Page 184 of The ARC Unit: Breach

Jackal rode with Bear because his side had started bleeding through the dressing after he ignored at least three separate instructions about not moving too fast. Bear had looked one sentence away from sedating him personally. Normally that would have generated enough commentary to fill the entire trip, but nobody was in the mood.

I watched the highway lights move across the window and kept seeing Keller turn toward the steel door after managing one word, just enough to make Kade turn before the gunfire started.

I looked down at my hands and could still feel his blood. Raven worked quietly beside me, reviewing photographs of the case contents without opening the encrypted drives.

After almost forty minutes, he stopped on the Paris invitation again.

“This foundation is real,” he said.

Wolf finally moved in the front seat.

“Useful?”

“Potentially. Private capital, charitable front, very old money and some big political connections. Guest list won’t be public. The credential number in the case looks active.”

“Kade connected?” Wolf asked.

“We don’t know yet.”

I looked at the invitation.

“He wouldn’t carry it for no reason.”

Wolf’s head turned slightly toward the windshield.

“He carried a lot of things for reasons we don’t understand.”

His tone ended the conversation.

We reached the compound after dark. Bear took Jackal straight to medical as Hawk and Viper went to clear weapons and return equipment. Raven carried the briefcase to the operations table with both hands, and I followed because I was not letting it out of my sight yet.

The compound felt almost unnaturally warm and bright after the warehouse, every clean surface making the blood and concrete I had just left behind harder to forget. Bear’s coffee mug still sat beside the sink where he had put it hours earlier. One of Jackal’s shoes was under the couch. My notebook from the morning remained open beside Raven’s keyboard to a page of missing-person names, written when they were still photographs and lines in a file instead of women we had carried out under blankets.

Raven set the case on the table and reopened it beneath the overhead lights. The evidence looked even more substantial spread across a clean surface.

Wolf came in from the equipment room after securing his rifle, the tactical belt still at his hips. The metal hardware shifted with the same click when he stopped at the end of the table. I heard it and kept my eyes on the evidence.

Raven glanced between us and collected the encrypted drives.

“I’m going to start imaging these.”

Wolf said, “Do that.”

He left with the drives, leaving the operations floor quiet.

“My office.”

I crossed my arms.

Wolf’s eyes hardened.

“My office, Mercer.”

Chapter Seventeen

MIA

Wolf crossed the operations floor, took the stairs two at a time and disappeared down the short hall toward his office while I stood beside the open briefcase trying to decide whether I wanted the argument badly enough to go after him.