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"Not one, but two living brothers?" Denny Carmichael slowly leans back in his outrageously large chesterfield desk chair, a smirk slowly blooming across his face. His dark eyes are locked onto a thin file splayed open before him on his desk, showcasing photos of two men.
"Well I'll be damned, Six," he licks his lips, like he's actually drooling at the mere thought of using Six’s carefully kept secrets against him. “You're not as untouchable as you thought, huh?”
Suzanne stands three paces away from Denny's desk (just as he always insists), thinking God, I really fucking hate my job.
"How did you even find this intel?" she asks incredulously. "Last I checked, we had absolutely no information on Six. Now you— you suddenly have profiles on his brothers? Wasn't the whole Sierra program supposed to be about recruiting orphans?"
"Oh Suzanne, how little you understand. There's nothing that money and connections won't buy," Denny mocks with a pout, tilting his head like he's talking to a toddler. Her nails dig their way into her palms as she counts backward from 10, reminding herself that she can't physically assault her boss even if he is a fucking dickhead.
"And yes, I also thought that Fitzroy was smart enough to make sure his little toys were truly disconnected from the rest of we human beings," he continues. "Alas, the man was even more idiotic than I initially thought, and that is certainly saying something. I'm certainly not complaining— one man's weakness is another man's weapon."
Suzanne's pretty sure her palms are bleeding.
"Are we even sure that this intel is reliable?" she suggests carefully, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear in a way that she’d firmly argue isn’t out of nerves. "Is dragging innocent civilians into this mess really a good idea?"
If there’s one thing Suzanne has learned in the years of surviving Denny Carmichael and Lloyd Hansen’s weird as shit bromance and dealing with the bullshittery of working in undercover ops, it’s to trust her gut. Her gut has never proven her wrong before.
It told her that Lloyd was an actual fucking psycho within minutes of meeting him at Harvard (though Lloyd’s dedicated attempt at tripping another student head-first down the very long flight of stairs outside the business building quickly confirmed that feeling). It told her that Denny’s grossly successful rate of promotions had more influence than just good ol’ Denny’s work ethic (the old man being the dark shadow following the man around is a bit too hard to ignore. Especially when Denny wields the old man’s favor like a spoiled brat with a rich daddy).
And it's telling her now that, should this intel be accurate and true, provoking this extremely skilled, practically unkillable bear by using his carefully hidden younger twin brothers against him is not a very good idea.
Evidently, Denny doesn’t like being told he can’t do something, no matter how carefully she puts it.
“I don’t care about your uncertainty, Suzanne,” Denny says as patronizingly as possible. “I care about results. If there’s a chance that snatching either of these men up could bring Six running back home with his tail between his legs with the asset in hand then I’m using it,” he clips his words, tapping his finger into a pair of photos showcasing either twin for emphasis. One is a stunt team I.D. photo and the other one is a middle school I.D. photo.
“It’s not a good idea, Denny,” she tries anyway, striding forward and dropping her palms onto the man’s desk emphatically. “You’ve already hired Lloyd to continue this manhunt, do you really need to stoop as low as to sic wet teams onto innocent civilians?”
“I am willing to do whatever it takes to get a job done,” Denny’s voice booms suddenly in the quiet of his office, his eyes darkening, “I need that asset back, I need Six dead in the fucking ground, and if a couple of civilian casualties are all it takes to achieve that then so be it.”
He slowly rises up from his chair, leaning forward on his desk to match her own pose. He leans in close, almost uncannily still as he stares into her eyes over the edge of his glasses. “This, right here, is your problem, Suzanne,” he whispers, “You limit yourself with uncertainties instead of seeing the potential right in front of your eyes. Getting our hands dirty is a part of the profession.”
Suzanne grits her teeth. Getting your hands dirty got us into this situation in the first fucking place.
Her heart pounds so aggressively against her ribcage that she's pretty sure Denny can hear it. Blood rushes hot through her veins, bringing with it a vicious wish to leap across this desk and bash Denny's head against his pristine white office wall.
Leading the charge of her rage is her gut instinct. It demands that she does something about this lingering sense of doom that Denny's words inspire, to do something about this helpless desperation she feels at the realization that she can't do anything to deny his decision. If Denny goes away, so too will the incoming danger.
Unfortunately, she can't go through with that desire. From where she stands, Denny is untouchable. She can’t do anything to him that the old man won’t do back to her tenfold.
