Chapter 5
Ty
The Vertex lab hummed with the same white noise it had been making since I’d arrived—ventilation systems, computer fans, equipment I still couldn’t identify after three days of staring at it.
I reminded myself I’d wanted to be here. That anything had been better than rotting away in Rocheport with my family smothering me.
But at this point, I think I’d take another gunshot wound over watching Charlotte ignore me for one more hour. At least getting shot had been interesting. This was like watching extremely expensive paint dry while someone pretended you didn’t exist.
I sat at what Alex generously called a security station—really just an old desk he’d had dragged in from storage. He’d positioned it where I could see through the glass walls into the main lab, apologizing for the wobble in the table leg and promising to find me a better chair “soon.”
The desk shook every time I breathed wrong.
The chair had probably last been comfortable during the Clinton administration, its padding compressed to nothing and one armrest held on with duct tape.
At least the sight lines were decent, giving me a clear view of the millions in quantum computing equipment and the team working on the Cascade Protocol countermeasure.
There’d been nothing so far to suggest that the FBI’s data breach might involve this lab or the Cascade Protocol. Nothing suspicious. Nobody tried to sneak in. No subterfuge at all.
Charlotte hunched over her workstation like she had been since she’d received her task to create the stabilizer code three days ago.
Four monitors surrounded her in a semicircle, two keyboards positioned at different angles, papers scattered across every available surface in what looked like chaos but probably made sense to her.
Sticky notes in various colors—pink, yellow, green, blue—climbed up the monitor edges like some kind of administrative ivy.
She worked both keyboards at once, left hand firing off strings of code, while her right navigated a completely different screen.
Like she was playing dueling pianos, except the music was numbers and symbols I couldn’t begin to follow.
I’d seen Rangers juggle comms under fire, but this?
This was sorcery. Probably illegal in at least three states.
Same wrinkled lab coat hung loose on her shoulders. She had a couple more just like it on hooks by her station—identical, equally rumpled—like she spun a wheel each morning and grabbed whichever one fate selected. Fashion roulette, scientist edition.
That bull in a china shop comment? Landed harder than I wanted to admit.
She wasn’t wrong. I was the guy who broke through doors, not the one who built the lock.
My family collected diplomas the way other families collected fridge magnets—Frank with his PhD in history, Leonard molding young minds with math, Annabel catching babies, Bridget arguing cases in court, even Donovan with his way with animals.
And me? The Hughes sibling who barely scraped out of high school, signed on the dotted line, and let the Army pound discipline into me.
Now here I sat, parked in a swivel chair like a watchdog, watching a woman in her twenties solve problems that might as well be written in Martian.
Hell, my brothers and sisters would have a field day with her.
They’d talk algorithms and theories, nod along like they belonged.
She wouldn’t even notice me standing here, except maybe to remind me not to knock something over.
You know, the oversized bull. The bull currently wondering if typing that fast should come with a warning label. Because watching her fingers fly across those keys? Yeah, that wasn’t just impressive—it was distracting as hell.
My phone vibrated against the metal desk, the hollow thing turning it into a damn drum. Ben’s name flashed on the screen.
I grabbed it and stepped into the hall, propping myself against the wall where I could still see into the lab. Charlotte hadn’t looked up once. Both keyboards were still under siege, her fingers a blur.
“Go for Hughes,” I answered.
“How’s the scientist assignment going? Boring as you thought it would be?”
“Living the dream.” I watched her roll her shoulders, quick and impatient, before diving back into the code like it had personally offended her. “I’ve counted the ceiling tiles three times. There’s 247 in the main lab. Thought you’d want to know.”
Ben chuckled. “That bad?”
“Worse. Yesterday, I made friends with a spider in the corner. Named him Fred. He’s got more personality than half the people in this building.”
“Any actual problems? Security concerns?”
“None. No unauthorized access, no weird activity. Just me, Fred, and a bunch of people who type faster than my brain can process.” I switched the phone to my other ear. “How’s the East Coast? At least tell me you’re rappelling off something.”
“Actual threats, actual work. You know, the stuff we’re trained for.” His tone shifted. “Speaking of which, you going to tell Ethan or Logan about this little side project?”
