Page 71 of Beckett
Code red. I hadn’t used those words, but trust Travis to read between the lines of a midnight summons.
“It is.” I kept my palm steady on Audra’s shoulder, feeling microtremors run through her like electrical current. “Guys, this is Audra. Audra, you’ve met Coop and Hunter. This is Aiden—he’s our weapons specialist. And Travis is our tech guru.”
“Hi.” Her word barely disturbed the air.
The way my team responded reminded me why I’d take a bullet for any of them. No irritation about the late hour. No demands for explanations. Just immediate, alert attention.
Hunter leaned forward, scarred hands flat on the table. “What’s the situation?”
“Beck doesn’t call midnight meetings,” Coop said, his usual humor nowhere in sight. “So whatever this is, it’s serious.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten you involved. It’s—” Audra started.
“Let us be the judge of that,” Aiden said quietly, his deep voice steady as bedrock.
They were already reading her—the trembling hands, the way she kept checking exits, how she’d positioned herself to see both doors. These men knew what fear looked like, what beinghunted did to a person. They’d seen it in war zones, in victims they’d protected, probably in their own mirrors too.
My chest tightened at their immediate acceptance. These men who trusted no one, who’d built walls higher than mountains, had just opened their circle without hesitation. Because I’d asked them to.
Audra’s fingers gripped the edge of the table, her knuckles white with tension.
“Tell us everything. Take your time,” I said quietly.
She drew in air like she was about to dive deep. “It started with notes.”
The atmosphere shifted—subtle but unmistakable. Coop’s chair legs touched down silently. Aiden’s breathing slowed to sniper rhythm. Hunter’s stylus hovered over his tablet. Even Travis leaned forward, pushing energy cans aside.
“I was living in Seattle. Working at a marketing firm, normal life, normal apartment.” Her tone had gone flat, dissociative. A defense mechanism I recognized from too many debriefs. The overhead lights hummed faintly, the only sound besides her voice. “It was about six months after my brother Todd died, so I was reeling from that, just trying to get through each day.”
She pressed her fingers to her eyes, already overwhelmed. I squeezed her shoulder gently. It was just going to get worse.
“It took me a while to figure out something was actually going on. The first pictures just appeared on my car windshield, outside my apartment—mostly images of me from my social media accounts that had been printed. Coffee shop photos, me laughing at a coworker’s birthday party, nothing particularly interesting. I thought maybe it was a prank, someone from work being weird.”
She paused to take a deep breath, hands dropping back down to the table.
“But they got more specific,” she continued, her voice dropping. “Pictures I hadn’t posted anywhere. Me through my apartment window brushing my teeth. Me sleeping on my couch during a Saturday afternoon. One morning, there was a photo on my car of me from the night before, undressing in my bedroom. I’d thought the curtains were closed, but there must have been a gap, and he was out there, watching, taking pictures.”
“When was this?” Hunter’s stylus clicked against the tablet screen.
“About a year ago. Maybe thirteen months.” She calculated silently. “After a few pictures, he started writing on the back of them. Always the same phrase: An eye for an eye.”
The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Or maybe that was just my blood going cold. I caught Coop’s eye—he’d already made the same connection. Aiden’s jaw muscle ticked once. Travis actually pushed his hair back, revealing eyes sharp as broken glass. Hunter’s chair creaked as he leaned forward, stylus suspended midair like a weapon ready to strike.
“That’s targeted revenge,” Aiden stated what we all recognized. “Someone thinks you owe them blood.”
“But I don’t know who. I’ve never—I can’t think of anyone I’ve hurt so badly that they’d want to come after me like that.” Frustration leaked through her careful control. “I went to the cops, but pictures from public social media accounts or through my window weren’t enough. Even with the message. They suggested I make sure I close my curtains tightly.”
“That sucks. Cops are often overworked, but that’s not an excuse. Keep going,” Hunter ordered gently. “Every detail helps.”
I watched her reconstruct her nightmare into something linear, logical. The strength that took… Most people would have shattered into incoherence by now.
“For the first few months, just pictures. But I felt watched constantly. Getting coffee, at work, walking home. That sensation of being studied, tracked. I don’t know if it was true or not, but it felt that way.”
My molars ground together. I knew that hypervigilance, that exhausting state of perpetual alert. But at least in Afghanistan, we’d had weapons and brothers-in-arms.
“Ten months ago, everything escalated.” Her fingers twisted together, the soft sound of skin against skin barely audible. “I came home from work. My door was still locked. But someone had been inside. Nothing stolen, but everything slightly wrong. Pictures on my wall rearranged. Books shifted so some of their spines were upside down. My closet reorganized by color, light to dark, with one red dress hung backward in the middle like a target.”
“He’d touched everything.” Her voice cracked. “My toothbrush was wet. My bed had been slept in—there was an indent on my pillow, the sheets pulled back on one side. But the police said without proof of forced entry or theft, there was nothing they could do.”