Which leaves her with nothing else to do but beg.
She swallows down the rage, leaving her mouth dry and her breathing shallow as she whispers back, "This job is not without moral standing, Denny. There are wrong choices to make— and this? This is one of them.”
Helplessly, she silently pleas for Denny to listen to reason once— just this one singular time— as her eyes bounce between his. Denny stares back at her with that still, unimpressed gaze of his and he drops a finger onto the photo of the middle school I.D., loud in the tense silence of his office. “Find this one, bring him in. If you won’t do it, I’ll have Lloyd do it.”
Her stomach churns at the thought of a civilian before forced into the bloodied hands of sadistic Lloyd Hansen. Her eyes fall down to look at the photo, Denny's finger pinning it down like a sword of Damocles. The face looking back at her is plain, if scruffy looking, and beaming at the camera with an innocent smile. The man's glasses are crooked on his face, his hair is a mess, and his tie is just ever so slightly askew. Perfectly civilian. Perfectly boring.
If something absolutely must be done, then… she guesses the best case here would be for her to go and kidnap an innocent middle school teacher.
And if this man is truly Six's younger brother, it very well may be the last thing she ever does.
Suzanne lets out a shuddery breath, standing up to her own height as she signs her soul away to Denny fucking Carmichael of all people.
“Okay. I’ll find him.”
“Good,” Denny finally smiles, satisfied at the sound of getting his way, as always. “Now get the hell out.”
Suzanne nods, then gets the hell out.
Tracking down a middle school teacher should not have been as wildly difficult as it was trying to find Ryland Grace.
Grace (apparently an adoption of their mother's maiden name when he turned 18) is, much like his older brother, gone with the wind. Perhaps she had been too assumptive in thinking that this particular half of the Gentry family twins was nothing more than a civilian.
She started with the basics: finding out everything to know about the man in order to snatch him up. Tracking Grace's movements had been stupidly easy at first, the man had a relatively reliable schedule. Old bank statements told her that he did his grocery shopping on most Sunday mornings at a local grocer. Old camera footage showed her the few hours he would spend at the gym and the diner he'd eat breakfast by before work. School records and admin reports told her that he taught at Grover Cleveland Middle School from 7 AM to 4 PM.
She learned exactly what breakfast he'd order at the diner every morning. She learned exactly which routes he took to get to school every morning, and which routes he took to get home. She learned that he taught specifically seventh grade science. She learned that he bought cheerios every time he went grocery shopping. She learned that he'd have dinner with an old college friend every Thursday night.
And then, some time around 11 months ago, all the trails left behind by Ryland Grace went dead cold.
Not just a simple change in routine, not just a sudden move. Ryland Grace seemingly fell of the face of the fucking earth.
Despite popular belief, it is nearly impossible to go ghost in the modern age. The art of faking one's death died the day that surveillance cameras were invented and slowly evolved to become smaller, more discrete, and easier to hide; it died when everyone started carrying around devices in their pockets that track their location, their preferences, and other useful data that makes an average person findable. There are only a handful of people capable of avoiding such surveillance, and one of them happens to be none other than the Gray Man.
Now, while Ryland Grace may be related to the Gray Man, Six he is not. And yet, impossibly, Grace is nowhere to be found just like his brother. Which led to a very worrying realization: this level of disappearance was professional.
This realization had her stumped for the longest time— because who in the world would go through the effort of disappearing a middle school teacher? What could a man teaching seventh grader about volcanoes and the solar system possibly do to get the attention of people skilled enough to snatch him out of thin air?
Well, besides being related to a Sierra Six agent.
She couldn't figure it out, and so with nothing new in terms of information to work off of, she pivoted and decided to work with what she did have.
She sent a team out to check out the school and his old apartment. The school had absolutely nothing of use to give them besides information that they already knew: Grace took a leave of absence one day and hasn’t been heard from since. The team that went to the apartment, which is curiously still getting rent payments from a shell account located in the Cayman Islands, also turned up with nothing. Apparently, the apartment looked like it hadn’t been lived in for about a year. Fan-fucking-tastic.
So with no leads from the school or the man’s apartment, she decided to do a bit more digging into Grace himself, as far back as records could possibly go. In doing so, she curiously discovered that he was actually Dr. Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist.
