thread by thread.

I shift, wincing as my shoulder brushes against the pillow. A sharp sting lances through the skin. I sit up, gingerly twisting to see in the mirror across the room. There, just beneath the slope of my scapula, blooms a shadowed bruise—ugly, circular, discolored. A leftover from the tracker.

It’s gone now, of course. Logan removed it with a surgeon’s precision and a soldier’s fury.

But the bruise remains. A mark of intrusion.

Of failure. Of how close someone got. The air feels cooler against that patch of skin, like the bruise itself has a temperature.

Outside, a scooter backfires, the sound too much like a muffled shot.

My shoulders jerk before I can stop them.

My breath catches. I touch it lightly. And suddenly, I’m not in the safehouse anymore.

I’m nineteen again. Fresh out of field school. Kneeling on marble tile in a Riyadh penthouse, hair slicked back, lips painted red, voice trained to purr instead of speak. My first operation under Wolfe’s command. My mission wasn’t extraction. It wasn’t surveillance. It was seduction.

I was the bait.

He’d walked me through it all: the dossier, the intel, the cover legend.

But what he didn’t prepare me for was the way it would feel when my mark slipped a hand under my dress and whispered state secrets like pillow talk.

The tiles were cold under my knees, the air thick with rosewater and cigar smoke.

My mark reeked of cologne and greed. I remember the static in my ear as Wolfe whispered, “You’re doing beautifully, love,” and something in me cracked that’s never quite sealed back shut.

My pulse spikes so hard I can hear it in my ears—loud enough to drown Wolfe’s voice in memory for half a heartbeat. Then it’s back, smooth as glass.

I finished the job. Got the files. Got the exit.

And spent the next three days scrubbing myself clean until my skin bled.

That was the beginning. Of my career. Of the lie. Of Wolfe. I was too green to know the difference between manipulation and mentorship, too eager to earn praise from a man who never bled for what he asked me to do.

I blink back into the present, heart pounding like I’ve run a sprint.

I throw the blanket off and swing my legs to the floor.

My go-bag sits by the closet, rumpled and forgotten, half-zipped from our last relocation.

I pull it closer, hands moving without thought.

Something itches under my skin—some instinct I haven’t trusted in years.

Zippers rasp. Fabric whispers under my fingers as I flip compartments open and shut.

The habit is muscle-deep, older than caution—old enough to pre-date Logan.

I check the lining. Nothing. Then the false bottom. Still nothing. Finally, I unzip the side seam and press my fingers into the insulation, the place where I once smuggled forged IDs through Heathrow.

There.

A sliver of black plastic. No larger than a thumb drive.

It takes me a second to recognize it: a micro-recorder. No Cerberus markings. Not one of mine. My chest tightens. I walk it to the table, slot it into a burner with a decrypted reader.

The voice that emerges isn’t Logan’s. It isn’t Fitz’s.

It’s Wolfe’s.

Faint. Calm. Deceptively warm.

"No matter what they tell you... trust only me."

My breath stops. It’s not just the words—it’s the cadence, the timbre, the intimacy. My skin crawls. My stomach knots as if it remembers something my brain hasn’t processed yet. My knees buckle. I sit hard, like my bones suddenly don’t know how to hold me.

It’s his voice—but it sounds like rot now. Like velvet hiding rust. My stomach turns so hard I taste acid. The voice is a ghost crawling under my skin, dragging every hair upright in its wake.

There’s no date stamp. No origin trace. No metadata at all. He could’ve hidden this last week. Last year. Before Prague. After. It doesn’t matter. The words crawl into my head like poison.

Because once, I did trust him. I trusted the man who trained me, who called me brilliant, who sent me into fire and made me believe I was flame.

I mourned him. Buried what was left of him in my mind, grieved a ghost I thought had died in Prague.

But now—now there's a whisper, a shadow, a recording in my gear, a tracker in my shoulder and field codes where they shouldn't be.

If Wolfe is alive, if he faked his death, if he let me believe he was gone—how can I trust anyone?

How can I believe any of it was real? And worse.

.. how do I stop from repeating the same mistake with Logan?

And all that nearly destroyed me. I thought he died—grieved him, bled for him, built new walls from his ashes.

But if Wolfe’s alive, if he let me mourn him just to use me again, then what the hell is real?

