Chapter Fourteen
MIA
The rest of the day disappeared into the Strasbourg records.
The light behind the narrow window of Wolf’s office stayed on above us while Raven and I worked, and we finally stopped close to midnight after the transport account refused to give us anything clean and every reimbursement code had started looking suspicious.
Neither of us could remember which coffee belonged to whom by then.
We left the automated searches running and agreed to pick it apart again in the morning.
I went upstairs tired enough that I barely remembered plugging in my phone before I got into bed.
I woke hard enough that my whole body jerked beneath the blanket, one hand already coming up to wipe water from my eyes before I understood why there was water in my bed.
Another stream struck the wall above my head and splashed across the pillow.
Somewhere near the ceiling, metal rattled with the thin, ugly sound of something that had failed under pressure.
I stared upward.
The sprinkler head in the corner of my room was spraying sideways instead of down, throwing a hard fan of water across the ceiling and directly over the bed.
It hit the wall and desk before catching the open door of my locker, where most of the clothes I had been too tired to put away were now being soaked with impressive efficiency.
For a few seconds I stayed exactly where I was, still half asleep and trying to make the room become normal again through refusal alone.
Then water ran into my ear.
“Fuck.”
I threw the blanket back and got out of bed. My feet landed in cold water that had already spread halfway across the floor.
“Fuck.”
The second one felt more appropriate. I grabbed my phone from the desk before the puddle reached the charging cable, unplugged it and opened the door.
“Bear!”
A door farther down the corridor opened almost immediately.
Jackal appeared first, which felt depressingly predictable.
His hair was a mess, sticking up in every direction, and he wore loose black sweatpants with no shirt.
The healing wound at his side disappeared beneath the waistband, which rode low enough for the familiar USE and ME tattoos over his hip bones to show.
The skin around the injury was still pink enough that Bear had threatened him twice that week for behaving as though getting stabbed had been a scheduling inconvenience.
Jackal squinted at me, then at the water running out beneath my door.
“Why are you wet?”
I pointed into the room. Another burst of water hit the wall.
He leaned around me and took in the bed and spreading puddle. “That looks expensive.”
“Thank you for the assessment.”
Bear’s door opened behind him. He came out wearing a gray t-shirt and shorts, took one look past my shoulder and became fully awake in a way I deeply felt sorry for.
“Sprinkler?”
“My room finally decided it hated me too.”
Bear moved past us and crouched just inside the threshold. He looked at the spray, then the water gathering around the wall outlet and the edge of my desk.
“Everybody keep the hall clear. Raven! West branch shutoff.”
Another door opened.
Raven chose that moment to step out shirtless, which was how I discovered he looked considerably better without a sweatshirt than I had expected.
He was so lean in clothes that I had never thought much about what was underneath them, but his chest was defined and his abs made it obvious that sitting behind six monitors all day had not excused him from whatever training schedule Wolf made the rest of them suffer through.
Raven followed Bear’s line of sight into my room. “Oh dear. That’s bad.”
“Woo! Strong technical analysis from the intelligence division tonight,” Jackal said.
“I just woke up,” Raven muttered.
“West branch,” Bear repeated.
Raven blinked once, seemed to remember he was useful, and disappeared toward the stairs.
I went back into my room and started grabbing anything that had not already surrendered. My notebook was dry. The laptop bag had survived because I had dropped it over the Strasbourg folder when I came upstairs, which accidentally made me look much more responsible than I had been.
Everything else had been less fortunate.
The spray had hit the open locker almost perfectly. I pulled out one shirt, squeezed the hem and watched a stream of water run onto the floor.
“Fucking fantastic.”
Bear appeared beside me and took the laundry bag before I could reach for it.
“Leave it.”
“My clothes are in there,” I replied.
“They’re wet either way.”
“I can see that.”
“Then stop standing under it.”
I moved before he decided to move me himself. Bear dragged the bag into the hallway and pulled my suitcase out even though the fabric along the bottom was soaked through.
Hawk appeared at the far end of the corridor dressed in dark shorts and a long sleeve shirt, his blond hair somehow less destroyed by sleep than everyone else’s. Viper came out behind him, looked at the water spreading across the floor and closed his eyes briefly.
“Why?” he asked with a sigh.
