In the Heart of Ice and Authority
A criminologist unexpectedly becomes the civilian consultant for a covert task force hunting elusive criminals,
while seasoned operators learn of their sudden reassignment to the same task force.
Their worlds collide under a mandate to pursue those who slip through bureaucratic cracks—and nothing will ever be the same.
Hereford
Pam had the phone wedged between her shoulder and ear, boxing croissants with the efficiency of someone who’d done it ten thousand times, when Dar’s voice came through. Not the usual Dar voice—the calm, measured one that asked about golf tee times or whether Pam had watched that documentary. This was the other voice. The one that meant something had happened.
“Hey, Pam. You busy?”
Pam’s hands stilled. Twenty-six years of friendship—minus the Barry years, but who was counting—meant you could hear the cracks in two words. “Never too busy for you, love. What’s wrong?”
A pause. Then: “Can you come over? I need to talk.”
“Give me twenty minutes.” Pam was already untying her apron, catching Maggie’s eye across the bakery. Her voice came out rougher than she’d intended—last night’s whisky with Logan still coating her throat. Christ, Logan. Her stomach did a little flip. Not now. Focus on Dar. “I’m bringing pastries. The good ones.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Dar-ling. Shut up. I’m bringing pastries.”
Eighteen minutes later—because Pam drove like she baked, with aggressive confidence—she was hip-checking Dar’s front door, balancing a pastry box and her massive tote. “Special delivery for my favourite criminologist who never eats properly!”
Dar opened the door, looking like she’d been awake since the Mesozoic era. Grey sweater, jeans with a hole in the knee, hair in that bun that meant she’d been running her hands through it. But her face did that thing—that little brightening that Pam had seen since they were teenagers, before everything got complicated for a decade and a half.
“Oh thank God.” Dar grabbed the box, glanced up and down the street. “Quick, before Mrs. Henderson—”
“—and that bloody dog, yes, I know the drill.” Pam slipped inside, and Dar kicked the door shut behind her.
The living room was already set up: two mugs of coffee on the table, the new mugs, the ones Pam had just given Dar when she’d finished her Master’s. Dar set the pastry box down and flipped it open. “Jesus, Pam. You brought the—”
“The chocolate ones, yes. Because whatever this is, it requires chocolate.” Pam flung herself onto the sofa—the same sofa where they’d gotten drunk after Dar’s graduation, where Pam had consoled Dar when Zoe died, and Dar returned the shoulder when Arthur died, where they’d watched the entire second season of that terrible reality show in one sitting. She kicked off her heels, tucked her legs under her, and reached for the coffee like a woman reaching for a life raft. “Christ, I sound like I’ve been gargling gravel.” Because I was up half the night with your stepbrother, but we’re not talking about that, are we? She took a long drink, closed her eyes. “Right. You’ve got that face on. The one that means you’ve been wrestling with something big and you haven’t slept.”
Dar sank into the armchair—not sitting, more like collapsing. Her fingers knotted together. “Logan and Rhys are being retired.”
Pam’s eyebrows shot up. She’d known—Logan had told her last night, between kisses, sworn her to secrecy, and she’d been carrying it around like a stone in her pocket all the way over here. But she made her face do surprise anyway. “What? Those two? They’d have to pry them out with—wait, being retired? What does that even—”
“Forced out. This woman, Veyr, she—” Dar’s voice cracked. She grabbed her coffee, took a sip that was too hot, winced. “She orchestrated the whole thing. She’s building some kind of task force, elite, going after criminals who slip through the cracks, and she—”
Dar stopped. Put the mug down. Looked at Pam with eyes that were too bright.
“She wants me.”
The words hung there.
Pam set her own mug down very carefully. “She wants you.” Logan didn’t mention that part. Bastard. A flutter of panic mixed with something else—guilt? Protectiveness? The weird feeling of knowing something about Logan that Dar didn’t, which felt like lying even though it wasn’t, not really. “Okay. Okay, back up. Start from the beginning. When did this—”
“Last night. Rhys was at Hounds, upset because they’re putting him out to pasture and he was contemplating moving to Greece—”
“Greece?”
