Djibouti, East Africa — Two Years Ago
Flashback
Sweat. Diesel. Burnt iron. The cocktail of tension that always clung to blood-soaked dirt before everything went to hell. You didn't need eyes to know something was wrong out here—your throat knew it first.
The compound squatted just outside Djibouti City, veiled in silence and sun-baked decay. No flag. No insignia. Just rusted sheet metal and secrets.
Audrey Rousseau moved like she belonged to the dark. One knee pressed into the ochre soil, her rifle braced against her shoulder, breath slow and sharp as a blade's edge. Every inch of her blended into the rusting cargo sprawl, red dust curling around her boots like memory. Even the night held its breath.
Three guards, casual and careless, strolled in lazy arcs through pools of floodlight. Inside that corrugated steel tomb was the real prize: an asset too classified to name, too broken to abandon. This wasn't a retrieval. It was a reckoning.
And she wasn't alone.
Static crackled. A voice broke through, smooth and arrogant, threaded with American bravado and something colder beneath.
"Rousseau. You got eyes?"
She didn't flinch. "Visual. Three tangos. Sloppy formation. I could end this now."
"That's not the assignment."
"Could've fooled me."
A pause, then a grin she couldn't see but felt anyway.
"God, I forgot how French you get when you're annoyed."
She didn't smile. But her pulse did.
Sebastian Donovan. The civilian lead on this joint op, if you believed in titles. She didn't. He wasn't military, but his movements told a different story—like someone who'd ended lives before breakfast and never wrote it down. He'd dropped into the mission with a duffel bag, a custom encrypted uplink, and zero regard for standard protocol.
Audrey had hated him on sight.
And wanted him with equal intensity.
"Give me two minutes," he said. "Cover me."
She didn't need to look. She felt him approaching—like gravity shifting. A ripple in the shadows. He peeled out of the darkness beside her, silent and smug, as if war bent around his steps. Dust clung to him like respect. His gear was spotless, too clean for this hellhole. And somehow, that made him more dangerous.
He moved ahead. She followed, rifle leveled, spine tight. Under a corroded pipe, past stacked pallets of forgotten weapons, the two of them bled into the blackness.
Two fingers raised. The signal.
She drew a breath, slow and steady.
One of the guards lit a cigarette.
Pfft.
The man dropped before the flame touched paper.
Another turned—
Pfft.
Gone.
The third barely blinked before Sebastian was on him. A flash of violence—elbow, blade, twist. The body sagged, crumpling like meat into silence.
"Clear," she murmured.
"You always this good?"
"Only when someone irritating is watching."
"Flirt."
"Amateur."
"Ouch."
They breached the side door. Inside, heat clung like a second skin. The smell—oil, copper, fear. The prisoner sat hunched in the far cell, wrists bound, face half-buried behind matted hair.
Sebastian dropped beside him, checking vitals.
Audrey kept her rifle trained on the hall.
Then—
A door slammed open.
Gunfire.
Sebastian shielded the prisoner. Audrey pivoted. One breath. One shot.
Pfft.
A body dropped.
The echo snapped through the metal room like a slap to the soul. Then silence. Tense. Final.
When it cleared, she felt his eyes on her.
Not the way a soldier looks at a teammate.
But like he'd just seen something rare. Dangerous. Untouchable.
"What?" she said, hard.
He stood slowly.
"Remind me never to piss you off."
"You already did."
A smile tugged his mouth. "Good. I like a challenge."
They got out. Barely.
Extraction came just before dawn. The safehouse was a tin-roofed ghost built into the hills—no cameras, no files, just two operatives too wired to sleep and too worn to pretend.
Dust still clung to their skin. Bruises bloomed like old secrets. They drank. In silence. One bottle. Two glasses. Too many shared glances.
And when his hand brushed hers on the table—when neither of them pulled away—
There was something in the air. Something sharp.
Not desire.
Not trust.
Something more dangerous than both.
It almost happened.
Almost.
But the world they lived in didn't reward "almosts".
Only scars.
Audrey didn't know it then, but Djibouti had been a beginning. Not of a partnership. Not even of betrayal. Something worse.