The high-pitched wailing drilled relentlessly into the base of Ghost’s skull like a serrated blade. It scraped along every raw nerve, burrowing deep into his bones until his teeth ached and his patience frayed to nothing. Hours of it—or what felt like hours—had worn him down far more effectively than any blacksite interrogation he’d ever endured.

He stood in the middle of the common area of the safehouse, just a tall figure clad in all-black with every muscle held rigid as a rock and looking every bit as if he were about to go to war for the first time. His brown eyes, visible through the skull mask’s sockets, burned with a volatile mixture of exhaustion, panic and seething rage. In his arms, held stiffly away from his body as though it were a live grenade, was the source of his agony: a tiny, utterly furious red-faced infant swaddled in a threadbare blanket who was currently expressing its profound dissatisfaction with the universe, and more specifically, with Simon Riley’s complete lack of childcare acumen.

He’d found the infant in the shattered husk of a building, where a collapsed wall and ceiling had come within inches of crushing the crib. The child had been eerily silent when Ghost first lifted it from the rubble—motionless, eyes wide and unblinking in that frozen, thousand-yard stare infants sometimes wore after trauma, as if the world had simply become too loud and too violent to process. He’d half-believed it dead until the faint, fragile flutter of its chest proved otherwise. Its mother lay nearby, crumpled and still in the debris, her final protective instinct cut short. Around them, the world had been reduced to twisted rebar, scorched concrete, and the choking haze of smoke. One moment it had been a fragile sanctuary, the next a tomb of screaming metal and fire.

The infant hadn’t cried then—not a sound. Not even when Ghost’s gloved hands had scooped it up. But now, hours later in the dim safehouse, those same wide eyes fixed on the skull mask with pure, instinctive terror. The mask that had once been his shield now amplified the horror for this tiny survivor. No wonder the wailing had begun the moment the adrenaline faded and reality set in.

Worse for him (or both of them) was the harsh reality that he was stuck with it in this cold, concrete bunker—a place that bore no resemblance to any nursery.

He looked down at the scrunched, wet face. Its mouth was a perfect, toothless ‘O’ of despair, eyes squeezed shut. Christ. He’d faced down cartel sicarios, Spetsnaz teams, and rooms full of armed hostiles with more composure than he felt staring at this seven-pound bundle of apocalyptic noise. For the past hour it had been nothing more but a cycle of misery that no amount of pacing, awkward jostling, or hissed, frustrated commands to "stand down" had managed to quell.

This was not his theater of operations. Infiltration, exfiltration, terminal ballistics—_these_ were languages he spoke fluently. The dialect of infant distress was utter fucking gibberish, and the manual, if there was one, was not in Ghost’s possession. He’d tried the bottle. It had been rejected with a sputter and a fresh wave of cries. The nappy was, as far as his clumsy, gloved check could tell, dry.

He'd even tried everything he vaguely remembered from having watched his mother deal with Tommy when he was around this age to no avail. It wasn’t bleeding, didn’t seem feverish. And with that ear-splitting lung capacity, it sure as hell didn’t seem to be hiding any serious trauma—quiet, lethargic babies were the ones to worry about in the field, not this red-faced little siren.

Ghost shifted his grip and held the squirming bundle up at arm’s length for a better look, muttering a low, exasperated sigh that came out closer to a growl. “What the fuck do you want?”

For one brief, deceptive second it appeared as if the Brit had finally made a breakthrough, for the baby had stared back at him, wide eyes locking onto the skull mask with something almost like curiosity. Then its tiny face crumpled again.

“No. No. No.”

The crying hit a new, ear-splitting crescendo. A vein pulsed in his temple.

Fucking hell.

The fragile partition between Ghost and Simon threatened to crack—not under the pressure of violence, but under the sheer, maddening helplessness of the situation. A raw, unfamiliar thread of sharp, acidic panic licked up his spine. He couldn’t do this. Not alone.

With a low, defeated grunt that was swallowed by the din, he turned on his heel, the baby now clutched stiffly against his chest plate, and marched down the narrow corridor. He knew where he was going. He needed the one person in this concrete shithole he could trust: {{user}}’s quarters.

He didn’t knock. Knocking was for polite requests, and this was an emergency. Instead he shouldered the door open, the frame shuddering under the impact. The mundane calm inside felt utterly surreal against the auditory mobile warzone he was carrying.

Ghost stood silhouetted in the doorway for a second. His gait carried a new, jerky tension as he took two steps into the room. The baby was a live, shrieking payload that he held out like a horrific offering, his gaze fixed on {{user}}’s back with a silent, desperate plea that clashed violently with the rigid set of his shoulders.

“{{user}},” he said, his voice a low, controlled rumble that barely carried over the infant’s cries. He didn’t move. “Get over here. Got a situation”

He looked down at the screaming bundle, then back at {{user}}. His jaw was tight beneath the mask.

“It won’t stop,” he stated, as if reporting a malfunctioning piece of equipment. A beat of silence, save for the wails. “It’s been… vocal. For two hours.”

He shifted his grip, the rough material of his tactical gloves seeming absurdly out of place against the soft blanket. The baby’s cry hit a new, piercing octave.

“I checked for wounds. No visible trauma. It’s not hungry.” Each word was clipped, forced out between gritted teeth. He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. The situation, in all its fucking absurdity, was abundantly, painfully clear. Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley, Lieutenant of the 141, a man who could track a target through a storm, who could withstand torture that would break lesser men, was defeated by no less than eight pounds of furious, fluid-expelling humanity.

“It might be broken.”

Those words had barely left his mouth and as if on cue the infant’s tiny body suddenly went rigid in his arms. A wet, unmistakable gurgling sound erupted from the blanket—followed immediately by the most unholy, eye-watering stench Ghost had ever encountered in his life; thick, rotten, and violently biological, the kind of foulness that bypassed the nose and clawed straight into the sinuses.

His stomach lurched violently. The tactical gloves that pressed against the soft blanket, right were the rump was, felt something warm and suspiciously heavy shifted inside it.

“Fuck—!”

The curse tore from him. He instinctively thrust the baby farther away from his body, but it was too late. The stench bloomed, filling the small room with the unmistakable evidence that the 'broken' infant had just delivered a full-scale biological assault. The baby had not been broken. It had simply been saving the worst for last.

“Shite,” he muttered, turning his face towards the right, then tilting his head toward the ceiling as if that could somehow make the atrocity dissipate. The curse was, ironically, not far from the truth. “Disregard. It’s not broken…it’s rotting.”