What version of the truth haven’t I seen yet?

If he can fake a grave, plant a whisper in my bag, tag me like prey—then trust is a myth.

And if trust is dead, what’s left for me to believe in?

What's it going to do to me now? In the future?

I yank the recorder free and set it on the counter. My hands shake. Just slightly. But enough. I want to throw it. Smash it. Burn it. Instead, I whisper, "You don’t get to haunt me anymore."

But the problem isn’t Wolfe. Not entirely. It’s Logan. Because I trust him, too. Not blindly. Not stupidly. But deeply. More than I should. More than I can afford. And that terrifies me. If Wolfe taught me anything, it’s that the person who knows how you breathe... also knows how to break you.

And Logan? He already holds the map of my ruin in his hands. The worst part? I want him to—and I’m not sure I’d take the pieces back even if I could.

Logan stirs, the sheet slipping down to his waist as he shifts, revealing the long stretch of muscle that makes up his chest—golden in the late light, dust-mottled and devastating.

The sight steals my breath for half a second before he sits up fully, eyes narrowing as he sees the recorder in my hands.

He’s up before I realize he’s awake, the bedsprings sighing under the shift of weight. "What is that?"

I turn slowly and show it to him. The room’s silence presses between us as I press play again—just long enough for Wolfe’s voice to bleed out into the air.

"No matter what they tell you... trust only me."

Logan curses under his breath and swings his legs off the bed, grabbing the device from me and setting it down hard on the dresser.

Then he pulls me into his arms, holding me tighter than I expect.

His voice is low but vicious, laced with fury.

"I’m going to find him. And I’m going to end this.

For what he did to us—for what he did to you.

He made me doubt everything I knew. Turned my instincts against me.

I won’t let him do that to you—not again. "

I want to believe him. God, I want to.

But I lean back just enough to look into his eyes. "You say that as if it’s that simple. Like we can just burn it all down and be done. But we buried Wolfe once already. We believed he died. He let me mourn him. He let me grieve. And now I don’t even know what parts of my life were real."

Logan’s jaw flexes. "This...” he cups my face gently, thumb grazing my cheekbone “...this is real. I’m real. And I’m not him. I will never use you."

The heat of his palm, the steady weight of his gaze—it unravels something inside me.

My breath hitches, and for a heartbeat, I imagine what it would feel like to let it all go.

The fear. The doubt. The ghosts. I want to believe him.

I want to fall into that warmth, let it fill the hollow places Wolfe left behind.

But trust doesn’t come without scars. And mine still bleeds.

He studies me as if he sees the war I’m fighting. "Vivian. I know it’s not easy. I’m not asking you to forget him. Or forgive what he did. I’m just asking you to believe that not everyone is like him. That I’m not."

I stare at him for a long moment. He’s standing now, holding me like I’m something precious he refuses to let go of.

Dust and shadow catch along the ridges of his collarbone and the sharp plane of his abdomen.

He’s strength made flesh, danger wrapped in warmth, temptation so tangible it makes my breath falter.

And I am so damn tired of running.

Every part of me screams to step away. To not make the same mistake twice.

But God help me—I want to believe him. "You say that. But he said it, too. Not in words—but in the way he trained me, trusted me, made me feel like I belonged. And I clung to that, like a lifeline I didn’t know was fraying.

I believed in him—God, I believed in him.

And look where that got me. Burned. Branded.

Haunted. I want to believe you, Logan. I do.

But I’m exhausted. Every time I trust someone, it feels like handing them a weapon and turning my back.

And maybe I’m not strong enough to survive another betrayal. Maybe I don’t want to find out."

“You never belonged to anyone,” Logan says fiercely, his thumb brushing beneath my eye like he can erase the past with a touch. "But if you did—it sure as hell wouldn’t be him."

I let out a shaky breath, my voice quieter now. "I’m tired, Logan. Tired of looking over my shoulder. Of second-guessing everyone’s motives. Of wondering who’s playing me and why."

He nods, pulling me closer. "Then stop running. You don’t have to anymore. You’re safe with me. I swear to you—I’ll never hurt you."

I want to argue. Want to throw up every wall I’ve built. But instead, I press my forehead to his chest and whisper, "I hope so. Because if I’m wrong again.. I won’t survive it."

His arms tighten. "You’re not wrong. Not about me. Not this time."