To say she was surprised by the CIA file containing the footage from the UNESCO conference in Denmark would be an understatement. She never would’ve guessed a man like Dr. Grace would have such an explosive outburst, and she definitely never would've guessed that that same man would later become a middle school teacher. Books and covers and judgement, and all that.
For a short moment, she wondered if Dr. Grace's past in academia had been the reason he disappeared, if maybe he was a potential whistle blower on some sort of project, but then she realized— she got this UNESCO conference information from a CIA file. As in, someone else in the industry had already requested this intel around the same time that Dr. Grace disappeared into thin air.
So... she was essentially chasing her tail this entire time. Infuriating because fuck, what a waste of time and resources, but amazing because finally she had a lead to follow and Denny could get off her ass for five damn seconds.
And so she dug into the person who requested the intel and got a name: Carl Brooks, a high level security officer for the CIA.
Unfortunately that lead didn't last long, seeing as Carl Brooks ended up being yet another brick wall. Any information about where Brooks was currently assigned or what project he was working was so buried in confidential files and redactions that Suzanne started hallucinating black boxes.
When she reluctantly brought this information to Denny, the man simply shooed her out of his office with a tired, "I'll unfuck your mess."
Quite frankly, Suzanne didn't care that she had to rely on Denny for this bullshit. As far as she was concerned, every brick wall she ran into during this investigation into Dr. Grace was a sure-fire sign from the universe that she was not meant to be doing this. But Denny is nothing if not stubborn, and after an hour inside his office, he smugly strode up to her desk with a file containing Dr. Grace’s location.
Gansu. Dr. Grace was aboard the Gansu, a Chinese Naval aircraft carrier that seems to be looping around the South China sea. Practically unreachable. What the hell he was doing there, Suzanne did not know and, fuck it, she didn't want to know. This extraction is already going to be a pain in her ass enough, she doesn't want to know what she's about to disturb by sneaking aboard this aircraft carrier and kidnapping Dr. Grace.
Just the idea seemed nearly impossible. Getting onto an aircraft carrier was going to be difficult, and sneaking someone off of it without raising a whole lot of flags and probably threatening international relations with China was even more so.
Nearly being the keyword here because, well, even aircraft carriers need to refuel after a while. Assembling a retrieval team to be ready to hit any naval port along the South China sea the second they make landfall is child’s play. All she has to do is wait.
And unlike Denny, Suzanne knows a hunter is only as good as their patience.
Dr. Grace is probably the oddest person Suzanne's had to deal with, and that's certainly saying a lot considering her profession.
They got word that the Gansu was going to dock in Lumut Naval Base in Malaysia just 15 hours ago, and she and her team were quickly rushing onto a runway and packing into a plane within seconds. After a long flight of Suzanne picturing every single way this could possibly go wrong, here they are to pick up Dr. Grace.
From the comforts of their swanky new safe house just an hour away from Lumut, Suzanne currently stands inside their decked out tech room, staring up at a T.V. showcasing a livestream from her retrieval team's body cams. The screens are all nearly pitch black since it's the middle of the night, but she can hear their boots shuffling around through her ear piece.
"Cherry, what's your status?" she calls over the shared line to her team. They should be close to infiltrating the Gansu right about now.
"Heading in now."
"Okay," Suzanne whispers to herself, wrapping her arms around herself. "Godspeed."
Thankfully, the retrieval team manages to get aboard the Gansu without a hitch. She emphasized for them not to go in guns blazing to keep the retrieval lowkey, which has proven to be the right strategy. The retrieval team eventually makes their way onto the top desk, where they find a lone figure standing calmly by the railing.
"Target located. Approaching," Cherry quietly announces over the radio.
Dr. Grace seems to finally sense the retrieval team because his head perks up and he glances over his shoulder. The very first thing her eyes land on through the live stream is the half-eaten Twizzler hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette. The next is the thin-framed glasses sitting crooked on his nose, just like it looks in the middle school I.D. photo. His hair is ruffled from the slight breeze, his eyes have deep circles beneath them, and he's wearing a hand-knit cardigan.
The most surprising, though, is his smile.
He smiles at the squad approaching him. A full team of men in tactical gear rolling up on him at once, and he smiles at them like they're old friends.
"Can I help you gentlemen?" Dr. Grace asks around his Twizzler.
"Dr. Grace, we need you to come with us," Cherry announces, his body cam shifting a bit as he waves an arm to lead Dr. Grace back down to the main deck.
