Page 90 of Code Name: Scorpio

“Yep.” Ryder rubbed the back of his neck. Fuck, he was tired. “The first thirty seconds. You have to be inside and in control before Heath has time to read the situation and react. The longer it takes, the more dangerous he gets.”

Fallon turned back to the warehouse layout. “Ryder, this is your show. You and Cassandra are the ones who have put in the work. Walk us through a breach sequence.”

He stood and moved to the screen. This, he could do. This didn’t require a single bit of the monster that lived inside him.

“Service entrance puts you here. Corridor runs east along the back wall, maybe forty feet, with a fire door at the far end that opens onto the main floor…”

He ran them through the rest. What different moves they’d make depending on different variables. There was no way to account for everything—everyone knew that. But you made your best plans then prepared for them to go to complete shit.

They ran through a couple different scenarios. Isaac leaned forward, studying the layout. “What about the loading bays? If someone inside runs for the south side during the breach, those bay doors are the fastest way out.”

“That’s where you put people outside. Two on the south covering the bays, two more on the east entrance. Nobody gets out. The interior teams handle the rest.”

They went through it three more times. Adjustments, alternatives, what-ifs. What if the interior had been reconfigured? What if the kids weren’t in the north rooms? What if the kidnappers had more people at the warehouse than they expected?

Each question he answered pulled from the place inside him that understood how this kind of operation worked because he’d spent years living inside them, and each answer came out clean and steady because that was what the room needed.

The plan kept building. Communication protocols, fallback positions if the timing slipped, abort criteria if everything went sideways. They mapped contingency after contingency because an operation this size would find every gap they left open.

He answered every question. How men like Heath thought, how they reacted under pressure, where they’d go hard and where they’d cut their losses. He understood every ugly inch of it.

The people in this room trusted him because of a lie. They trusted him because they thought he was a solid agent with some sort of military or law enforcement background like most of them. Outside of Ian, nobody knew who he’d been at all.

Didn’t know how close the darkness in him was to the surface. That had always been true. He just wasn’t going to pretend like it wasn’t any more.

One more assignment: get these kids out.

The meeting ran another forty minutes. Plans got refined, taken apart, rebuilt tighter. Fallon assigned roles. Isaac would lead the breach. Fallon had the holding rooms and the kids. Nolan and Ian would lead the perimeter team.

“Once we’ve ensured takedown, my contacts at the FBI will be ready for cleanup and arrests,” Ian said. “They’re on standby. Fortunately, at this point, law enforcement trusts us enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I’ll make sure that transfer goes smoothly, and they’ll make sure the missing kids get back to their homes.”

Ryder was on the breach team and would be providing adjustment updates in real time based on his reading of the Diehl brothers and their people.

He looked around the table while Fallon walked through the final timeline. Isaac had a pen in his hand but wasn’t writing anything down. He never did until he’d already worked through it in his head. Nolan was taking notes he’d memorize and shred before he left the building. Ian hadn’t said much in the last twenty minutes, which meant he was satisfied with where the op had landed.

He watched them work and felt the distance opening up inside him. Good people doing clean work, and him at the table pretending he belonged there.

Four years at Zodiac. He’d walked away from Rogue and into the clean side of Ian’s operation, where the work was straightforward and nobody around him knew what he’d been.

He’d told himself it meant something. That the work itself could change whatever sat at the core of him. That pointing his skills somewhere better would eventually make him someone better.

Cassandra had proved it couldn’t.

And she’d been right. That was the part he couldn’t get around. The skills that made him useful—reading people, anticipating reactions, knowing where someone would break and how to apply pressure to make that happen—he’d built those in rooms where breaking people was the point. He’d spent years telling himself that using them here, for missions like this, had made him something different from what he really was.

But the truth was: the application changed. He didn’t.

Fallon’s voice cut through, assigning final check-in times. He heard it without listening.

He thought about what rescuing six kids on Friday would weigh against everything else. It wouldn’t move the needle. Nothing moved it. He needed to stop trying.

After Friday, he was done here. Done at Zodiac. Done with missions. He wasn’t going back to what he had been, but he couldn’t stay here anymore pretending to be something he was never going to be.

The room cleared out. People moved into the hallway already working the details, voices overlapping as they went. He stayed where he was.

Ian didn’t leave either.

When the door closed behind the last person, Ian sat back in his chair, arms crossed loosely. “Believe it or not, you’re not the only one who can read people. Got something you want to tell me?”