Page 119 of Calculated Risk

So, he’d typed a new message.

Congrats. Miami looks good on you both.

You better wait a while longer—I’m not missing the wedding.

He hoped it hit the way he meant it to. He hoped it told Marshall what he couldn’t say aloud.

I’m alive. I’m close. I’m coming home—just not yet.

Jackson lowered himself onto the bench beside the helm, the exhaustion crashing hard now that adrenaline wasn’t propping him upright. His hands trembled from cold, from fatigue, from blood loss. He closed his eyes and let the ocean wind press against his face—warm and salty. He could almost pretend he wasn’t half-feral from months on the run.

Almost.

His mind drifted somewhere softer for a moment. Someone softer.

Miranda.

He hadn’t said her name out loud in months, but it lived in his head the way the ocean lived in the spaces between waves. Steady. Inevitable.

He wondered what she’d say if she could see him now—filthy, injured, and sporting a beard he hadn’t meant to grow. Running instead of sleeping, surviving instead of living. She’d probably hand him water, give him that look that wasn’t pity but wasn’t quite disapproval either, and tell him he was doing too much again.

She’d been helping him. He wasn’t sure if she thought he didn’t know, but he recognized her fingerprints on every anonymous supply stash that showed upexactlywhere he needed it. She was covering her tracks well.

But she should've known better than to think he wouldn’t recognize the pattern of her care.

He scrubbed a tired hand over his face. Part of him wanted to reach out. Wanted to hear her voice, even distorted over an encrypted channel. Wanted—heaven help him—to let her know how much it mattered that she still believed in him.

But reaching out meant exposure.

Exposure meant danger.

He wouldn’t do that to his best friend. His baby girl.

“No more mistakes,” Jackson muttered under his breath.

As if on cue, his secure tablet buzzed on the cracked vinyl beside him—a soft vibration, the signature alert of one of his passive field traps.

Jackson straightened.

He’d planted a dozen trail cams in the past few weeks—tucked into vents, behind molding, inside false wiring boxes. All positioned near pressure points in Syndicate’s network.

Most weeks, the feeds stayed empty. Most days, he wondered if he was chasing ghosts.

Tonight, one of the cameras blinked to life.

His screen displayed a grainy still image, a hallway outside a restricted office tied to Morris’s private schedule. Someone standing where no one had business being. Shoulders hunched, posture furtive, expression nervous.

Features Jackson recognized immediately.

Jackson felt the exhaustion bleed out of him, replaced by something colder. Sharper.

He had it. Proof the mole wasn’t a phantom after all. And it was someone no one suspected.

He straightened slowly, ignoring the pull in his ribs, the throb in his shoulder, the sting of the hastily stitched-up knife wound along his hip. He brought the photo closer, studying the face of the person inside Black Tower who’d helped frame him.

He breathed in once, long and steady.

Finally.

“All right,” he murmured, gripping the wheel with blood-stained fingers. “You want to show your hand? Let’s play.”

He turned the boat, the engine humming as it cut away from the Miami lights and back into the open sea. He didn’t look back. Couldn’t. Not yet.

But as the coastline thinned into a band of gold on the horizon, he let one truth settle deep in his chest.

The mole just made a mistake. Which meant Jackson finally had a lead.

And God willing—a way back home.