“I know, right? And then he tells Logan that he’s being retired too, and then out of nowhere this Veyr woman calls me—I don’t even know how she got my number, Pam—and she just lays it all out like she’s ordering takeaway. ‘We’re forming a task force, we need your skills, you’ll be working remotely, here’s the offer.'” Dar laughed, but it came out wrong. “And I hate her. I hate her for what she did to them, for just—just moving people around like chess pieces. But I’m also—”
She stopped.
“You’re tempted,” Pam said quietly.
“I’m tempted.” Dar’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “My head is screaming no. Every logical part of my brain is saying this is insane, this is dangerous, this is—but my gut, Pam. My gut feels like this is right. Like I’m supposed to do this.” She finally looked up, met Pam’s eyes. “That’s mad, isn’t it?”
Pam was quiet for a moment. She reached for a pain au chocolat, tore it in half, handed part to Dar. “Eat something. You look like you’re about to pass out.”
“I’m fine—”
“Dar-ling. Eat the bloody pastry.”
They both took bites. Chewed. The silence was comfortable, the kind you can only have with someone who’s seen you at your worst and stayed anyway. Even when you ran off pregnant at seventeen and they disappeared to Canada at eighteen and you didn’t properly talk for years thanks to that bastard Barry, and it was like no time had passed at all.
“Remember when we nicked Mrs. Patterson’s garden gnome?” Pam said suddenly, a grin breaking across her face. “And you were so bloody serious about it, like we were planning a heist? You made a diagram.”
Dar’s lips twitched. “We were fifteen. And you’re the one who wanted to ransom it.”
“For charity!” Pam protested, gesturing dramatically with her pastry. “We were going to donate the proceeds to the animal shelter. Very noble.” She took another bite, then her face turned more serious. “But Dar, love, this isn’t the same as nicking garden gnomes. These people—intelligence types, government spooks, whatever the hell they are—they always undersell the danger. Always. Remember when Logan ‘just popped over’ to Damascus for a ‘quick consult’?”
“The scar.”
“The scar. He came back looking like he’d been through a meat grinder and tried to tell us it was ‘nothing serious.'” And last night I traced that scar with my fingers, and he still wouldn’t tell me the whole story. Pam’s voice had an edge now. “So when they say you’ll be safe at home, what they mean is you’ll be safer than if you were in the field, which is not the same as actually safe.”
Dar was quiet, turning her mug in her hands.
“But,” Pam continued, softer now, “I also know you. I know that look. You’ve already decided, haven’t you?”
“I think so.” Dar’s voice was barely audible. “Is that stupid?”
“No.” Pam reached across the arm of the chair, grabbed Dar’s hand. “No, it’s not stupid. Terrifying, yes. Potentially catastrophic, absolutely. But not stupid.” She squeezed. “You’ve been—God, Dar, you’ve been so stuck since Zoe. And Arthur—” Her voice caught. Three months apart. Three bloody months and they were both gone. “I’m not saying this is some magical fix, but if your gut is telling you this is right—”
“It is.”
“Then I trust your gut.” Pam squeezed her hand again, then let go and sat back. “But I’m also going to worry about you constantly and probably develop an ulcer, so you’re going to owe me a lot of wine. And you’re going to have to let me win at golf for the next six months to make up for the stress.”
Dar laughed, and this time it sounded real. “You never let me win anyway.”
“Because I’m brilliant and you’re rubbish at putting.” Pam grabbed another pastry, settled back into the sofa. “So. Logistics. When do you start this cloak-and-dagger nonsense? And more importantly, what’s your extraction plan for when you inevitably uncover some massive parliamentary scandal and need to flee the country?”
“Extraction plan?” Dar was grinning now. “I was counting on you hiding me in the bakery’s walk-in freezer.”
“Oh, absolutely. I’ll tuck you behind the sourdough starters. No one ever looks there.” Pam gestured with her pastry, getting more animated. “Seriously though. When?”
“Veyr’s meeting with Rhys and Logan this morning.” Logan. Christ. Pam felt her face get warm as Dar talked. “I’m not sure when she’ll contact me, but apparently the paperwork’s already moving. She’s got serious pull—like, capital-C Clout.”
