Collateral Legacy Trilogy, 3
Storm Reed doesn’t do disasters, or anyone taking the piss out of her name. She prevents them.
As Head of HR and Internal Compliance for Scout Drilling, Storm is the one sent in when things are being buried, people are lying, and the truth is dangerous. So, when Aquila Station—Scout’s most valuable Arctic asset—starts bleeding data, personnel, and secrets, Storm is activated to shut it down.
What she doesn’t expect is Cole Reardon.
A former military operator turned private security consultant, Cole was embedded to investigate Aquila from the shadows—until someone tried to silence him. Now trapped in a frozen station crawling with sabotage, corporate betrayal, and a conspiracy big enough to level the ice shelf beneath their feet, Storm and Cole are forced into an uneasy alliance.
The pressure is relentless. The danger is escalating. And the attraction between them burns hotter than the Arctic storm closing in.
If they fail, Aquila falls.
If they trust the wrong person, they die.
And if they give in to each other, there may be no turning back.
Some storms are survived. Others change everything.
Excerpt:
The chopper settled onto the pad, blades whipping snow into tight spirals. The door opened.
And she stepped out.
Not a man. Not a clipboard carrier in a trench coat. Not someone who’d wilt at the first fuel leak.
This woman had steel in her spine.
Her boots hit the tarmac with a sharp, decisive sound. Dark thermal pants tucked into snow-rated tactical boots. A streamlined, regulation-issue coat with a Scout Drilling logo on the arm. Her black hair was cut into a sharp bob that would be sleek if the wind ever stopped trying to murder it.
And her eyes—cool, bright blue—swept the outpost like she already knew what was broken.
They stood ten paces apart, neither moving. Opposite ends of a chessboard.
Cole spoke first.
“Let me guess,” he said, voice low and roughened by cold and long nights. “You’re HR.”
One eyebrow lifted. Her mouth twitched, just barely. “And you’re the contractor who stopped submitting reports two days ago.”
“Well,” he shrugged, “figured I’d wait for someone who could read them.”
She closed the distance with precise steps. “Storm Reed. Director of HR Compliance. Field-deployed.”
He didn’t offer a hand. Just nodded once. “Cole Reardon. On-site disappointment.”
The corner of her mouth curved. “I was told you’d be charming.”
“I was told you weren’t coming.” He eyed her. “Guess someone drew the short straw.”
She tilted her head, studying him. “No straw. I volunteered.”
That gave him pause.
He’d expected polished detachment. Someone sent to slap forms on desks and leave. Instead, there was weight to her—quiet, deliberate. The kind that came from knowing which battles mattered.
“You always open with sarcasm?” he asked.
“Only when I’m deciding if someone’s an asset or a liability.”
Wind lashed snow across the tarmac. Tower lights cut through the gray. Behind them, the site loomed—twelve buildings, a mobile drill tower, a maintenance rig. Silent. Watchful.
“Where’s command?” she asked.
He turned and started walking. “This way. You’ll want gloves.”
“I’m good.”
“You’ll lose a finger.”
“I don’t need all ten to write a report.”
He barked a quiet laugh. “You’re not what I expected.”
“You expected a bureaucrat.”
“I expected someone I could ignore.”
She didn’t respond.
Inside the ops unit, heat hit like a wall. Cole pulled off his gloves and motioned her toward the U-shaped central console, screens glowing beside two thick logbooks.
She sat, scanning everything in front of her at unsettling speed.
“You log offline redundancies?” she asked, eyes still on the screens.
“I log anything that smells wrong.”
“That’s a long list.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Her gaze snapped up. She leaned in. “Then start talking.”
Cole studied her—clean lines, steady posture, no wasted motion. He knew who she was. Reed’s sister. One of the owners. The family had a reputation: tight ship, serious money, and an almost inconvenient commitment to safety.
“All right, Reed,” he said. “This place is wrong. People are scared. Inventory’s off. Manifests don’t match. Someone tried to overwrite the internal server last week.”
“And you didn’t report it?”
“I did. Twice. Got a receipt for my service file. Then silence.”
“So, now you’re trusting me.”
He crossed his arms. “Didn’t say that. Just ran out of better options.”
She nodded once. “We start with shift schedules and chain of custody on the sealed crates.”
He looked at her—really looked—and something shifted. Not attraction. Not yet. Something closer to alignment.
“You actually came to fix this.”
“This site is tied to Scout Drilling,” she said calmly. “We may not own it, but our name is embedded here. I came to find the rot and cut it out.”
And for the first time since landing in this frozen hellscape, Cole Reardon felt something dangerously close to hope.
Or trouble.
Either way—she’d just walked straight into it.
Chapter Two
An operational Arctic base like Aquila Station—even between rotations—should’ve been loud. Engines whining. Boots ringing against steel. Radio chatter snapping through the air.
Instead, it was still.
Unnaturally so.
A few crew members lingered near the fuel hub. One mechanic tightened bolts beneath a supply drone. No one moved with purpose. No one moved like they had a place to be, and things to do.
Her manifest listed eighteen active personnel.
She’d seen four.
Storm filed the thought away like a live wire and kept moving.
A rotating schedule wasn’t unusual this far north, but transitions were normally precise. Coordinated. This wasn’t that. This was absence pretending to be order.
Skeleton crew for diagnostics, the welcome memo had claimed. She didn’t buy it. Not with comms failures. Not with missing staff. And not with Cole Reardon pacing behind her like a loaded weapon.
She hadn’t expected warmth here—not real warmth. Not the kind that came from a six-foot-two, tactical-grade problem with sharp eyes and an instinct for corruption better than anyone back at HQ.
She especially hadn’t expected to feel it under her skin.
The command center hummed softly—servers, heaters, the low industrial thrum under the grates. Wind scraped endlessly across the hull overhead. The entire site felt like a floating graveyard.
Waiting.
Storm sat elbows-deep in falsified equipment logs, the monitor’s blue glow reflecting off her glasses. Her fingers flew—timestamps, badge logs, user IDs. Breadcrumbs.
Behind her, Cole stood too close.
She spoke without looking up. “Two of these personnel signatures were entered from off-site servers.”
He leaned in just behind her shoulder, close enough that she felt him—not touching, but present. She could feel his barely leashed power and unspeakable control.
“Those servers don’t exist,” he said.
She arched a brow. “So, we’re blaming ghosts now?”
“Only if your ghost knows how to bypass biometrics and loop footage.”
She exhaled through her nose. “Corporate saboteur with a side of hacker.”
“Welcome to the Arctic.”
- Series:
- /series-collateral-legacy-trilogy/
