In Restraint’s Embrace: Secrets and Apologies
With tension simmering in the team and unresolved trust issues surfacing, every decision counts as they prepare for a potential seismic shift in their ops landscape.
Dar’s lungs burned pleasantly against the sharp, clean chill. She’d woken at five-thirty and never drifted back. Sean’s remarks echoed in her head along with Volkov’s recent behaviour and Rhys’s scrutiny, quiet but ever-present.
Running helped. Running always helped.
So did smashing golf balls, but this was cheaper and didn’t require daylight.
Callum had been waiting where they’d agreed, doing a quad stretch against the tree trunk, breath misting in the pre-dawn air. Observing her, he straightened. Her chest performed a traitorous little flutter. Shut it.
The sight of her stopped his routine mid-stretch. Something about the way she moved, purposeful and unbothered by the cold, snapped his attention clean away from muscle memory and repetition. He straightened as she approached, nodding once.
The flip in his chest was mutual, inconvenient, and dismissed with practiced efficiency.
“Morning.”
His voice came out rougher than intended, sleep still clinging to it. He fell into step beside her.
“Morning,” she said. Then, because it mattered, “Welcome home.”
They started easily, feet finding the same cadence. Her ankle had improved over the last two days. She wasn’t gasping after the first kilometre now, though Callum was still holding back.
They’d been running for twenty minutes without speaking. Dar preferred it that way this morning—the silence, the movement, the way her mind could process without the weight of conversation. But she could feel Callum’s attention, the way he kept glancing over as if checking her temperature.
“How was your night?” he asked finally.
“Productive, Volkov’s scrambling.”
He didn’t ask for details. Just nodded. She appreciated that more than she should have.
“And yours?” She asked, glancing sideways.
“Quiet. Made the mistake of trying to read a book Logan recommended. Apparently, his idea of light reading is a history of CIA black ops.”
The bridge slid beneath them, the river dark and patient beside their path. He stole a glance at her profile, the way the cold had flushed her cheeks.
Dar laughed, surprised by the sound of it. “That tracks. He once tried to get me to watch a documentary on the Peloponnesian War. For fun.”
He exhaled a low chuckle, breath disappearing into the pale air.
“Did you?”
“One episode. Then I told him I’d rather perform my own root canal.”
“That’s fair. He’d probably say it builds character.”
Silence settled comfortably between them again, broken only by footfalls and breath. He noticed the hitch in her stride, subtle but there. Filed it away.
“You good for the briefing later?” He asked finally, his voice careful.
“I’m fine.”
“Right.” A pause. “Just checking.”
Dar remained silent, wanting to push harder into the next stretch, but she could feel the ankle wrap slipping.
“For what it’s worth,” he said after another minute, “In Berlin, I let Calder know he should have told you. About Midland.”
“Oh.” Dar felt her pulse quicken, and not from running. “Well, that explains why he asked me yesterday if you had told me about Berlin. I thought he was referring to Volkov.”
“He didn’t like it. I probably shouldn’t have—”
“It’s okay, Callum.” She glanced at him, just briefly. “You’re right. He should have. Very’s already aware. It won’t happen again.”
He nodded, seemed to relax slightly. They rounded the corner toward where tree roots knotted the pavement. Her ankle shifted, the wrap loosening just enough to betray her. She adjusted her stride, but he noticed. Of course he did.
“Hold up,” he said after the second hitch. “Your ankle.”
“It’s just the wrap.”
“Dar. Let me look at it.”
She stopped, leaning back against a tree trunk. He crouched in front of her, and the morning suddenly felt smaller, focused.
“When did you do this?”
“Sunday.”
“You should’ve said something.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“You’re favouring it.”
She was. She knew it.
He unwound the elastic carefully, hands steady and warm even through her sock. Tested gently.
“This?”
“No.”
“This?”
“A little.”
He nodded and re-wrapped, neat figure-eights, efficient but unhurried. His fingers brushed the inside of her ankle, and her body lit up in a way she very much did not approve of. Shut. It. Down.
His hands stilled briefly, thumb resting just above the bone.
“Stop fibbing to me,” his voice softened. “And to yourself.”
The Velcro tore loudly in the stillness. He looked up at her then, blue eyes catching the copper light.
