Page 90 of My Unhinged Alphas
“That wasn’t the question.”
“It was the answer.”
I take a step toward him. “We bring her in because she’s connected to the target, we barely scratch the surface, and you just drop her back at home like it’s nothing?”
“She doesn’t want anything to do with us,” he says.
Like that settles it.
I shake my head. “That doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to her.”
“I don’t care about her preferences,” I snap. “I care about what she knows.”
Havoc’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a flicker there. Amusement, maybe. Or something else. “She doesn’t know anything,” he says.
“You don’t know that.”
“I thought we didn’t hurt innocent people.”
I look at him. He knows that’s not true. I know that’s not true. We’ve both seen enough to know how thin that line really is. You don’t work inside something like this and come out unchanged. You just get better at deciding what you’re willing to carry.
“Intent matters,” I say. It sounds hollow even as it leaves my mouth.
Havoc huffs a quiet laugh. “Yeah? Tell that to the ones who didn’t sign up for any of this.”
I don’t answer.
Because he’s not wrong. We don’t go out looking for innocents. That’s the rule. That’s the line we pretend keeps this from turning into something worse. But lines blur. Someone knows something they shouldn’t, or someone thinks they do, and suddenly they’re part of it whether they agreed to be or not.
Like her.
Lena wasn’t supposed to be anything. Now she’s a problem.
I’m already irritated, and the way Havoc is standing there acting like dropping her off solved anything is making it worse.
“The point,” I say, “is that we still don’t know what she saw, what she heard, or who else knows she was there.”
Vale says, “She’s in the files.”
No one answers right away.
Havoc looks over at him. “We know.”
Vale’s expression doesn’t change. “So the question is how.”
That shifts the room.
I stop pacing and look between them. He’s right. We’ve all been treating Lena being in the file as a fact to react to, but notone of us stopped long enough to ask how her name got there in the first place.
Havoc folds his arms. “Could be the target. If they were watching him, and she was with him, that’s enough.”
But even as he says it out loud, it doesn’t make sense. The files aren’t casual records. They’re not case notes or some list somebody updates after a bad night. They’re older than that. Built over years. People of interest, names that matter, bloodlines, patterns, anyone another order might be watching, using, following, circling. Most of the names sit there untouched. Some disappear. A few rise to the surface when they suddenly connect to active work.
Lena’s name should never have been in there. Not unless somebody put it there long before last night’s hit ever came down.
I think back through everything. The hit order. The target. The timing. Lena getting pulled into the edge of it. None of that explains a preexisting file.
