Page 26 of Code Name: Hunter
A glint catches my eye—barely there, tucked beneath the edge of a torn patch of skin just below her shoulder blade. The kind of tear you’d get from a scuffle like the one she was in earlier, shallow and easy to miss. But what’s beneath it isn’t.
A sliver of tech. Embedded. Foreign. The pulse in my jaw matches the one in my chest—steady, violent—because something this crude should never have made it past her skin.
It doesn’t belong. The design’s wrong—too crude, older gen, definitely not Cerberus-issue. My vision narrows, fury punching through my chest in a cold, surgical strike. I press my fingers gently around it, steady despite the heat in my blood.
Whoever planted this got close. Had to. Within inches. Skin contact. And she never felt it. Never saw it. That’s what shreds me from the inside out. Vivian Black doesn’t get tagged. She clocks a tail before they breathe in her direction—but this? This slid right past her defenses, slipped under her skin, and waited.
No sixth sense. No warning. Nothing.
It wasn’t the tech that gave it away—it was the injury. A split-second tear in the right place at the wrong time. If she hadn’t gotten into that fight, I never would’ve seen it. Which means it could have been there for a while.
My jaw grinds as the implications lock in. This was deliberate. Precise. Someone wanted her traceable. Which means someone wanted her caught.
"Well, it’s not mine," she says, voice low.
I pinch the skin and extract it with a twist of my blade.
She hisses. "Was that necessary?"
"You want the needle next time?"
She turns, her bare chest brushing mine. "Next time I’ll do it myself."
"No, you bloody won’t. And don’t let there be a next time."
The tracker pulses—once, then again—steady and red. My stomach knots.Fuck.It’s reactivating. Someone out there just got our location. A silent signal. And just like that, the illusion of safety shatters. Someone’s watching. Someone’s coming. Not to test us this time—but to end it.
I snatch up the tracker, shove it into the lead-lined containment box Cerberus issued for exactly this kind of shit. The lid snaps shut, the latch’s click too loud in the stillness—out of place, jarring. A cold rush of adrenaline spikes through my veins.
The air feels wrong now. Too quiet. Too still. Too thick to ignore. Every instinct I have screams the same thing: we’ve been compromised. Whatever comes next—Wolfe, the cabal, the truth that nearly destroyed us—she’s mine to protect, to control, to own. I’m done playing by everyone else’s rules.
11
VIVIAN
The safehouse bedroom is dim, lit only by the dying glow of late afternoon spilling through high-set windows. Dust dances in the sunlight like ash suspended in amber, slow and soundless. I lie still on the bed—splayed, boneless, utterly spent. But sleep doesn’t come. My body aches in the best possible ways: the sore stretch of muscles used, the faint burn along my wrists where Logan held me, the deeper thrum of satisfaction lodged low in my hips. Every inch of me is marked by him. Every nerve threadbare. My heel digs into the mattress, the springs giving a faint, protesting creak. A breath I didn’t know I’d been holding slips out, slow enough to fog the edge of the mirror across from me. I track the swirl until it fades.
Physically, I feel claimed. Emotionally? Exposed.
The contradiction knots in my chest. Safety and surrender. Control and chaos. It shouldn’t feel like this. Shouldn’t feel like comfort. But Logan’s hands never promised me tenderness—they promised truth. And that’s worse. Because now that I’ve let him touch the parts I buried, I can’t pretend I’m still made of steel. Because I’m not. I’m stitched together with wire and secrets, and he’s unraveling them, thread by thread.
I shift, wincing as my shoulder brushes against the pillow. A sharp sting lances through the skin. I sit up, gingerly twisting to see in the mirror across the room. There, just beneath the slope of my scapula, blooms a shadowed bruise—ugly, circular, discolored. A leftover from the tracker.
It’s gone now, of course. Logan removed it with a surgeon’s precision and a soldier’s fury. But the bruise remains. A mark of intrusion. Of failure. Of how close someone got. The air feels cooler against that patch of skin, like the bruise itself has a temperature. Outside, a scooter backfires, the sound too much like a muffled shot. My shoulders jerk before I can stop them.
My breath catches. I touch it lightly. And suddenly, I’m not in the safehouse anymore.
I’m nineteen again. Fresh out of field school. Kneeling on marble tile in a Riyadh penthouse, hair slicked back, lips painted red, voice trained to purr instead of speak. My first operation under Wolfe’s command. My mission wasn’t extraction. It wasn’t surveillance. It was seduction.
I was the bait.
He’d walked me through it all: the dossier, the intel, the cover legend. But what he didn’t prepare me for was the way it would feel when my mark slipped a hand under my dress and whispered state secrets like pillow talk. The tiles were cold under my knees, the air thick with rosewater and cigar smoke. My mark reeked of cologne and greed. I remember the static in my ear as Wolfe whispered, “You’re doing beautifully, love,” and something in me cracked that’s never quite sealed back shut. My pulse spikes so hard I can hear it in my ears—loud enough to drown Wolfe’s voice in memory for half a heartbeat. Then it’s back, smooth as glass.
I finished the job. Got the files. Got the exit.
And spent the next three days scrubbing myself clean until my skin bled.
That was the beginning. Of my career. Of the lie. Of Wolfe. I was too green to know the difference between manipulation and mentorship, too eager to earn praise from a man who never bled for what he asked me to do.