“If it hurts, it matters. Doesn’t matter if it’s an ankle or something else.”
The words landed harder than intended.
He stood. For half a second, they were too close. Something unspoken surged between them, sharp and undeniable. He felt it. She saw he felt it.
“We should—” he began.
“Yeah.”
They ran again, but the rhythm had shifted. Charged. Aware. The silence threaded with things neither of them named.
Mid-morning, alone in her office, Dar watched Volkov’s network twitch under pressure.
Cold storage units lost certification overnight.
A precursor shipment arrived chemically intact but useless.
Just today, transport manifests reconciled perfectly, except the product was gone.
Not sabotage.
Not chaos.
Pressure.
She watched it register in Volkov’s operation like pain in a limb that couldn’t quite locate the injury.
“She’ll test the perimeter first,” Dar verbalised it to the room. “She won’t panic.”
She didn’t.
Volkov tightened internal controls. Replaced couriers. Froze discretionary spending. Shrunk exposure. Every move defensive, measured. Professional.
Then something shifted.
For the first time in years, Volkov reached outward.
Not to Kozlov.
Not to the old brokers.
Not to anyone who might bleed.
She reached for protection.
The request didn’t travel on open channels. It moved sideways, layered, disguised as a routine continuity query buried in harmless traffic.
Dar caught it anyway.
Short. Clean. Careful.
A request for shielding.
For continuity.
For permission.
The routing header made her go still.
Ashford.
Not as a fixer.
Not as a last resort.
As infrastructure.
Dar leaned back, fingers steepled, pulse steady but alert.
Volkov wasn’t scrambling anymore.
She was bracing.
And for the first time, Dar felt the ground shift beneath both her analyses.
Some pressure points, once touched, never stop responding.
When she heard the knock at the front door, Dar checked her watch. She quickly surveyed the office; she’d squeezed in one more chair; it felt close, too tight. Once in the front hall, she straightened and opened the door. Callum was about to speak when he saw Rhys coming down the stairs. Dar didn’t need to turn around; she felt it.
The air changed.
Rhys slowed when he saw them, his expression unreadable. He was in field clothes—dark trousers, a jacket that concealed more than it revealed. His gaze moved from Dar to Callum and back again, and something flickered across his face before he locked it down.
Callum cleared his throat. “Afternoon.”
“Afternoon.” Rhys’s voice was neutral. Professional. He looked at Dar. “Ready for the briefing?”
“Yes.” Dar’s tone matched his. Clipped. Functional.
They stood there for a moment, the three of them forming an awkward triangle in the safehouse front hall. Twigs had jumped off the couch to investigate. Rhys’s jaw tightened slightly, and Dar saw him register it—the fact that she’d been running with Callum earlier this morning, that Callum had been the one checking on her, that the distance between them now was a gap Rhys had created and didn’t know how to close.
Dar heard SIBYL ping from the office. “Veyr’s already online.” She headed back quickly, leaving them to stand or follow; she didn’t care which now. To her, the significance of the mission clearly outweighed the individual importance of two soldiers driven by testosterone.
The office felt even smaller now as Rhys leaned on the windowsill, Twigs on his lap, demanding attention, which he offered willingly without thought as she purred. Callum took the kitchen chair that had become a fixture in the office. Veyr, on screen and sitting back in her own office chair, arms crossed, appeared to be evaluating.
“Berlin worked,” Dar said without preamble. “Volkov’s pattern broke exactly where I predicted. She left the conference early, abandoned her scheduled meetings, and went dark for six hours before resurfacing at her hotel. She’s on the defensive.”
“Good,” Callum said. “Panicked people make mistakes.”
“They also reach out,” Dar tapped her tablet, and the screen on the second monitor changed to show two photographs side by side: Volkov on the left, a man in his early forties on the right. Distinguished features, the face that belonged in boardrooms or officers’ clubs. “This is Marcus Ashford. British. Former military intelligence, now private sector. On paper, he’s a consultant specialising in geopolitical risk assessment.”
Rhys leaned forward slightly. “On paper.”
“On paper,” Dar confirmed. “In reality, we believe he’s been operating as a strategic architect for destabilisation networks. Not a broker—brokers connect buyers and sellers. Ashford designs the operations themselves. He identifies fracture points, develops exploitation strategies, and coordinates implementation across multiple actors.”
