Chapter 3: Reid

The problem with systems is that they do not lie.

They don’t flirt. They don’t tuck their hair behind their ears and pretend that they didn’t just walk into your space as if they owned it. They don’t look up at you with those fucking eyes and make you forget what you were doing for half a second and then leave you standing there holding emptiness like an idiot.

No. Systems do what they’re told.

People, on the other hand, do whatever the fuck they want. Fuck consequences. Fuck what it does to other people or how it derails them. Which is why people are always the problem.

I should’ve gone back to Ops the second Sato peeled off, and Alexis Harper disappeared behind her door. I should’ve gotten ahead of the chatter. Shut down Evan’s little gremlin brain before he could start a betting pool or something. Kept Marcus from getting too friendly. Kept Luke from looking at her like a stray dog he wanted to feed and adopt. Kept Jonah from noticing anything at all.

Instead, I walked in the opposite direction.

To my office.

Because control is a habit, and when something threatens it, I go where the walls are thick, and the screens are the only ones that answer to me.

My door sealed behind me with that soft hydraulic hiss, and the familiar hum of the monitors came alive like a heartbeat. Cool air. Clean air. The kind of air that smells like nothing and therefore can’t betray you.

I sat down, rolled my shoulders once, and stared at the blank screens as if staring hard enough would erase the last hour.

Didn’t work.

Her laugh was still lodged under my fucking ribs like shrapnel. That’s not poetic. Or romantic. It’s fucking annoying.

I keyed in my credentials, pulled up the compound map, and forced my brain into mission mode.

Perimeter. Check—internal cams. Check—motion logs. Check. Entry timestamps. Check.

Standard. Normal. Fine.

And then my cursor drifted, on its own, as if it had a personality disorder.

Residential wing.

Unit C.

Door six.

Her door.

I stared at it.

I didn’t click.

I didn’t not click either.

I told myself I was verifying something. That I needed to confirm Sato’s “full clearance” didn’t come with a side of “oops, we accidentally transferred a threat into your house.” That I was being thorough. Vigilant. Professional.

All those words sounded great until you looked at what my hands were doing.

Hovering. Hesitating.

Like a man who doesn’t know how to leave a fucking room he’s already left.

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, rubbing a hand down my face. “Get a goddamn grip.”

I clicked.

Feed opened.

Unit C, Room 6.

Alexis stood with her back to the door, bag unzipped on the bed, and posture loose as if she’d finally let gravity win. She wasn’t performing anymore. No bright smile. No polite warmth. No social camouflage.

Just her… the real her.

It hit me like a cheap shot.

Not because she looked fragile, but because she didn’t.

She looked tired in a way that didn’t ask for pity. Tired, like she had been carrying herself since she was a kid and never put the weight down long enough to notice it was crushing her.

She sat on the edge of the bed and dragged in a slow breath. Controlled. Measured. As if she was… counting.

Then her thumb moved, unconsciously, across the pad of her opposite palm. Once. Twice. Three times. A small motion. Practiced. Automatic. Grounding.

Then she realized what she was doing and stopped abruptly, like she had been caught.

Like the movement was weakness.

Her fingers curled into a fist. My spine went still. I recognized the motions. Not the exact gesture, but the why of it. The nervous system is trying to climb out of its own skin and pretending it’s fine. The kind of thing you don’t learn if you had a good childhood. The kind of thing you don’t learn because of “stress.” You learn it from survival.

I should have shut the feed off right then. That would be the sane thing to do. The ethical thing. The not-a-creep thing.

My mouse hovered over the close button.

Turn it off, Reid. Just walk away.

That’s what I should have done. Instead, like a creep, I kept watching.

Because the truth is, Alexis Harper made my unit feel… unpredictable. And “unpredictable” is just another word for dangerous.

At least that’s what I told myself. I was almost convinced, too, until she stood, rolled her shoulders back like she was bracing for impact, and turned toward the mirror. She went to the en suite bathroom and disappeared for a couple of seconds. The video in the room did not have any sound, because I’m not that kind of weirdo, but I assumed she went in there to turn on the shower.

When she returned, her jacket was off, and she was just in her camisole and dark jeans. She rummaged through her bag and found a towel. I thought that was weird because the bathrooms had ample towels in them. I took a mental note of that.

She placed the towel on the bed, and the next thing I knew, I was watching Alexis Harper take her clothes off. She took off her camisole first, and I noticed how toned and perfect her body is. She was wearing a t-shirt bra that made her breasts slightly lift, the apex of her nipples slightly forming an indentation on the cups. Then she took her belt off and started unbuttoning her pants. The full vision of her behind as she bent down to pull her pants down made my breathing faster. She was built as a goddess.

She was about to take the rest of her clothes off when I heard the hiss of a door nearby that made me jump. I immediately closed the window and looked at the door to see if someone was about to enter my office.

Ten seconds later, my door hissed, and in came Marcus. I tried to look as stoic as possible, but apparently that didn’t work.

Marcus looked up from the iPad he was holding and stopped abruptly. He furrowed his brows and looked around my office.

“What?” I barked at him.

“What were you just doing? Were you jerking off or something?” he said accusingly.

“WHAT? No! What the fuck do you want?” I was trying to keep my composure but realized that I sounded so fucking guilty.

“Okay. Defensive,” he moved on but still looked at me suspiciously. “So. New girl.”

“Asset,” I corrected automatically.

Marcus grinned wider. “Right. New girl.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay. What?”

He watched me for a beat, eyes sharp under the humor. Then he tilted his head. “You like her.”

“Is that a question? I don’t like anyone,” I said.

“That’s not true,” he replied cheerfully. Sitting on the couch at the corner of my office. “You like me. You just show it by threatening to kill me twice a day.”