Dr. Grace rolls his eyes like this is a major inconvenience for him, but follows the order anyway without hesitation. As soon as he's stepped close enough to Cherry's body cam, Suzanne can hear him grumbling under his breath, "Why can't she just be normal?"
As she said. Odd.
The mission continues smoothly from there, with her team leading Dr. Grace off of the Gansu and getting him sandwiched into the middle of a transport van with guards on all sides of him. For the first twenty minutes of the drive from the base to the safe house, Suzanne has to sit through Dr. Grace trying and absolutely failing to strike up a conversation with every single one of the guards in the van.
Yes, all seven of them.
When they were 10 minutes out, she sends out a message to Denny who was still on his way to the safe house himself to let him know that Dr. Grace was almost there. As she positions herself to greet the team and Dr. Grace at the front door, she gets a reply:
Lock him down.
“Ma’am,” a voice calls out, snapping her head up from glaring down at her phone, internally hoping that it will set Denny on fire.
She looks up to find Cherry and his team escorting Dr. Grace through the doors, and as he steps inside, she's once again surprised by the sheer softness of the man. He's even scruffier than his I.D. photo gave him credit for: his hair is messy like he's been running his hands through it all day, the knit of his sweater is fuzzy like he's worn it every day for years, the black t-shirt he wears beneath it says "Reading Rainbow" with a graphic of a shooting star, and his white converse are barely laced up.
"Dr. Grace," she greets with a small smile, watching as the man glances around with a raised brow. She supposes she can't blame him, being grabbed off of an aircraft carrier to be brought to a mansion must be surprising. Leave it to Denny to splurge on useless things like temporary safe houses.
"Thank you for coming," she continues, "If you'd take a seat inside here, we'll explain everything shortly." She waves a hand toward the room they prepared to lock him into: a small bedroom with a twin bed, a wall of bookcases, and an antique wooden desk. Hopefully nice enough to keep him comfortable and unsuspecting of the fact that he’s going to be used in a shitty cat and mouse game for arrogant CIA operatives.
"Right, right, thanks," Dr. Grace nods, striding inside the room easily. Suzanne follows him inside, curious to watch the man just accept this predicament like it's nothing.
"This room is nicer than the one I have on the Vat! It's actually got windows!" Dr. Grace cheers, darting over to the tall window just above the desk to look out at the midnight horizon. "Even with being on the Vat for so long, I don't think I'll ever get bored of seeing the ocean. It's like every where I turn, I'm seeing a brand new sea."
"I'm glad you enjoy the view," Suzanne says almost genuinely. It's not often she gets to engage so conversationally with her captives, especially not one so painfully earnest. It makes the painful tug in her stomach grow even tighter. "Get comfortable, we're waiting on one more person to join us, and then we'll explain what happens next."
Dr. Grace turns from the window to look at her again. His blue eyes look even bluer from the moonlight in the window, which makes his curious study of her face feel even more intense. His glasses are still crooked where they sit on his nose, just low enough for him to look over the edges at her.
For a moment, Suzanne wonders if Dr. Grace has finally figured out what's really happening, that he'll finally realize that he's actually not as safe here as he thought. But then he smiles and gives her a tiny salute.
"Aye-aye,” he cheers, “I'll just be here."
God help him. Suzanne sucks in a breath, gives a short nod with a smile, and steps out of the room, tugging the door closed behind her and quietly locking it. She presses her forehead against the door for quiet a moment, feeling dual sense of relief that her capture of Dr. Grace went well, and fear for what it means next.
It's just a few moments later that Denny comes striding into the mansion with his own armed escort, “Suzanne!”
So much for a quiet moment of reflection.
“You don’t have to yell, I’m right here,” she grouches. He raises a brow at her as she comes to meet him at the door, looking a bit too pleased for himself.
"Where is my bait?" he asks with a shark-like smile, adjusting his suit cuffs.
For a moment, Suzanne almost doesn't want to tell him. She doesn't want Denny to involve the poor man in whatever sick plans he's concocted to lure in, capture and probably torture Six to death with. Even after all of that time spent digging into the man’s life, even after all that time traveling and assembling a team to go to Malaysia, even after the stress of sneaking onto a Chinese aircraft carrier to kidnap someone, this is her last chance to try and stop this bull shit operation.
“Denny, I still—”
"The bedroom down that hall," a guard beside her, Elias if she remembers correctly, tilts his head in the direction of the bedroom, "Idiot has no clue what he's just walked into."
