Page 26 of Oath

I leaned forward, planting my hands on the table, voice low. “You’re circling something. Either say it or don’t. I’m not here to play catch-up, and I don’t give a damn what rocks you think you’ve turned over. Just tell me what you’re trying to say.”

His smirk widened. The bait had landed.

“I washired,” he said, dragging the word out, “to track a target. Isolate them. Assess threats, weaknesses. Standard gig. But then—then I ran the name through a few systems. Pulled some old files. Compared incident reports. Cross-referenced timelines.”

He gave me a meaningful look.

“Care to guess who kept showing up on the periphery?” he asked.

I held his gaze. “No.”

O’Rourke laughed again. “Jesus, you reallyhaven’tchanged. Alright then, I’ll skip ahead. The name they gave me? I think they were hoping I wouldn’t connect it to you. Or maybe they figured I wouldn’t care. But like I said, I vet my contracts. Especially the ones that stink of setup.”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

“So, there I am, considering declining. Not because I care, of course. But… let’s say I’ve learned that whenyouor yourteamis involved, things tend to get bloody. Fast.”

He paused, apparently waiting for me to respond.

I didn’t care, ready to just wait him out, but he had that obstinate look about him. Tired of this dance, I exhaled slowly. “What’s the job, O’Rourke?”

He leaned forward, finally dropping the chair’s front legs to the ground with a dullthud. His smile vanished.

“They want me to bring in someone. Quietly. A ghost, off the books. No body, no trace. Someone with very specific knowledge of a very dirty operation from a few years ago.”

His pause was dramatic. Fuck, I forgot how damn impressed with himself he was.

“Problem is,” he said, eyes boring into mine, “the only person who fits that profile... is you.”

I didn’t flinch. Not when he dropped the bomb, not when he leaned in like he expected some kind of reaction. That was the game. O’Rourke was baiting, poking at old wounds, trying to get a read on whether I’d known someone was hunting me before he showed up with the warning disguised as a threat.

Arms relaxed, I just waited. Casual. Controlled.

“That’s cute,” I said, voice low, even. “But you’re dancing around it again. Who hired you?”

O’Rourke tilted his head, running a finger along the condensation on his bottle. “You know how this works. Names cost.”

“And if you were really going to decline,” I said, keeping my tone steady, “you wouldn’t be sitting here tossing out riddles like a Bond villain who’s two minutes away from triggering his own death trap. You want something. So cut the shit.”

He grinned at that, but it was all teeth now. No humor.

“Old habits, I guess.”

I didn’t blink. “Name.”

He let the silence breathe. The air buzzed with it.

Then: “Does the nameVegamean anything to you?”

It did. But it could mean a lot of other things too, so I wasn’t going to just jump at this first bit of bait

I just shrugged slightly. “Vega’s not a name. It’s a direction. Could be a hundred players.”

“Could be,” O’Rourke allowed with only the faintest hint of doubt, swirling his beer, “but in this case? It’s not. The job came down through a third-party broker out of Santa Fe. But the funding, the chatter, the protocol? Black string budget. Not cartel, not corporate. This is deeper. Shadow-funding, limitedoversight, built for total deniability. The kind of thing that makes politicians nervous and keeps internal affairs chasing their tails for years.”

That tracked. The Vega I knew wasn’t a person—wasn’t supposed to be, anyway. Vega was a codename. A myth wrapped in intel that was always just out of reach. Last I heard, it had ties to an ops division that was shuttered during a clean sweep six years prior. Not shut down—shuttered. Buried. No paper trail, no accountability.

Just ghosts.