Page 55 of The Sniper

She shot him a glare. “You don’t get to play the protective Dom right now.”

He leaned in, lowering his voice so only she could hear. “Oh, I always get to play the protective Dom. Especially when my sub doesn’t know when to sit her ass down and let someone else handle the dirty work.”

Heat flared low in her belly. Not just anger. Something darker. Something more dangerous.

She stepped closer, her lips inches from his ear. “I’mnotyour sub.”

Daniels didn’t back away. He tilted his head slightly, brushing his stubble against her cheek. “Not yet.”

God help her, she wanted to bite him.

Fitz sighed, clearly unimpressed with their silent standoff. “Mitch, Daniels—shake out Artemis’s network. I want to know who’s helping her and why the hell we haven’t been able to pin down her location. Reyna, you’re with Anton. Find that damn SUV.”

Daniels held her gaze a second longer before stepping back, his expression unreadable. “Be careful.”

She rolled her shoulders, trying to shake off the way his voice settled deep in her bones. “Always.”

Reyna spent the next few hours in Anton’s lair of technology, scouring traffic cams, hacking into private security feeds, trying to find the black SUV. It was like tracking a ghost—one minute, the vehicle was there, the next, gone, slipping between blind spots, taking back roads that weren’t covered by surveillance.

“She’s good,” Anton muttered, fingers flying over the keyboard.

Reyna breathed out through her nose. “She’stoogood.”

Anton clicked his tongue, shifting through yet another set of footage. “Here...” He slowed down a video, rewinding it frame by frame. “This intersection, just outside the south docks. That’s our SUV.”

Reyna narrowed her eyes. The camera had only caught the edge of the vehicle as it turned onto a side road leading to the waterfront. “Can you get an exact address?”

Anton snorted. “What do you think I am, a miracle worker?”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Fine,” he grumbled, typing furiously. “Give me ten minutes.”

Reyna paced the room while Anton worked, her muscles thrumming with restless energy. She hated waiting. Hated sitting on the sidelines.

The door opened behind her. She didn’t have to turn to know who it was.

Daniels.

His presence filled the space instantly, dark and commanding. “We’ve got something,” he said, crossing the room in that measured way of his.

Anton glanced up. “What kind of something?”

Daniels handed Reyna a tablet. On the screen was a list of names, all connected to past Cerberus raids. “Artemis has been paying people off—former auction workers, people who weren’t arrested when we took down their operations. They’ve been feeding her information.”

Reyna’s grip on the tablet tightened. “Which means she knew exactly where to find Hartley and when.”

Daniels nodded. “And she knows how we work. How we think. She’s anticipating us.”

Anton let out a low whistle. “That’s bad.”

Daniels’s expression darkened. “That’s a damn understatement.”

Reyna looked up at him, something cold settling in her stomach. “She’s playing us, isn’t she?”

Daniels nodded, his jaw ticking. “Yeah. And she’s winning.”

They returned to a war room that hummed with urgency, the tension inside thick as a live wire ready to snap. Reyna stood behind Anton, watching as he tore through traffic cams, piecing together a trail that barely existed. The black SUV that had taken Jonas Hartley was a ghost, slipping through surveillance gaps like it had been planned by a professional. And it had.

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