Veyr’s expression didn’t change, but Dar caught the slight shift in her posture. Interest.
“Intel had fragments pointing to someone in this role for months. Someone with institutional knowledge, access to classified threat assessments, and the operational sophistication to stay invisible. Ashford fits the profile, but we’ve never had proof. Until now.”
“What’s the connection to Volkov?” Rhys asked.
Ashford wasn’t a man you hired.
He was someone you aligned with.
Dar had only seen his name surface at the edges of other people’s disasters. Never in invoices. Never in communications meant to be read. Ashford didn’t fix problems, and he didn’t clean up messes.
He ensured systems continued to function while other people disappeared.
Ports kept running.
Licenses renewed without comment.
Customs flags downgraded quietly, automatically, as though they’d never existed.
Ashford didn’t make things go away.
He made them uninteresting.
The request Volkov would send wouldn’t be phrased as protection. It never would be. It would read like a continuity assurance, the sort of language used by corporate logistics firms hedging risk during political instability.
But Dar knew better.
Volkov wouldn’t ask Ashford to fight.
She would ask him to stand still.
To occupy enough structural mass that no one could move against her without tearing holes in half a dozen legitimate systems. Ashford didn’t shield people. He wrapped them in process, compliance, and plausible deniability so dense it became radioactive to touch.
Dar pulled the data apart slowly, mapping the tendrils.
Ashford-linked entities touched three shipping insurers, two port authorities, and a financial clearinghouse that sat just far enough outside regulatory scrutiny to act as a pressure valve for nervous governments. He didn’t own these systems. He leaned into them. Nudged them.
A human keystone.
If Volkov completed that alignment, she wouldn’t be safer.
She’d be harder to reach.
Dar exhaled, slow and deliberate.
This wasn’t escalation in the traditional sense. No guns. No new violence. Just a woman with too much blood on her ledger asking a system designed to ignore blood to look the other way.
And the system was considering it.
Dar changed the display again, this time showing a predictive model with probability curves. “Which means when she does panic, she reaches out to him. Not to a cutout, not to a dead drop. Directly. Because he’s the only person who understands the full scope of what she’s involved in.”
“You’re predicting she’ll contact him,” Veyr said. It wasn’t a question.
“Within seventy-two hours. Probably sooner.” Dar met her eyes. “She’s isolated, frightened, and she just watched her entire Berlin network collapse in real time. She needs reassurance, protection, or extraction. Ashford’s the only one who can provide any of those.”
Rhys glanced at Veyr, then back to Dar. “How do we intercept it?”
“We’re already positioned,” Dar said. “GCHQ has had passive monitoring on Ashford’s communications for six months as part of a separate inquiry. We’ve arranged access to that feed. The moment Volkov reaches out—phone, email, encrypted messaging, anything—we’ll have it.”
“And if she uses a method we’re not monitoring?” Callum asked.
“She won’t. She’s a scientist, not a field operative. She’ll use whatever secure channel Ashford gave her, which means something he controls and we’re already inside.”
Veyr leaned back slightly. “What do we do with the intercept?”
This was the part that mattered. Dar felt the weight of it, the way the next few sentences would reshape everything.
“We use it to reframe Ashford in the intelligence databases,” she said. “Right now, he’s flagged as a person of interest in a handful of unrelated inquiries. Low priority. But once we have proof he’s directly coordinating with a known destabilisation asset, we can reclassify him as a long-term strategic threat. That changes his entire profile.”
“Changes how he’s handled,” Rhys said.
“Exactly. It moves him from ‘watch and assess’ to ‘active disruption.’ It authorises deeper surveillance, asset recruitment in his network, and if necessary, direct action. It also means every operation he’s touched gets re-examined. We’re not just taking down one man—we’re exposing an entire methodology.”
Callum whistled softly. “That’s a hell of a domino.”
“It’s the right domino,” Dar said. “Kozlov’s the network’s foundation, but Ashford’s the blueprint. Remove him, and no one else can replicate what he’s built. The network doesn’t just collapse—it becomes unreproducible.”
Veyr studied the screen for a long moment. “Timeline?”
“Intercept within seventy-two hours. Analysis and reclassification within a week. After that, it depends on what the intercept reveals and how quickly we can move on Kozlov.”
