My father’s knees gave out. He slumped against the concrete pillar, his hands covering his face. A wretched, guttural sob ripped from his throat.
“I’m sorry,” he wept. “Oh god, Emily, I’m so sorry.”
The cold dread in my stomach turned to ice. “You knew he was alive.”
“I…” He couldn’t look at me. “I didn’t just know.”
The air left my lungs. “What did you do?”
“Six years ago, when your unit was ambushed in the valley…” His voice was barely a whisper, drowned out by the distant waves. “It wasn’t a random attack, Emily. You were getting too close to the ghost network. Halcyon.”
I knew Halcyon. The myth. The shadow syndicate of corrupt defense contractors and rogue intelligence officers that profited off endless wars.
“They were going to wipe your entire team,” my father continued, tears cutting tracks through the dust on his face. “I found out. I used my old clearances.”
“You sell insurance,” I whispered, the reality of my entire life unraveling.
“I built cryptographic architectures for Naval Intelligence thirty years ago,” he corrected, looking up at me with dead eyes. “I laid the foundation for the network Halcyon eventually hijacked. When I saw the kill order with your name on it, I reached out to them.”
I stepped back, horrified. “You made a deal with them.”
“I had to save you!” he screamed, his voice echoing off the concrete. “They wanted the master key to fully lock down their network so no government entity could ever track their financials. I had it. But they wanted blood, Emily. They needed a body to close the file on your unit’s investigation.”
I felt physically sick. The puzzle pieces were slamming together with bone-crushing force. “You gave them the key.”
“And I gave them a target,” he whispered, burying his face in his hands again. “I told them to spare you. I told them… I told them to take Lucas instead.”
The silence under the bleachers was absolute.
I had knelt in the dirt in that valley. I had screamed Lucas’s name as the mortar fire rained down. I had spent six years waking up screaming because I couldn’t reach him before the compound collapsed.