“Perfect,” Denny claps his hands in excitement beside her, quickly rushing past to head down the hall and into the bedroom. She rushes right after him, but not without glaring at Elias as she passes him. The dickhead pays her absolutely no mind, but he’ll regret stealing her chance to make things right. If she survives this bullshit operation, she swears to make his life a living hell after all this is over.
With a flick of his wrist, Denny unlocks the bedroom door and swings the door open, welcoming himself inside. Suzanne enters the room right on his heels, hearing two guards take up post just outside the bedroom as she closes the door behind her.
Here we go. She sighs, clasping her hands in front of her as she watches Denny approach Dr. Grace, who has taken a seat at the desk since she left.
“Well now, look what we have here,” Denny almost purrs as he strides further into the room, adjusting his glasses like a douche as he goes. He tilts his head down at Dr. Grace like he’s looking at a particularly interesting bug sitting in the shadow of his hovering oxford. “I can definitely see a family resemblance.”
Dr. Grace blinks at the comment, his eyebrows pinching up in surprise and then down in confusion in quick succession. Suzanne feels sick as she watches the man realize that he is, in fact, not in the hands of allies. He looks at her, to Denny, back to her, and nods his head once.
“Ah,” Dr. Grace says lamely, almost as if he’s unimpressed. “Stratt didn’t plan this.”
“No, I have no idea who that is,” Denny steps even closer to Dr. Grace, so close that the poor man is forced to tilt his head back to maintain eye contact with Denny. “Who I do want to know about is Sierra Six. Tell me what you know about him.”
“Sorry— Sierra Mist?” Dr. Grace squints in even deeper confusion. “Like… like the soda?”
“No,” Denny snaps, “Sierra Six, otherwise known as Courtland Gentry, your older brother. I want to know about him.”
At the mention of Six’s name, Dr. Grace’s face completely drops. His eyebrows lose their pinched confusion, his searching gaze goes cold, and his nervous body language just— stills. His overall scruffiness shape shifts to seem less like softness and more like hackles rising. It’s so sudden that Suzanne shuffles in place, tucking a strand behind her ear just to have something to do with her hands.
“My brother,” Dr. Grace begins after a long, tense moment of silence and staring blankly at Denny. His voice is quiet and strained, like he’s trying a bit too hard to keep himself calm. “Died in prison years ago.”
Denny’s eyes bounce between Dr. Grace’s, then a smirk slowly curling on his face as he stuffs his hands casually into his trouser pockets. “Well I’ll be damned. I think you really believe that.”
“‘Course I do, he was my brother,” Dr. Grace snaps, surprisingly out of character for this previously obedient, docile man. Suzanne suddenly gets the feeling that they are missing something here. A very, very big something. Her gut sinks even further.
“Your brother,” Denny mocks Dr. Grace, “Is an old CIA-trained toy that should’ve been destroyed and disposed of when we had the chance. Now, your dear older brother is nothing but a shoot-on-sight threat to national security and a pain in my ass, and I think you may have some information that could be useful for me.”
“Seems you already know all about this Sierra Six guy, so I’m not sure what information you could possibly think I could have.” Dr. Grace clips back. “But last I checked, my older brother was buried in a Florida penitentiary cemetery because— oh, right, he’s dead. So, forgive me, but I’m not really sure what your business with this Six-man— who you believe is my dead brother— has to do with me.”
"It has everything to do with you, seeing as you're the one thing I've been desperately searching for since Six decided to fuck with me," Denny hisses, leaning down to cage Dr. Grace in with his hands on either arm of the desk chair. "A weakness. An Achilles heel. And turns out, Six has two. How lucky am I to find that out?"
Dr. Grace says nothing at that, his face still completely blank as Denny crowds his space. His hands are laced together in his lap, his fingers blanched white from how hard he's squeezing them together. Holding himself back? Suzanne worries. Is this going to get physical?
"You and your brother will be quite useful to luring Six in," Denny continues, sounding far too amused. "I can't wait to hear Six's reaction when he hears I have his little brother in custody, I’m sure he’ll just come a-running. And if you don’t behave, I'll bring your twin brother in— Colton, was it? A stunt man currently filming in London?"
