Updated Apr 20, 2026 • ~10 min read
Chapter 12: Extraction
Riot
The perimeter alarm goes off at three in the morning on what should have been their last day in Montana—Marcus finally cleared them for transport, they were supposed to leave at dawn—and Riot knows before he even checks the security feed that Viktor found them and everything’s about to go to hell.
“Nadia.” He shakes her awake with one hand while reaching for his weapon with the other, his voice pitched low and urgent. “Multiple hostiles approaching from the north. We have maybe twenty minutes before they’re in range. I need you to pack essentials—laptop, charger, whatever you can’t replace. Two minutes, then we move.”
She’s awake instantly, years of survival instinct kicking in, and Riot watches her scramble out of bed and start throwing things into her go-bag with shaking hands while he does a final check of his weapons and coordinates their exit strategy with Marcus over the encrypted line.
“How many?” Nadia asks, her voice steadier than her hands.
“Five heat signatures. Professional team, based on their approach pattern and equipment.” Riot’s already running through scenarios, calculating odds, planning for the dozen ways this could go wrong. “They’re not trying to be stealthy, which means they’re confident they can take us even if we know they’re coming.”
“What’s the play?”
“We disappear before they get here. There’s a secondary vehicle hidden half a mile out—we go now, we can be gone before they breach the cabin.” He turns to look at her, needs her to understand the stakes. “But it’s going to be tight. And if they spot us during the escape, it becomes a running firefight through the woods.”
“Better than waiting here to die.” Nadia zips her bag closed with shaking hands. “Let’s go.”
They move fast and quiet through the pre-dawn darkness, Riot leading with his weapon raised and Nadia right behind him, trusting him to navigate while she focuses on not tripping over roots and giving away their position. They’re maybe two hundred yards from the cabin when Riot hears it—the distinctive sound of a safety being switched off, followed by a voice speaking Russian in the darkness behind them.
“Fuck,” Riot breathes, already pivoting and returning fire before the sentence is complete, his shots precise and deadly despite the limited visibility. “Run! Now!”
Nadia doesn’t question it, just takes off toward the hidden vehicle while Riot provides cover, dropping one attacker and then another before a bullet catches him in the left shoulder with enough force to spin him partially around.
The pain is white-hot and immediate, but Riot’s been shot before and he knows how to compartmentalize, how to shove the agony into a box and deal with the immediate threat first. He drops two more hostiles with his right hand while his left arm hangs useless and screaming, and then he’s running after Nadia because staying means dying and he’s not done protecting her yet.
She’s at the vehicle when he reaches her, her face pale in the moonlight, and her eyes go wide when she sees the blood soaking through his tactical shirt. “You’re hit—”
“I’m fine. Get in.” He practically shoves her into the passenger seat, slides behind the wheel with his right hand because his left is currently on fire and mostly non-functional. “Buckle up. This is going to be rough.”
He drives one-handed down the mountain access road, each turn sending fresh agony through his shoulder, but he keeps the vehicle steady through sheer force of will and years of training that taught him how to function through worse. Behind them, he can see muzzle flashes as the remaining attackers realize they’ve lost their targets and try for distance shots, but Riot’s already putting space between them and the bullets go wide.
“You’re bleeding everywhere,” Nadia says, her voice shaking as she presses what looks like her t-shirt against his shoulder. “We need to get you to a hospital—”
“No hospitals. Too easy to track.” He grits his teeth against a particularly vicious wave of pain. “There’s a secondary safe house. Alaska. Marcus has coordinates. We get there, you’re going to have to remove the bullet.”
“I’m WHAT?”
“Remove the bullet. I’ll talk you through it.” He risks a glance at her, sees the terror in her expression. “I know it’s scary, but I trust you to do this, Nadia. You’re the strongest person I know. You can handle it.”
She looks like she wants to argue, wants to insist there has to be another option, but instead she just presses harder against his shoulder and says in a voice that’s trying very hard to be steady: “Don’t you dare die on me, Tobias Hawke. We have unfinished business, and I refuse to let Viktor win by killing you.”
“Not planning to die,” Riot says, which is maybe a lie given how much blood he’s currently losing, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to leave Nadia alone to face Viktor without him. “You’re stuck with me, remember? For better or worse.”
“We’re not married.”
“Yet,” he says, the word slipping out before he can stop it, and he sees something complicated flash across Nadia’s expression before she looks away.
They don’t speak for the rest of the drive to the airfield, where Marcus has a plane waiting and a pilot who doesn’t ask questions about the blood or the weapons or the fact that Riot’s currently going into shock. By the time they’re airborne and Alaska-bound, Riot’s vision is starting to grey at the edges and his shoulder feels like someone’s pressing a hot iron directly into the joint, but he forces himself to stay conscious because if he passes out, Nadia’s going to panic, and he needs her focused for what comes next.
