Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 36214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 181(@200wpm)___ 145(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36214 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 181(@200wpm)___ 145(@250wpm)___ 121(@300wpm)
Something shifts in my chest. Not attraction. Something quieter and more inconvenient than that.
Mace finds it in four minutes. A service entry three weeks ago. One of our own prospects signed off on it. A prospect named Finn.
The room goes cold.
I look at the name on the screen. Then at the date. Then at Tia, who’s gone very still because she can read a room even when she doesn't know all the players.
"That's your inside man," she says quietly.
"Yeah,” I say.
I pull out my phone. Text Ghost a single word. He reads it, nods once, and leaves the room.
The rest of the night goes fast and ugly in the way these nights always do. But before I pull Mace aside to start running Finn's full history, I stop at the table where Tia’s sitting. She looks up. Her eyes are tired but steady.
"Good work," I say.
It comes out simple. Direct. Like it costs me nothing, even though we both know better.
She doesn't smile or make a joke. She just says, "Don't let it happen again," meaning the dismissal, and looks back at the screens.
I almost smile. I turn away before she can see it.
"Tonight you stay in my room," I say, already heading for the door. "In my bed. I'm not leaving you in a room with one lock and a prospect who's been on a twelve-hour shift."
She doesn't argue. Behind me I hear the scrape of her chair. I look at her as she picks up her napkin and a random potted plant I didn’t notice before.
"Kraken," she says.
I stop.
"The prospect who signed that maintenance log. Is he going to be okay?"
I think about Finn. About what comes next for anyone whose name is on that log.
"No," I say. "He's not."
A beat.
"Okay," she says. Her voice is quiet and she doesn't ask anything else, and that, the way she absorbs it without flinching, without making me explain, is somehow the most unsettling thing she's done all day.
I wait for her in the hallway outside her bedroom door. She comes out a minute later with her napkin folded in her hand and her backpack tucked under her arm.
We walk to my room. The compound is quiet around us. The door closes. The lock clicks.
Tia November is doing something to my control. She sat in my operations room for three hours and made herself necessary.
That's going to be a problem.
9
Tia
His room smells like him.
That's the first thing I notice when the door closes behind us. Leather and something darker underneath it, gun oil maybe, and the faint salt that seems to live in every corner of this compound. It's not a soft smell. It doesn't try to be. It just is what it is, the same way he is what he is. I feel something in my chest settle that I wasn't expecting.
The room is sparse in the way that tells you everything about a person. A large bed with dark sheets pulled tight, military corners. A heavy dresser. A desk buried under papers and what looks like three different versions of the same map. No pictures. No color. Nothing on the walls except a single hook where his cut hangs when he takes it off, which I realize he hasn't done yet. He's still in full armor in his own room and I'm not sure he notices.
"I should change," I say.
"Bathroom's through there." He nods toward a door I hadn't seen. "I'll wait out here."
I take my backpack and go. The bathroom is small and plain and has exactly one concession to comfort, a bar of soap that smells like cedar. I change into my sleep shirt, the thin cotton one with the tiny pineapples, and my soft shorts, and I look at myself in the mirror for a moment. Smudged. Tired. Still a little wired from the noise and the locked room and the way he said good work like it cost him something.
I look like someone the night happened to.
I also look, and this is embarrassing to notice, like someone who’s about to sleep in Reef Ryder's bed.
I go back out. He's sitting on the edge of the desk with his arms crossed, still in the cut, and he looks up when I come in and something moves across his face and then doesn't.
"Bed," he says. He pushes off the desk and reaches up to pull the cut from his shoulders, hanging it on the hook in one practiced motion. Then the jeans. He doesn't make anything of it, just strips down to a black t-shirt and dark boxers the way you do when you've shared space with people your whole life and stopped thinking about it.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
I get into bed. The sheets are cool and tight and smell like the rest of the room, like him, and I pull them up to my chest and look at the ceiling while he turns off the overhead light and leaves the small lamp on the desk burning low.