Dr. Grace is completely still, drawn in tight like a spring. Then he sucks in a quiet breath and slowly relaxes as to coolly reply, "I seriously don't know who you're talking about. This Six character you talk about has nothing to do me, or Colt, or Court, so I'd suggest rechecking the reliability of your sources of intel."
Denny hums in amusement, "My sources are perfectly fine—"
"And another thing," Dr. Grace cuts Denny off smoothly, his voice confident and stern— a teacher who's lost his patience. Suzanne's never seen someone cut Denny off so effectively. "My boss is not going to be happy with you when she finds you. Both of you," he ends with a pointed look at Suzanne.
Denny’s hand shoots up to his chest in faux horror. “Oh! My weakness! Your boss! Whatever will I do?” His voice drops with anger, “I am a high-ranking CIA Chief with some very powerful friends, Mr. Grace. I think you’ll find very little people in this world will outrank me.”
“That’s Dr. Grace to you, and I really don’t think you’ve realized just who you decided to mess with by stealing me away from the Vat.”
“The what?”
"The Vat."
Behind her, past the bedroom door, Suzanne swears she hears a slight, muffled scuffle in the hallway. She turns to stare at the door like she can see through it, focusing hard to listen for the sound again. It could just be the guards switching out, or one of them adjusting their stance, or another guard making rounds through the hallway.
The sound doesn’t happen again so she turns back around, but a sinking feeling of dread hits her like a bullet through the skull, and despite all the logic and reasoning, suddenly she very much regrets not having her gun on her.
"Denny," she calls out quietly, hoping it doesn't sound as shaky as she feels. "Does Six know you have him yet?"
The man doesn’t turn from his staring contest with Dr. Grace to bark a reply, "He will soon enough."
Okay. Okay good. If Six doesn't know about his brother being abducted yet, then that scuffling sound behind her isn't anything to worry about. No one there to do the impossible like kill all their guards right under their noses and corner them in this room with a vengeance. Her heart races harder anyway.
Dr. Grace continues, “That aircraft carrier you lured me off of happens to be the home base for the most important research project in the world— yes, you heard me, the most important research in the entire world,” the man emphasizes slowly.
Right, Suzanne’s feeling of sheer dread triples. Right. Why the fuck else would you have been on that aircraft carrier. Why else would the CIA already have a file on you.
Just who did we fuck with?
As soon as the thought enters her head, her ear twitches at the sound of steady, calm footsteps coming down the hall. She opens her mouth to say something, but Dr. Grace continues.
“And I don’t know if you’ve realized this yet, which if you haven’t you probably should start now, but you just kidnapped the lead scientist for said project, and the woman who’s at the head of this entire operation doesn’t take kindly to delays in progress—”
The footsteps come to a stop just behind the door Suzanne stands in front of. The door pushes open with a quiet creak.
“But you don’t have to take it from me,” Dr. Grace tilts his head toward the door behind Suzanne, “You can ask her yourself.”
Suzanne watches Denny spin in place like a complete idiot to look at the doorway, and his face morphs into surprise. Slowly, very slowly, Suzanne turns around to do the same, coming nearly face to face with a woman. The woman stares at her with a calm gaze, her blue eyes locking with hers. She reads the silent order loud and clear.
Carefully, Suzanne steps to the side to get out of her way.
If Suzanne were someone with absolutely no self-preservation instincts, she’d probably think something stupid like ‘This woman doesn’t look intimidating at all.” But that’s the thing— she does have those instincts, and right now those instincts and her gut feeling are sounding an alarm so loud they're like a Geiger counter in the middle of Chornobyl.
The long, baggy black turtle neck sweater, oversized grey trousers, and pinned up strawberry blonde hair doesn’t exactly scream ‘dangerous’, but she’s quickly learned through Dr. Grace that such displays softness does not mean fiercelessness. This is the woman who snatched Dr. Grace out of thin air. This is the woman who ordered pages upon pages of redactions on CIA documents. This is the woman who made Denny have to use favors to sneak around.
This woman has just walked her way into their overly guarded safe house right under their noses.
This woman is far bigger than her. She’s far bigger than Denny and his stupid fucking op.
But Denny— stupid, stubborn, overzealous Denny couldn’t see just what he decided to fuck with in his hunt for Sierra Six. Can’t see what he just dragged her into.
“Suzanne Brewer. Denny Carmichael,” a soft, almost sweet voice greets.
“Who the hell are you?” Denny barks, giving the woman a slow, judgmental up-down. “Who the hell allowed you in here? Where are my guards?!” he yells, trying to call for people who won’t come.
