My boots hit the polished concrete floor with a familiar gravity. I’d walked this stride across continents, but never felt the weight of the world quite like I did crossing this room. My mask faltered when I saw her.

{{user}} was standing motionless, entirely focused on the glowing map, the red dots screaming failure. She was thinner than I remembered. Even from behind, I recognized the rigid tension in her shoulders—the same stance she took just before she decided to burn the mission plan and improvise.

She didn’t need to turn to know it was me. She knew my rhythm better than my own pulse. “Didn’t think they’d send you,” she said, her voice rough.

I set the weight of my tactical jacket on the table. The canvas was rough and smelled faintly of the high-altitude air of the flight I hadn't filed paperwork for. I hadn't slept either, not since the agency notification hit my terminal thirty hours ago.

“They didn’t,” I said, forcing the gravel out of my throat. “I volunteered.”

It was the closest I could come to the truth without admitting I’d moved mountains, bypassed three layers of command structure, and threatened to expose proprietary agency secrets if they dared assign anyone else to the case. This wasn't a mission for the agency; this was mine.

She stayed quiet.

My gaze swept over her—a habit I couldn’t shed. She was ready to deploy, every piece of kit accounted for, but the fatigue was etched around her eyes. I had to know if she was compromised.

“You look tired,” I said finally. The observation wasn't kind, but it was honest. "When’s the last time you slept?”

The mask returned to her face then, cold and sharp. The ghost of our old dynamic, the constant push and pull that had simultaneously saved our lives and shattered our quiet home.

“When’s the last time you minded your own business?”

A faint, bitter smirk pulled at my mouth. She still had the fight in her. That fire—reckless, brilliant, and completely necessary now. “Touché.”

I exhaled, the sound barely audible, and moved past her toward the screen. My focus locked onto Lyra's image. Four years. Four years of growth I’d only seen in grainy phone calls that inevitably failed due to 'network issues'—my faulty excuse for keeping my distance.

“She’s grown,” I murmured. “Got your eyes.”

Her eyes. The shade of storm-steel that promised defiance. I looked at that image and saw the devastating intersection of our lives—the precision of my strategy, the reckless passion of hers.

“She had your temper this morning,” she murmured, and the sound was thin, fragile. “Before she was—”

The silence that followed was far louder than the explosion I wanted to rip through the walls. She couldn’t finish the thought. If she surrendered to the agony, we were both lost.

I didn't dare look at her. I couldn’t afford to see her break. Instead, I gripped the edge of the briefing table, forcing the tremor in my hand into the wood until my knuckles were white. The tactical assassin had to reassert control. The father was screaming.

“We’re going to find her,” I commanded, low and certain. I cleared my throat, I needed to convince her—and myself—that this was manageable, defined, solvable.

“I’ve been tracking The Veil since I left. They’ve been rebuilding—slow, quiet. The cell that took Lyra? They’re not random. They knew exactly who she was.” I pointed to the data overlay on the map.

“This isn’t a run-of-the-mill kidnapping. It’s a message. It’s a message directed at both of us.” I finally turned, meeting her gaze for the first time. “They think they can leverage our past. They think they know how to break us.”

The hope, the love, the fear, and the guilt—they were all there, tangled up in the air between us. But beneath it all, there was the dangerous, undeniable knowledge: we were the two most destructive forces the agency had ever fielded.

I looked at the mother of my child, and I saw the only partner who could survive the coming storm.

“They’re wrong,” I finished, my voice steady again. “They should have k-ll-d us four years ago.”