Nobody answered.
Viper went back into his room.
I watched the door shut. “Is he going back to sleep?”
Hawk looked toward it. “Probably getting shoes.”
The door opened again. Viper stepped out wearing boots.
“Mia finally broke the building,” Jackal said.
“I was unconscious.”
“No witnesses.”
By then, Raven had reached the shutoff. The pressure dropped in stages, the hard spray weakening into a heavy stream before settling into an aggressive drip from the sprinkler head and the ceiling around it.
Water still tapped against the desk and mattress, but the room no longer looked like someone had turned a hose on it.
Bear stood beneath the damaged fitting with both hands on his hips.
“Branch fitting probably failed above the head.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Probably in the morning.”
As if offended by his confidence, the sprinkler gave one last pathetic spit onto my pillow. I stared at the bed. The entire mattress was dark with water. My pillow had landed on the floor and absorbed enough additional moisture to qualify as a flotation device.
The door behind us opened again and Wolf stepped into the hallway.
He wore black drawstring pants and a fitted dark shirt, the plain black covering already pulled over the lower half of his face.
His hair was completely loose without the zig-zag headband, dark waves falling around his forehead and ears.
Without boots, a belt or tactical gear, there was less between me and the actual man underneath everything he usually wore.
His eyes went first to the water at my feet, then to Bear.
“What happened?”
“Sprinkler line failed,” Bear said. “Branch is shut. Breaker is off in this room until I open the wall and make sure nothing else got wet.”
Wolf stepped around me and looked inside.
Water dripped from the desk. One corner of the mattress had started sagging under the weight, wet sheets hanging partly onto the floor. The open locker held several shirts plastered together against the metal backing.
“Room’s out,” Bear said. “At least until tomorrow night. Probably longer if the wall’s bad.”
Wolf nodded once.
I folded my arms and immediately regretted it when the soaked sleep shirt pulled tighter against my chest. The pale gray cotton had gone almost transparent under the hallway lights, and cold air moving through the corridor made my nipples tighten beneath it.
Wonderful.
I crossed my arms more deliberately.
Wolf’s attention flicked down. It lasted no more than a second before his eyes returned to my face, but after the kitchen that morning, pretending I had imagined it would have been insulting to both of us.
Bear started moving the rest of my things into the hallway.
Hawk took the plastic bin Raven had brought back upstairs, while Viper lifted the wet suitcase and carried it toward the stairs without commenting on the amount of water dripping from the bottom.
Raven returned with two industrial towels looped over one arm.
I stared at the small disaster now occupying one side of the corridor.
“Thanks guys, but where should I go?”
Raven looked toward the stairs. “Couch?”
Bear shook his head. “Ops floor starts up in a few hours.”
“I can sleep through people working.”
“You complained about training waking you up your second morning here,” Hawk said.
“I had higher standards then,” I snapped back.
Jackal leaned against his doorway. “I wouldn’t use the couch.”
“Why?”
“Because I slept on it in my boots for most of Tuesday.”
Bear looked over. “You also bled on it.”
Jackal frowned. “That was one time.”
Raven stared at the stairs. “I’m washing that couch tomorrow.”
Bear ignored them and pointed toward the opposite end of the hall. “Equipment room gets no heat. Medical stays clear.”
“Garage?” I asked.
Viper came back up the stairs empty-handed and looked at me as though I had suggested sleeping outside the perimeter fence.
“No.”
“Good talk.”
“My floor?” Hawk said. “If you need somewhere dry.”
I looked at his door, then at the narrow strip of floor visible inside. He’d definitely have to step over me to leave.
“Your room is not an option,” Bear told Jackal before he could volunteer it.
Jackal looked offended. “I wasn’t offering. She’d leave with tetanus.”
“From what?” I asked.
He considered his room through the open door. “Honestly, I don’t know. That’s why I’m warning you.”
A tired laugh escaped me before I could stop it.
The discussion continued for another minute because every practical solution inside the compound came with a flaw none of them had cared about until a seventh person needed somewhere to sleep.
The couch put me directly in the middle of the operations floor before dawn, while the equipment room had no overnight heat.
Hawk’s floor technically worked, though even he admitted the gap between his bed and locker would barely fit me without turning the doorway into an obstacle course.