Page 5 of Pressure Point (Lantern Beach Blackout: Detonation #2)
CHAPTER
FIVE
Atlas had planned to check on the woman one more time before heading back to Blackout headquarters. He wanted to see the woods himself. Investigate what could have happened.
But instead of leaving, he’d gone back into her room and found her sleeping. He’d anchored himself in the uncomfortable plastic chair beside her hospital bed. Something had told him to stay longer.
Maybe it was the way she’d looked so lost when she’d asked where she would go. Maybe it was the defensive wounds on her knuckles and bruises on her ribs that spoke of a fight for survival.
Or maybe it was simply the right thing to do.
When he was a kid, his grandmother used to read him Bible stories. The story of the Good Samaritan had always stuck with him—the idea that sometimes you helped someone not because you knew them, but because they needed help.
It was a philosophy that had served him well in his military career, his time with the CIA, and now his work with Blackout.
He studied the woman another moment.
She slept fitfully, her dark hair spread across the white pillowcase like spilled ink. Even unconscious, she didn’t look peaceful. Her hands clenched and unclenched periodically, and her breathing occasionally hitched as if she were running from something in her dreams.
Atlas found himself studying her face, trying to reconcile the vulnerability of her amnesia with the combat-ready alertness he’d glimpsed earlier. She was beautiful, but it was the kind of beauty that could be dangerous. It made men like him want to protect her even when logic suggested caution.
His phone buzzed with a text from Ty Chambers.
Status report on the woman?
Atlas typed back:
Still no memory. Staying with her until she’s discharged.
Ty replied:
Be careful. Something feels off about the timing of her being here.
Atlas frowned at the message. Ty was right to be suspicious.
For two months, Sigma had been eerily quiet. After coordinated attacks involving bombs and the infiltration of Blackout, the terrorist organization had simply . . . vanished.
No chatter on intelligence networks, no new incidents, nothing.
In Atlas’s experience, silence from an enemy was often more dangerous than noise.
His phone buzzed again with another text from Ty.
Cassidy’s guys searched the woods. So far, nothing.
His jaw tightened. He didn’t believe this was as simple as someone randomly chasing her.
Atlas was composing a response when soft sounds drifted from the woman beside him.
He glanced over, expecting to see her shifting restlessly in another nightmare. But her breathing remained even, her body still.
Then he heard it clearly—a whispered phrase in what sounded like Russian.
Atlas went still as he listened to the fluid syllables flowing from her lips.
“Nyet, vy ne mozhete zastavit menya eto delat. Ya ne budu. Slishkom mnogie postradayut.”
He recognized enough to know she was speaking with the fluency of a native speaker, not someone who’d picked up phrases from a language app.
Atlas hit a button on his phone and began recording, his mouth dry.
But he thought he could translate.
No, you can’t make me do it. I won’t. Too many will be hurt.
Why would she say something like that?
The woman’s voice grew more agitated, and the foreign words came faster. She seemed to be arguing with someone, her tone sharp and defensive.
Then, clear as day, she said in perfect English, “The target is protected. I need more time.”
Atlas’s blood turned to ice.
Target.
He ended the recording, his heart pounding harder.
She fell silent again, her breathing evening out as she settled deeper into sleep. But Atlas couldn’t unsee what he’d just witnessed, couldn’t unhear those words.
The target is protected.
Was Blackout the target? Was he?
What if this was all an act?
Atlas studied her sleeping face, searching for any sign of deception. But she looked so vulnerable, so genuinely lost.
Either she was the best actress he’d ever encountered, or the amnesia was real and her unconscious mind was revealing secrets her waking self didn’t remember.
Neither option was particularly comforting.
Atlas leaned back in his chair, his protective instincts warring with his training.
Every rational part of his mind said he should wake her up, demand answers, treat her as the potential threat she might be.
But when he looked at her wounds, considered the way she’d trusted him so completely, rationality seemed less important than the certainty that whatever the woman had been involved in, she was as much a victim as a participant.
The target is protected.
Atlas just hoped he wasn’t making the biggest mistake of his life by choosing to be her protector instead of her interrogator.