“Fantastic. So you’re joining a secret task force run by a woman with mysterious government connections who can apparently retire people at will. This is fine. Everything is fine.” Pam took a long drink of coffee. “Does she know about your thing? The pattern recognition thing?”
“Must do. That’s why she wants me.” Dar was looking around the living room now, and Pam could see her brain working. “I’m going to need a proper desk. This room’s too small. Maybe I can—”
“Dar.”
“Yeah?”
“Are you scared?”
Dar stopped. Looked at her. “Terrified.”
“Good. That means you’re not an idiot.” Pam set her mug down with a decisive clink. “Right. Here’s what’s going to happen. One: you’re going to let me install a panic button disguised as a biscuit tin. Don’t argue, it’s happening. I’ll get one of those fancy ones from Fortnum’s. No one will suspect a thing.” She was warming to her theme now, gesturing more wildly. “Two: if you need to leak anything scandalous or pass secret messages, my sourdough starter makes an excellent dead drop. I’m completely serious about that, by the way. I’ll name it something inconspicuous like ‘Gladys’ and you can leave coded notes in the flour bin.”
Dar was laughing now, properly laughing. “A biscuit tin panic button? A sourdough dead drop named Gladys?”
“Mock me all you want, but when MI6 is knocking down your door and you need emergency extraction, you’ll be thanking me.” Pam was grinning too, but then her face turned serious. “And three: you’re going to text me every day. Even if it’s just ‘still alive, ate something that wasn’t coffee.’ Because I swear to God, Dar, if you disappear into some classified black hole and I don’t hear from you—”
“I promise.” Dar’s smile was soft now. “Every day.”
They sat there for a moment, the morning light coming through the window, Twigs sunning herself on the ledge, the pastry box half-empty between them. Over two decades of friendship, Pam thought. Twenty-six years—minus the Barry years, plus the reconnection that felt like coming home, plus golf on Thursdays and coffee on Sundays and showing up when it mattered. And now this.
And now Logan. Christ. I slept with her stepbrother last night, and I’m sitting here eating pastries and I haven’t said a word.
“You know what’s weird?” Dar said quietly. “I’m excited. Like, actually excited. I haven’t felt like this since—”
She didn’t finish, but she didn’t need to. Pam knew.
“Then it’s right,” Pam said simply. “Terrifying and potentially disastrous, but right.”
Dar nodded, more to herself than to Pam. “Yeah. I think it is.”
Pam glanced at her phone, swore softly. “Shit. I need to get back before the mid-morning rush descends on poor Maggie. She’s brilliant but she panics when there’s a queue.” She stood, started hunting for her shoes. “Text me after Veyr contacts you, yeah? I want to know everything. Well, everything you’re allowed to tell me. Or everything you’re willing to tell me even if you’re not allowed.”
“Pam—”
“I know, I know, official secrets, classified, blah blah.” She found one shoe, then the other. “But seriously. Updates. Even if they’re vague and cryptic.”
“I promise.” Dar walked her to the door. “And Pam? Thank you. For—”
“Oh, shut up.” Pam pulled her into a hug, fierce and quick. “That’s what we do. You show up for me, I show up for you. That’s the deal.” She pulled back, looked at Dar seriously. “But I mean it about the panic button.”
“I know you do.”
“Good.” Pam grabbed her tote, her keys. “Right. I’m off. Try to eat something that isn’t pastry. And maybe sleep? You look like death.”
“Love you too.”
“I know.” Pam grinned, then her face turned serious again. “Hey. You’re going to be brilliant at this. Whatever it is. You know that, right?”
Dar’s eyes got bright again. “I hope so.”
“I know so.” Pam squeezed her arm once more, then headed down the path to her car.
I should tell her about Logan, Pam thought as she slid into the driver’s seat. I should go back in there right now and tell her.
But she didn’t. She started the car, waved at Dar standing in the doorway, and then pulled away, the secret a cold, dense weight pressing against her ribs.
After Pam’s car pulled away, Dar stood in the doorway, surveying her empty living room. Twigs jumped down from the window ledge and wound around her ankles. The coffee mugs sat on the table, the pastry box still open, crumbs scattered across the surface.
And underneath the fear, underneath the uncertainty, there was something else. Something she hadn’t felt in so long she’d almost forgotten what it was.
