CRIMSON CAMELLIA

The Pull

Sophia reappeared officially two weeks later, reassigned as liaison between the field teams and analysis — a title vague enough to mean almost anything and specific enough to put her in the same room as Ethan every week, which she suspected was not an accident anyone had bothered to hide from her. She briefed Ethan and Jax on a new target: a network moving specialized alloys through ports that also, conveniently, handled legitimate nuclear industry traffic, the kind of overlap that made a paper trail nearly impossible to untangle from a legitimate one.

Ethan felt the shift the moment she walked into the room, a change in air pressure he couldn't have named out loud. Jax felt it too — his eyes followed her with open, uncomplicated interest, the kind he'd never bothered to hide from anyone. Ethan's interest was quieter. It was also, though neither of them could have said exactly why yet, more dangerous.

After the briefing wrapped, Sophia lingered by the door a beat longer than the job required.

"You two handled Macau well," she said, addressing them both, though her gaze settled a fraction longer on Ethan than protocol strictly demanded.

"We had good intelligence," Ethan answered.

She almost smiled. "That was me."

Jax laughed, easy and loud. "Then we owe you a drink."

Sophia's eyes flicked back to Ethan, just once, just long enough to mean something. "Maybe later."

That night Ethan lay awake far longer than he should have, replaying the exact angle of her gaze — not the look of someone assessing an asset, not the look of a test administered and scored, but the look of a woman who had already, somewhere in the last five minutes, decided to watch him carefully for reasons that had stopped being entirely professional. He didn't know yet that she'd made that decision months earlier, in a motel room three towns away, and had spent every day since trying and failing to walk it back.