Page 103 of The ARC Unit: Breach

I leaned back and rubbed both hands over my face. “A rehab center with overnight perimeter security and thirty people’s worth of laundry.”

Raven’s voice had lost the dry edge it carried through most of our work. “And cameras pointed inward.”

He brought up photographs from an old property listing. The rear cameras did not watch the road, they watched the courtyard and the doors leading from the farmhouse toward the outbuildings. They were built to watch people leave.

A door banged somewhere outside and voices carried through the lower hall. The training group returned all at once, bringing wet grass and mud into the building with them while sweat and gun oil followed a few steps behind.

Jackal looked like he had been dragged behind a vehicle. Dirt covered the front of his shirt and one side of his face. Viper had mud up both shins, while Hawk’s sleeve was torn near the forearm and streaked brown from elbow to wrist. Wolf came in last with black soil ground across one knee and a smear along the side of his plate carrier. His mask remained on, though sweat had darkened the fabric beneath it.

Jackal stopped when he saw Raven’s screen. “We got something?”

“Maybe,” Raven said. “We need another hour.”

Wolf looked at the property image, then at the clock. “Finish the build.”

His voice was rougher from the training and whatever shouting he had done outside.

Jackal glanced toward him. “I’m showering before I contaminate the entire floor.”

Wolf nodded once.

There was still no ease between them, but the work had at least given them a language they could share without either man pretending the night before had disappeared.

Within minutes, the upstairs pipes started complaining.

Jackal went first because he was the dirtiest and argued that this constituted medical priority. Viper and Hawk followed, while Bear collected equipment before joining the rotation. For the next forty minutes, the bathroom became exactly the kind of traffic jam I had learned to avoid so I stayed at Raven’s station.

That decision looked like dedication until nearly five, when the last of the doors upstairs stopped opening and closing and the building finally settled into the tired quiet that followed training days. Raven left to make his perfect chai while Bear was in the garage. Jackal and Viper had disappeared into their rooms, and Hawk was somewhere downstairs cleaning the weapon he had carried outside.

I closed the file in front of me, went upstairs for my towel and shower bag, then folded clean clothes over one arm and waited another few minutes because I had become embarrassingly strategic about basic hygiene.

The corridor was quiet when I left my room. Finally, no Jackal shouting through a wall about “feminine smelling body wash” and no running pipes except a faint hiss somewhere inside the old plumbing. I made it to the bathroom feeling almost smug about the timing.

Then I stepped through the open door and found Wolf at the long mirror.

He was taking his gear apart piece by piece beside the lockers. The plate carrier already sat on the bench with dried mud worked into one edge, while the black field shirt underneath clung damply across his shoulders and back. His belt was still on, and the retention webbing had been folded against it with the same compact precision I had watched him use before the party.

Involuntarily, my attention went to the webbing first. Wolf caught the glance in the mirror. He made no move for the belt, he just held my eyes in the reflection and waited.

“I can come back,” I said, tightening my grip on the towel.

His attention dropped to the shower bag and clean clothes under my arm.

“Mercer, just shower.”

“You’re still in here.”

“It’s a bathroom.”

The callback almost made me laugh, mostly because he delivered it with exactly the same patience he had shown when I demanded a lock.

“That line was annoying the first day too.”

“You survived it.”

“Hardly.”

He unclipped the radio from his shirt, wound the cord around it and set it beside the carrier. “Then this should be easier.”