“My name is Eva Stratt, I’m the director of the Petrova Taskforce,” she replies. “And you’ve stolen my lead scientist.”
Suzanne watches in real time as Denny Carmichael, arrogant asshole extraordinaire, looks a little like he’s just shit himself.
Yeah, they’re screwed. Atomic levels of screwed.
“Petrova Taskforce?” Denny mutters, clearing his throat to try and maintain face. It’s not working. “The space op?”
Eva Stratt takes a step forward into the bedroom, her eyes locked onto Denny. “Yes. As I’m sure you know, Denny Carmichael, the astrophage crisis is a global problem that every nation is racing to solve. We have a lot of work to do in order to figure out a solution to ensure all of humanity doesn’t die alongside our Sun, and I don’t appreciate you causing such useless delays.”
“Sierra Six—” Denny tries uselessly.
“Is not my problem,” Stratt shrugs.
“The man is in possession of some very bad, very dangerous information and this man here could help me trap—”
“I don't care.” Stratt tilts her head to look around to look at Dr. Grace almost lounging in the desk chair behind Denny. “Dr. Grace, if you would join me. We must get back. We’ve delayed for too long.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Dr. Grace huffs, slapping his knees with his hands as he stands up. He side eyes Denny smugly as he strides around the man, an almost fox-like smirk curling on his face as he joins Stratt’s side.
“Next time, please don’t walk off the carrier with CIA operatives,” Stratt trails off with a sigh, turning to leave the room and completely ignoring a fuming Denny. Suzanne is happy just to be a fly on the wall if it means not being included on Eva Stratt’s shit list, and she gets to silently watch as Dr. Grace’s smirk collapses into a small pout.
Dr. Grace huffs, “Maybe if you didn’t train me to be so used to groups of men in tactical gear escorting me wherever you please without question, I wouldn’t accidentally get myself kidnapped.”
“Ryland, when was the last time I requested you without finding you personally?”
Dr. Grace pauses, running a hand through his messy blond hair, “Like… two days ago?”
“When I sent Dr. Lokken to find you for a meeting? Had she shown up in tactical gear?”
“… No.”
“Did she force you to get into an unmarked van off of the Vat?”
“… No.”
“Right. Let’s get going.” Stratt waves a hand for Dr. Grace to leave the bedroom first, which he does without question. She follows after him a step, but she pauses in the doorway and turns back to Denny. “Mr. Carmichael, if you attempt to reach Dr. Grace again, I will have you and your associates wiped off the face of the earth.”
“My benefactor—”
“Does not scare me. I outrank him by miles.” Stratt declares, holding eye contact for a long moment before turning away. As she turns, she locks eyes with Suzanne, “Ms. Brewer.”
And with that, Eva Stratt closes the bedroom door behind her. It’s absolutely silent after the click. Suzanne is so stunned she doesn't know what to do next— breathe, think, or close her mouth? Evidently, its's her brain that turns back on first as a thought patches itself together:
Did that seriously just happen?
Suzanne goes to say something when suddenly footsteps return and the bedroom door flies open again. A blond head peeks around the door, an angry blue gaze locking onto Denny once again.
“And if you go anywhere near Colt,” Dr. Grace hisses, his voice low and quiet in the silence of the room, “You won’t just have to worry about Six.”
And with that the door swings shut again, once again leaving Suzanne in tense silence with a visibly shaking, red in the face Denny Carmichael.
“FUCK!” Denny roars, spinning around the kick the wooden desk chair, which shatters against the opposite bedroom wall. “FUCKING FUCK!”
Suzanne stands there, watching numbly. Feeling a lot like she just dodged both a bullet and a nuclear bomb dropping right on her head. Is she breathing right now? Is the room closing in on her, or is she about to pass out?
“Six you son of a fucking bitch!” Denny continues in the corner of the bedroom, now taking a lost leg of the desk chair to hit the antique desk over and over.
She spins about face, grabs the door knob and makes her way out of the bedroom, not interested in staying for Denny’s temper tantrum.
As she steps into the hall, feeling a little more than shell shocked, she find the rest of the safe house dark, completely empty and disturbingly silent.
She stands there, gazing around where all the guards should be but aren’t with the sounds Denny ragefully destroying the bedroom beside her, and idly thinks,
God, I really fucking hate my job.