“And if Volkov doesn’t reach out?” Veyr asked.
Dar had run that scenario a hundred times. “Then we were wrong about their relationship, and we go back to fragmented intelligence. But I don’t think we’re wrong. The pattern’s too clean.”
Rhys looked at the monitor again. “What do you need from us?”
“Stay ready. Once we have the intercept, things will move fast. We’ll need field assets positioned for whatever comes next.” With that, Veyr sat forward. “All right. We wait for Volkov to make contact. Dar, I want updates every twelve hours, even if there’s nothing to report.”
“Understood.”
Veyr paused before signing off. “You’re confident in this?”
Dar met her gaze. “I’m confident in the model. People are predictable when they’re afraid.”
Veyr nodded once, then shut down.
Callum stood, caught her eye for a moment, then nodded once. “I’ll be ready.” The front door closed quietly behind him, and Dar sat alone with the screens, letting the weight of seventy-two hours settle into her shoulders.
Almost immediately after Callum left following the briefing, Rhys came and stood at the open office door.
He didn’t need the full briefing to feel it.
Berlin had changed the air around the team. Not in the obvious ways. No adrenaline hangover. No loose tempers. Just the quiet recalibration that followed contact with something that didn’t behave the way it was supposed to. Or the way you wanted it to.
Ashford wasn’t a target. He wasn’t even an enemy in the traditional sense. You didn’t plan for him. You planned around him, and even then, you expected collateral you’d never see coming.
“This isn’t muscle,” Rhys said after a moment. “This is ballast.”
Dar nodded once.
“If she gets him,” he confirmed his understanding, “she doesn’t need to win. She just needs to last.”
And that, Rhys understood all too well, was where wars actually turned.
He glanced back toward the kitchen, the hallway, toward the quiet house, toward the places where people were pretending this was still a normal operational rhythm.
“Then we don’t rush,” he said. “And we don’t spook her.”
“We map the system,” she said.
Rhys started to leave, then turned back, hand against the door frame.
“Dar.” he didn’t drag it out as he often did. It was a call for her attention.
Dar met his eyes.
“I’m sorry.” He looked up, jaw tight. I should have told you. I know that. I knew that.”
A pause, quieter. “That’s not fragility. That’s trust. And I broke it.”
The words hung between them, small and sharp. Dar didn’t move from her chair, but instead she exhaled, slow and deliberate, the way she’d learned to do when the grief threatened to swallow her whole.
“I’m not asking for a play-by-play of every op, Rhys. You want to fix this? Start treating me as part of this task force and stop making decisions for me. About what I can or can’t handle. Can or can’t do.”
She watched his face for a reaction, any flicker that he heard her.
“You’re right,” Rhys said, the words coming out low and careful. “I didn’t treat you like a teammate. I treated you like…”
“Like Zoe’s mom,” Dar finished for him.
Rhys flinched but didn’t look away. “Yeah.”
“Zoe’s mom will always be here,” she softly patted her chest. “But she’s not the only one sitting in this chair anymore. So no, Rhys. I’m not fragile. I’m just really fucking tired of being the last to know.” She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply, as a wave of emotion threatened to overwhelm her.
“I know you’re not.” His voice stays low, no bark left. “And that’s why I should’ve told you.”
He finally dropped his arms,the tension bleeding out. “Midland was a mistake. Not the op. The silence.”
“Then don’t make me do it alone,” her eyes slowly opened as she blinked away tears. “I can handle the weight. I just need to know you’re standing in it with me.”
He wanted to reach out; instead, his hand tightened on the doorframe until his knuckles whitened. “I’m standing.” The words felt both true and false in his throat. “Won’t be anywhere else.” Say it! Just tell her!
He gave a military nod instead, turning away before his face could betray him. Three steps down the hall, he nearly turned back.
The silence that followed wasn’t indecision.
It was the battlefield between duty and desire.
Alone in the office now, Dar looked back at the screen. Ashford’s photograph stared out at her, composed and controlled. She wondered if he knew someone was coming for him. If he’d already felt the first tremor of the collapse, she was engineering.
Probably not. People like Ashford never saw it coming. They were too used to being the ones pulling the strings.
She closed the file and began drafting her monitoring protocol. Seventy-two hours. Maybe less.
The web was tightening.
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