Page 16 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“Yeah. A sister.”

The way he said it made every obvious follow-up question feel like the wrong one, so I didn’t ask. Jackal reached back into the cereal box a second later and the easy expression returned, but not quite quickly enough to make me believe I had imagined the shift.

Bear turned the eggs in the pan. “Only child, as far as I know.”

I looked over. “As far as you know?”

He shrugged. “Foster care. I was young enough when I went into the system in Texas that I don’t know much about the biological side. Could have a whole football team somewhere. Could not.”

He said it without self-pity and went back to the stove before the conversation could settle too much around him. Raven took a drink of coffee and nodded toward himself.

“One older sister.”

Jackal’s mood recovered enough for him to point across the table. “Terrifying woman.”

Raven looked at him. “You met her once.”

“Once was sufficient.”

“She was perfectly nice to you.”

“She asked why you worked with me.”

“That was a perfectly reasonable question.”

Even Viper smiled at that. I looked around the table and realized I had somehow managed to turn breakfast into a tour of everyone’s family history before seven in the morning.

“Sorry for being the only normal person here guys,” I said. “My mom and stepdad in Connecticut have been together for twenty-six years and my brother Nick goes to NYU. That’s about as dramatic as it gets.”

Jackal looked at me over the top of the cereal box. “Give it time.”

“That sounded threatening.”

“Encouraging.”

“Somehow worse.”

Raven shook his head while Bear laughed quietly and went back to the stove. I guess there was nothing interesting about my life that warranted follow-up questions when the people sitting around me had spent their lives in foster care, military services and whatever history Jackal had just decided not to explain.

I glanced toward the operations floor. “Where’s Wolf?”

“Brooding,” Jackal chimed in with a mouth full.

Bear gave him a tired look. “He’s outside.”

I followed the direction of his glance toward the side window and found Wolf standing near the edge of the building where the concrete ended and the grass began. Morning fog still hung low over the trees beyond the perimeter, soft enough that sections of the fence disappeared into it. He stood facing away from the building with one hand in his pocket and a cigarette held loosely in the other.

He wasn’t wearing the full balaclava from the day before. For a second, that made him almost difficult to recognize.

His dark brown hair was much longer than I had expected from the photograph, thick and wavy enough that the damp morning air had already started working pieces loose around a thin zig-zag headband pulling it away from his face. A plain black covering still hid everything below his eyes, but seeing his hair made him look considerably more human than he had yesterday. It also made him more interesting, which was irritating.

His sleeves were pushed to the elbows, exposing the tattoo I had only partially seen in the hallway. A black-and-gray snake wrapped around his forearm in slow coils, disappearing around the inside of his arm and reappearing along the outside as though it had been wound directly around the muscle. Its head sat lower near his wrist, detailed enough that the scales seemed to shift whenever he moved.

Wolf lifted the cigarette and pulled the lower edge of his mask up just enough to take a drag. I caught only the briefest impression of a chin before his hand blocked the rest. Smoke left his mouth slowly when he exhaled toward the trees, then the covering was back in place and whatever I’d almost seen disappeared with it.

Raven said something beside me that I missed completely.

“What?”