Excitement. Possibility. The sense that something was beginning.
She hadn’t felt this way since before Zoe died.
Dar picked up her phone and waited for Veyr to call.
Elsewhere in Herefordshire, the pale sun struggled through narrow, leaded windows high in the concrete walls of a locked-down government complex. The sterile air tasted faintly of disinfectant and cold steel. In a spartan conference room, fluorescent lights hummed overhead as Rhys Calder sat rigidly across from Logan Ward. Both clutching cardboard cups of vending machine coffee, their breaths synchronized in the heavy silence, like one nervous system expecting the enemy’s first move.
The door swung open without fanfare. Veyr stepped in—a silhouette of ice and authority. No announcements, no flourishes: just the crisp line of her charcoal suit cut so sharply it could draw blood, matching the stern sweep of her hair, and eyes that moved across the room the way an accountant reads a balance sheet—cataloguing, assessing, finding nothing that surprised her. She paused deliberately, letting the hush stretch like a taut wire.
Logan shifted, leather creaking. Rhys could feel the barely contained energy in his partner’s posture; the dark lenses hid Logan’s eyes, but not the tension coiling in his frame. Fucking hell, she’s good at this. Could freeze a room just by breathing.
“Calder. Ward.” Her voice was cool and precise, like an ice pick’s sharp glint. “Officially, you’re both retired as of this morning.”
The word clipped the air like a guillotine. Retired. Forty-five and suddenly obsolete. Rhys’s fingernails dug half-moons into the disposable coffee cup. He forced his face still, a blank mask against the world. “That it? No fanfare, no ceremony?”
Logan leaned back, letting a smirk curl as his eyes hid beneath the dark lenses. “No one summons us just to hand out commemorative watches.”
Veyr’s lips curved ever so slightly. “Correct. While you appear pensioners in waiting, you’re being reassigned to Task Force 983—off-book, denied existence. You’ll answer only to me. The mandate is this: find the people we keep losing in the paperwork. The ones who are never quite guilty of anything, until suddenly everyone around them is dead.”
Rhys flicked a look at Logan, reading the familiar spark in his eyes. He’s already in. Always ready to step across the line. To Veyr, “Why us? You’ve got younger teams—hungrier, faster.”
“Experience decides wars.” Veyr replied without haste. “Considering the established trust and shared experience of working together for so long, you’ve developed a strong connection with each other. You can’t manufacture or fake that.” She paused as if tasting the words. “You’ll have additional support and one civilian consultant: Dar Montgomery.”
Logan snapped his head toward the doorway as if expecting to see his stepsister emerge. “She’s not—”
“In the field? No.” Veyr shook her head. “She stays behind the screen, analyzing. You use her vision as your advantage.”
The relief came first—sharp and immediate. Safe. She’ll be safe from the field. Rhys felt his shoulders drop half an inch, felt the knot in his chest loosen. But then the dread crept in, cold and insidious, replacing the relief with something worse. Behind the screen meant she’d still be in this. Still tangled in the machinery of Task Force 983, still hunting the people who left bodies in their wake. Still in danger, just a different kind—the kind that didn’t leave visible scars.
He glanced at Logan, who’d already settled back into that easy acceptance, that of course she’s part of this calm that came from years of compartmentalizing. Logan had always been better at that—at accepting the inevitable and moving forward without looking back. But Rhys couldn’t do that. Not with Dar.
The weight of it hit him then: she was tied to this now. Tied to him, to Logan, to Veyr’s ice-pick voice and the black folio and the people they’d hunt who left no official trace. She’d be in the thick of it, just without the field training, without the backup, without him there to — He stopped that thought before it could finish.
He exhaled, nodding once. “When do we start?”
Finally, Veyr settled into her chair. With deliberate calm, she opened a black leather folio and slid a matching folder across the table toward Rhys. Its surface was icy and smooth—like a promise and a warning in one. She laced her fingers. “You already have.”
Two worlds—one messy with crumbs, one carved from steel—had converged on the same trajectory into a mashup.
Task Force 983 was no longer a secret plan sketched on napkins in a dingy bar.
It was alive. It was their future—both a promise and a prison, its jaws already closing.