“Stay with me,” Nadia’s saying, her hands on his face, her voice pitched high with fear. “Riot, look at me. Stay awake. We’re almost there.”
“I’m okay,” he manages, even though he’s very much not okay. “Just need you to do exactly what I tell you when we land. Can you do that?”
“Yes. Anything. Just don’t die.”
“Not dying,” Riot says again, and makes himself believe it because the alternative is leaving Nadia alone, and that’s not something he’s willing to accept.
Not now.
Not ever.
🔥
The Alaska safe house is even more remote than Montana—a cabin so deep in the wilderness that Riot’s pretty sure they could scream for a week and nobody would hear them—and by the time they arrive, he’s barely conscious and leaning heavily against Nadia while she helps him stumble from the vehicle to the door.
“Medical kit,” he’s saying, his voice slurred with pain and blood loss, and Nadia finds it tucked in the bathroom cabinet exactly where he said it would be—a full field surgical setup that looks terrifyingly professional and makes her stomach clench with the reality of what she’s about to have to do. “Kitchen table. Better light.”
She helps him onto the table, watches him grit his teeth as he pulls off his blood-soaked tactical shirt with his good arm, and tries very hard not to panic at the sight of the bullet wound in his shoulder—red and angry and still bleeding despite the makeshift pressure bandage she applied in the car.
“Talk me through this,” Nadia says, her hands already shaking as she opens the medical kit and finds more instruments than she knows what to do with. “Step by step. What do I do first?”
Riot walks her through it in a voice that stays remarkably steady even when she knows every word must cost him—how to sterilize the forceps and scalpel, how to clean the wound with saline solution, how to feel for the bullet with gentle pressure before attempting extraction. His instructions are clear and precise, the product of years of field medicine training, but nothing prepares Nadia for the reality of cutting into his flesh while he’s conscious and watching her with fevered eyes.
“I can’t,” she whispers when the forceps slip for the third time and fresh blood wells up around her shaking hands. “Riot, I can’t do this, I’m hurting you—”
“You’re saving me,” he grits out through clenched teeth, his right hand white-knuckled where it’s gripping the edge of the table. “I trust you. Just keep going.”
She does, forcing herself to focus past the tears streaming down her face and the way her hands won’t stop trembling, and when the forceps finally close around something solid deep in his shoulder, she nearly sobs with relief. The bullet comes out clean, dropping into the metal dish with a sound that Nadia knows she’ll hear in her nightmares, and then she’s irrigating the wound with saline and packing it with antibiotic-soaked gauze exactly the way Riot instructed.
“Got it,” she manages, her voice breaking on the words. “The bullet’s out. What’s next?”
“Bandage it tight. Monitor for infection.” His voice is getting weaker, eyes starting to flutter closed. “You did good, Nadia. So good.”
“Stay awake.” She cups his face with blood-stained hands, needs him to focus on her instead of the pain. “Riot, look at me. Don’t you dare pass out until I get you to bed and make sure you’re not going to die on me.”
His eyes open, and there’s something soft in his expression despite the agony he must be feeling. “Not dying. Promised you, remember?”
“You better not be lying.” She helps him off the table, half-carries him to the bedroom because he can barely walk, and gets him settled on the bed with extra pillows propped under his injured shoulder. “I’m staying here. Watching you. And if your fever spikes or you start showing signs of infection, I’m dragging you to a hospital whether you like it or not.”
“Stubborn,” Riot murmurs, already drifting toward unconsciousness.
“You love it,” Nadia says without thinking, and watches something complicated flash across his face before sleep finally takes him.
She spends the rest of the night monitoring his breathing and changing cold compresses when his fever spikes, her medical knowledge limited to frantic Google searches on the satellite connection and sheer desperate determination not to lose him. And somewhere between checking his pulse for the dozenth time and pressing her fingers to his too-hot forehead, Nadia realizes with stunning, terrible clarity that she loves him.
Not the casual affection of their friends-with-benefits arrangement, not the lust-driven attraction that got them into bed in the first place—she’s in love with Tobias Hawke in the deep, terrifying, all-consuming way that means losing him would break something in her she’d never be able to fix.
“Fuck,” she whispers into the quiet cabin, pressing her face into her hands because this is exactly what she swore wouldn’t happen, exactly what she spent three weeks protecting herself against. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
But it’s too late to protect herself now, too late to rebuild walls that Riot systematically demolished with his patience and his ridiculous coffee attempts and the way he looks at her like she hung the stars just for him.
She’s in love.
And she has absolutely no idea what to do about it.
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