Page 25 of Reaper
Wyatt comes back from the morning perimeter sweep and finds Frost running the day's debrief without him — door closed, the whole team inside, Wyatt's name not called.
I'm at my terminal. I see it through the main room doorway: Wyatt standing in the hall, looking at the closed door.
He stands there for three seconds, which is three seconds too long for a man who never stops moving.
Then Frost opens the door.
He clocks Wyatt in the hall. He doesn't say anything. He turns back to the room.
"Guess I'll catch up later." Wyatt's voice is flat.
Frost stops. Turns back around. Closes the door behind him.
"You want to tell me something?" Frost's voice is low. Controlled. The kind of controlled that means nothing good.
"You ran a debrief without me."
"I ran a debrief with my team."
The silence that follows that single word —my— is so sharp it has edges.
"That's what I thought." Wyatt doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't move. "I'm clear on where I stand."
"Are you?" Frost steps closer. It's not a question. "Because from where I'm standing, you're in my safe house, eating my team's food, breathing my team's air, and I still don't know if you're an asset or a liability. Three days, and I still can't read you."
"You've been reading me for thirty-five years."
"I read you wrong."
The words land like a slap.
Wyatt absorbs it. His jaw tightens — barely, the smallest possible tell — and then it's gone.
"Yeah." The word is dry and quiet and utterly without argument. "You did."
That's what breaks something in the air between them.
Frost expected a fight. He built toward one — the low voice, the closed door, the deliberate provocation. What he gets instead is Wyatt agreeing with him, and there's nowhere for the fight to go when the other man simply stands there and takes it.
"You don't get to do that." Frost's voice cracks just slightly at the edges. "You don't get to just — agree with me and call it over."
"It's not over." Wyatt's voice is steady. "I'm not trying to make it over. I'm just doing the work."
"The work?" Frost spits the word like it offends him. "You think that's what this is about? The work?"
"It's all I've got to offer. So that's what I'm doing."
Frost stares at him. Something moves across his face — the very edge of something that isn't anger, that he shuts down fast.
"Get in the debrief." He opens the door.
Wyatt walks past him without a word.
The door closes.
My knuckles ache from gripping the keyboard edge. Every instinct saysgo after them.Say something — not to Wyatt, but to Frost.
Tell him what Flint didn't say. Tell him that Wyatt accepting the verdict for four years isn't compliance. It's grief. Tell him that a man who thinks he's beyond redemption doesn't drive back through the door of the family that cut him off.
