Page 3 of Override

Instead, I stand there staring at the evidence of my own oversight while she scrambles for the sheet and says my name again, louder this time, panic cracking through every syllable.

“Keaton, wait—”

I turn and walk out. Bare feet slap behind me seconds later.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she says, which is such an objectively stupid sentence that under different circumstances I might have laughed. “Please, just let me explain.”

I stop in the living room and face her. I really look at her. Her flushed cheeks. Wild hair. Bare shoulders hidden poorly beneath a dark sheet. Eyes darting too quickly as she searches for a story she can make believable.

A lie forming in real time. And somewhere in the quietest, most detached corner of my mind, something shifts with mechanical precision.

Not because she cheated. Because she did it successfully. She looked me in the face for months and fed me exactly the version of reality she wanted me to accept, and I took it without checking the code underneath.

Human error. Mine. Unacceptable. I reach for my keys.

“Keaton?”

My hand closes around the doorknob. She sounds scared now. Good. I glance over my shoulder.

“You can keep the sheets,” I tell her.

Then I leave. By the time I reach the parking lot, I’m laughing. Not loudly. Not because anything is funny. Just one short, disbelieving sound as I unlock my car and slide behind the wheel. I sit there in the dark with my hands at ten and two, staring at my own reflection in the windshield.

Trust is a design flaw. I don’t know why I never saw that before.

Chapter 1

Keaton (Skee)

“Tell me again why we couldn’t just call the cops like normal people.”

I keep my eyes on the tablet balanced against my thigh as I reroute the traffic camera feed for the third time in six minutes. “Because normal people don’t usually hire private covert teams to recover children their ex-brother-in-law stole after losing a custody hearing.”

“Mm.” Wheels drums his fingers against the steering wheel. “Still feels illegal.”

“It is illegal,” Bullet says calmly through comms. “You’re driving a stolen van.”

“It’s not stolen,” Wheels argues. “It’s temporarily borrowed.”

The van’s suspension groans as he throws us around another corner hard enough to make the coffee in Matt’s cup slosh over the lid. Behind me, Matt doesn’t even blink. He just wipes the spill off his hand with the same exhausted patience he’s used on all of us since the military shoved four psychologically questionable specialists into one unit six years ago and called it strategy.

Some days I still think the government owed him financial compensation for surviving us.

“Eyes up,” I murmur, zooming in on the tablet feed. “Blue sedan just crossed Halsted. That’s our guy's sister.”

Wheels straightens. “See? This is why we keep the resident felon.”

“I was never convicted.”

“That’s because the government got to you first.”

Fair.

I tap twice against the edge of the tablet while the software pulls updated traffic patterns across the screen. Green dots flare across the map. Toll cams. Stop lights. ATM captures. One very unfortunate gas station selfie from a woman currently helping her brother violate federal custody laws.

People are unbelievably stupid when emotions get involved.

They stop thinking about systems.