For an extra heartbeat, the room remained silent, tension coiled like a wire waiting to snap. Then all at once, the JTT stirred. Laptops closed. Adam issued orders. Bodies shifted into rapid motion.
Jay sat frozen, staring at the screen like it might flicker back to life.
The way Maya had dropped the baby like a grenade at Becca’s feet, waiting for the impact, had rattled him. It still rattled him.
Fuck.
The urge to shield Becca from her twin surged through him—fierce and unrelenting—and he had to remind himself. She wasn’t fragile. She was steel wrapped in flesh. Smarter and stronger than all of them combined.
In proof, she stood before him and held out her hand. “Ready?”
He closed his laptop, pushed to his feet, and entwining their fingers in a solid grip, he gave them a gentle squeeze. “Ready.”
Thirty minutes after the call with Maya, the JTT were on the move.
In the middle seat of a blacked-out SUV, Becca sat next to Jay, her mind spinning faster than the wheels taking them to the airport. Outside, the trees blurred past, walls of shadow under the full moon’s glare.
“Rook Island,” Chase said through the secure line on Adam’s phone. “It’s a decommissioned Cold War military outpost seventy-five nautical miles off the coast of Southern California. Sending coordinates now.”
“Two-and-a-half square miles of hell on earth,” Gray added. “The ideal breeding ground for an army of dive-bombing, blood-sucking, fucking ectoparasites. Make sure you bring bug spray, Band-Aids, scented candles, and a priest.”
Becca snorted and grinned at Gray’s dramatics. Man, she’d been missing her new friend’s sarcasm.
“Who owns it?” Adam asked from the front passenger seat.
“Technically?” Chase replied. “No one. The Feds walked away from it in ‘84. No records, no leases. No satellite pings in the last ten years until our recon passed overhead.”
Screen casting a pale glow across his face, Jay keyed the geographical data into the laptop resting against his thighs, and Becca leaned closer, drawn to the digital image as it materialized.
An aerial snapshot of jagged cliffs, dense overgrowth, and more than one crumbling structure rising from the green came into sharp focus.
“Does it meet our needs?” Zander asked.
“It’s perfect,” Gray said. “Completely off the radar and with more than one secret if you know where to look.”
Jay marked two locations on the map. “Air strip and dock?”
“Yeah,” Chase confirmed. “Runway’s cracked but usable. Dock’s sketchy as fuck but works if we keep it light.”
“So two viable entry points for a possible counter assault,” Cody said from the driver’s seat.
“Three,” Chase replied. “There’s a narrow strip of beach to the north. But they’re all chokepoints. We control them, we control the island.”
“What about that building at the edge of the clearing?” Jay asked.
“Old hangar. Reinforced concrete. Minimal interior damage. Should make a decent ops base.”
Becca stared at the box-shaped building. It looked solid. Contained. Safe.
“That’s our setup,” Adam confirmed. “We get Maya inside, and we control the environment. Hard perimeter, fallback options, and if shit goes sideways, it looks like that thing’s built to take a hit.”
“Exactly,” Chase said. “Interior’s open span—gives us a full field of view and room to maneuver. No blind corners, no surprises.”
“The dead space around the structure gives us good sightlines and a buffer zone too,” Jay added. “Anyone approaches, we’ll see them coming from a mile away.”
Becca’s stomach twisted, tension curling low in her gut. The place might’ve looked safe, but now she saw it for what it was—a kill box designed to contain whatever hell Maya planned to unleash.
Yeah, she’d taken the bait—they’d given her no choice—she needed the code to control Dominion. Without it, she had no leverage, no value to Johnson or the Imperium. And that left her exposed. Vulnerable.
