Page 1 of Covert Temptation

ONE

Dante King adjusted his tie with a flick of his wrist, struggling with the discomfort of wearing a suit.

Normally, he was only seen in combat fatigues. But today, he looked like any government agent planted in the courtroom.

Bland.

Forgettable.

Except for the body armor he wore beneath his tailored dress shirt. And his Glock secured at his side.

Weapons were only permitted inside a courtroom with special clearance from the judge, and with a little pressure from the Department of Defense and some United Nations officials, the judge here signed off on the safety precaution.

Technically, Dante was present as security detail, acting as one of several guards protecting an expert witness in a high-stakes case.

If Dante was honest, it was nice to be in the field, away from the screens and servers that usually tied him to base. SEAL Team Blackout Charlie counted on him for intel, but today, he wasn’t just the guy behind the data.

His gaze drifted toward the grand windows filtering in a pale wash of sunlight. Ornate molding trimmed the ceiling, and carved columns stood like sentinels. The courtroom had been built to intimidate, and the silence inside the four walls held weight.

It draped over the room like a heavy woolen blanket, stifling everyone seated on the polished wood benches. Every cough wasmuffled. Every squeak of a shoe brought on a wince from the person wearing it.

To Dante, the quiet had deeper undertones. He felt the threat throbbing beneath the surface. The foreign national on trial hadn’t arrived yet—he got hung up in security—but his high-powered attorneys looked like wolves in their expensive suits.

In his ear, Dante’s comms device emitted a softclick,prefacing the voice he expected to hear.

“Focus, Mainframe.” His leader, Constantine’s, voice was as sharp and clipped as it always was. “You seem a little too happy to be there.”

“Mainframe” was the nickname given to him the very first time the team leaned hard on his knowledge. They claimed having him on the team was like having their very own mainframe computer. They didn’t use it often, but he knew it was a gentle reminder of his purpose here.

Dante smirked. He’d forgotten another of his teammates was also planted in the courtroom today, watching his six as much as the proceedings.

Dante shifted his focus to the defense table and touched a fingertip to the stem of the glasses he wore. He had the perfect 20/20 vision of a SEAL, but the accessory came in handy in times like these. The brush of his fingertip transmitted footage recorded by the microscopic camera, and all data would be uploaded to servers, to be analyzed later—probably by him.

“What?” he murmured under his breath to his commanding officer. “Can’t I be happy to be out of the cave?”

“I wouldn’t call our base a cave,” Con responded.

“We need to have the wi-fi fixed. There’s interference every time someone microwaves a burrito,” he murmured in response.

“Yeah, I’ll get someone on that. My to-do list is piling up since we’re a man down. Denver’s leaving shook everything up.”

Dante’s smirk faded, but he masked any other reaction to the sensitive topic. Denver Malone was one of his closest friends on Charlie team. Denver had taught him everything he knew about being an intel specialist.

Recently, Denver had been discharged for medical reasons, leaving an immense hole in the brotherhood, one that wouldn’t be easily filled.

With Denver gone, and Chase tied up protecting Ambassador Alyssa Vargas—who was still very much a target—Dante felt the absence of his closest friends. Blackout Charlie was running thin, and the weight of it pressed harder every day.

He swept the room with slow purpose, noting faces and postures. The way the defense kept checking their watches. The bailiff near the door was blinking too slowly, as if he might fall asleep.

The system uploaded everything Dante looked at, meaning that lingering too long on something—a person's expression, a hand gesture—flagged it for deeper scrutiny.

Every single shift of expression was data, a lead…or a distraction from what was about to go down.

The defendant finally arrived, sending a ripple through the crowd. Then a heavy wooden door opened with a jarring noise, and the jury entered.

“All rise.”

The judge entered in a whisper of robes, and the heavy doors shut with a thud Dante felt in his chest. He didn’t do fear, but the sound filled him with tension as he picked up on a throb of danger in the room full of people who thought they were safe before the criminal entered.

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