I stared at him until he stopped smiling. He didn’t.

“Evan’s already taking bets,” Marcus added, like he was casually mentioning the weather.

My eyelid twitched.

“Of course he is.”

Marcus’s grin went feral. “Odds are good. Evan’s got you at ‘asks her out within two weeks.’ Luke says a month. Jonah didn’t say anything, but he tossed Evan a bill, so apparently he’s participating in society now.”

“I’m going to bury Evan in the walls,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose.

Marcus shrugged. “He’d still find a way to organize a betting pool from behind the walls.”

I should’ve shut it down. Shut Marcus down. Shut all of it down.

Instead, I heard myself say, “What are the odds?”

Marcus blinked, delighted. “Oh, Major Reid Calder. You want a piece of this?”

“I’m asking so I can determine how severe his punishment would be,” I snapped.

“Suuuure,” Marcus said, still smiling. “Evan’s got you at five-to-one.”

I stared at Marcus.

Then I stared at my desk. Then I stared at the wall. Because my brain had latched onto one phrase and wouldn’t let go.

Two weeks. Two weeks? Like that was even an option. Like I was the kind of man who asked women out. Like, I had the emotional bandwidth to eat dinner with someone and pretend my life was non-existent in any database, and I’m basically a ghost.

Marcus pushed off the couch. “We briefing in the morning?”

“0900,” I said.

He nodded once, and the grin faded just enough to reveal the man underneath.

“You gonna be fair to her?” he asked quietly.

I lifted my eyes.

Marcus held my gaze. No teasing. No humor. Just loyalty. Warning.

I didn’t answer him with words. Because if I answered honestly, I would have to admit to something I didn’t want to even fathom yet.

“She’s good people, Reid,” he said. “She’s been through a lot.”

I looked at him. Puzzled.

“Check her file,” he said as he left. The hiss of the door echoed in my office. “Night, boss.”

My office was quiet again. I sat there staring at nothing, jaw tight, pulse beating too fast for no reason, like my body had decided to take up cardio as a hobby.

I shook my head and wiggled the mouse to wake up my monitors. The blue and white hue of the screen illuminated my office.

I went to the personnel files and looked for hers because, apparently, I’m committed to making excellent decisions today.

Alexis Harper’s name populated the screen. Clearance level. Training history. Linguistics. Counterintelligence. Covert operations. Sato hadn’t exaggerated. She’s perfect for this unit.

All of it was clean. Straightforward. Something I would find in the public domain.

But then I started scrolling deeper. Not out of curiosity, but because I’m thorough. Because I’m responsible. Because I’m her superior. Because I’m a liar.

The first thing I clicked on was full of redaction. Entire lines blacked out. Transfers. Dead zones in the timeline where someone had either lost her in the system or didn’t bother to update her file. That made me more curious. Details always mattered to me.

I ran my thumb over the edge of the desk, slow and deliberate, grounding myself the way I tell my guys to ground themselves when they’re about to do something stupid.

Then I did something worse.

I bypassed the surface summary.

It wasn’t hard. Evan would’ve said that he can do it while jacking off. Evan can go choke on a flash drive.

The file opened wider.

And there it was. Not all of it. But it was enough.

Foster placements. Multiple foster placements. Relocations. Patterned like someone had been moved too often to ever unpack.

Then an incident report. A single paragraph. Buried so deep I almost didn’t notice it.

Sexual assault allegation. Placement. Dismissed. Reassigned.

Language stripped of blood. Stripped of humanity. Stripped of consequence.

I stared at it until the words stopped being words and turned into something ugly behind my eyes. Something hot. Anger. The kind that doesn’t make you tear up. The kind that makes you want to put your fist through a wall and then apologize to the wall for wasting its time.

“She reported it,” I said out loud, voice flat.

Like saying it out loud would make it make sense.

She reported it. And the system did what systems always do when it’s easier to blame the vulnerable. They made it disappear. They buried it under bureaucracy. They moved her. They moved the problem.

I leaned back, staring at the screen as if it had personally offended me. because now I couldn’t un-know it.

Now her thumb on her palm wasn’t just a quirk; it was a scar.

And the worst part was the immediate, uninvited conclusion my brain drew: If she learned to survive by becoming what people wanted, then anyone we send her to was going to want her. Adrian Kovac is going to want her.

And I -

I stopped that thought so hard it felt like slamming a door on my own fingers.

I was her superior. That’s it. That’s the boundary. Anything beyond that is unacceptable.

And yet, my jaw clenched so tight I could feel my molars ache.

I closed the file.

Hard.

As if that would close the feeling, too. Didn’t work.

My monitor reflected my face back at me. Green eyes. Long hair shoved behind my ears. A man who looked like he was built on discipline and bad decisions.

“Get your shit together,” I muttered.

I wasn’t worried she would fail.

I was worried someone would hurt her.

And I didn’t trust myself with what I’d do if that happened.

I sat there for a long minute, staring at the blank screen.

And then I made my first morally questionable choice.

Not the biggest one. Not yet.

I wiggled my mouse to wake up the monitors again and opened the system settings. I created a new watch protocol.

Not for the whole residential wing. Just for one door. Door six.

A silent alert to my phone for unusual movement. Tamper detection. Forced entry.

“That’s reasonable,” I justified to myself. “I’m just protecting the team.”

If anyone asked, it was security.

I saved the protocol.

The system accepted it without judgment.

because systems don’t care why you do things. They just do what they’re told.

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the notification log, and felt the most infuriating part of all settle into my bones:

I didn’t even feel guilty.

I felt… calmer.

Which was the real problem. Because if this was what calm looked like now, then whatever Alexis Harper was going to become in my life wasn’t going to be gentle.

It was going to be catastrophic.

And I was already building the foundation for it.