“I’m not exactly storming compounds here, Ben. I’m sitting in a chair while geniuses argue over keystrokes. Trust me, our bosses would laugh me out of the room.”
“You’re supposed to be recovering from a gunshot wound.”
“I am recovered. Mostly.” I rolled my shoulder—tight but functional. “Whether I sit at home or sit here, doesn’t make much difference.”
Ben sighed, the long-suffering kind. “Fine. What about the people? Scientists boring as predicted?”
My eyes locked on Charlotte. She shoved a strand of hair behind her ear. It immediately fell forward again, and she didn’t notice. “Definitely not what I was expecting.”
Ben caught the shift in my tone like a dog catching a scent. “Define not what you were expecting.”
I grinned at the glass wall, watching her mutter something under her breath at the screen. “Let’s just say the head genius isn’t an old guy in tweed. She’s…different.”
“She?”
“Yeah. Dr. Charlotte Gifford. Brilliant. Intense. Mid-twenties.”
“Mid-twenties and head of a world-renowned R her posture said she knew exactly how to get attention.
“Darcy.” I kept my eyes on the report one beat longer than necessary.
“Bored yet?” She perched on the corner of my desk, crossing her legs in slow motion. “All this sitting must be killing someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
“You know what I mean.” She leaned forward, making sure I noticed what she was offering. “Man of action. Probably used to more…exciting assignments than lab security. More dangerous. More physical.”
“It’s fine.”
“You don’t sound convinced.” She glanced toward Charlotte, her expression shifting to something almost pitying. “I should warn you—our ice queen doesn’t do social. Ever. But especially not on Fridays.”
“What’s Friday got to do with anything?”
“Everyone else gets excited for the weekend—making plans, going out, having lives. Charlotte? She hates having to stop working. Honestly, she’d probably sleep here if Alex let her. I think she actually asked once.”
“She asked to sleep in the lab?” That tracked somehow.
“Mmm-hmm. During a big project last year. Alex had to practically force her to go home.” Darcy’s fingers traced along the desk edge, then found my forearm.
“Unlike some of us who know how to have fun. There’s this amazing Italian place downtown.
Tiny, locals only, the kind where the owner’s grandmother still makes the sauce.
I could show you around the city. I know all the best spots. ”
“Rain check.” It wasn’t that Darcy wasn’t attractive, I just…wasn’t interested. Fuck if I knew what that meant.
She tipped her head, amusement a shade cooler. “Your funeral. When you get tired of being invisible to our brilliant queen, you know where to find me.”
After she sauntered away—and it was definitely a saunter, hips swaying more than necessary—I watched as the lab team started taking lunch breaks. Most people grabbed their food and headed to the break room or their offices, probably chatting about weekend plans. Normal people with normal lives.
Charlotte never even looked up from her workstation.
Twenty minutes passed. Then thirty. Everyone else made their way back to their stations. Charlotte hadn’t eaten a thing.
I grabbed my own lunch—sandwich I’d grabbed on my way in this morning—and walked over.
She didn’t acknowledge my approach, completely absorbed in the code streaming across her monitors.
Up close, I could see the complexity of what she was working on, lines and lines of what looked like mathematical equations mixed with programming languages I didn’t recognize.
Symbols that might have been Greek or might have been something she’d invented herself.
“You should eat something,” I said.
No reaction. The lab’s white noise could drown a marching band. I tried again, closer. “Hey, Charlotte.”
Nothing. Her shoulders were tight as wire. She was laser focused on what was in front of her.
I leaned down, just enough to enter her peripheral. Still no reaction. My hand brushed her shoulder. A tap. Barely there. “Food would be—”
She shrieked like I’d dropped a flash-bang.
Her elbow slammed into a mug the size of a paint can. It wobbled, considered its life choices, and emptied itself across her desk with missionary zeal.
Oh fuck.
“No, no, no—” She moved fast, one hand yanking both keyboards into the air, the other snatching a cardigan from the chair back and slamming it down like a sandbag. Pale blue turned brown instantly. Coffee ran for the monitors with malicious intent.
“Shit, I’m sorry—” I grabbed the entire roll of paper towels from the next station.
“What were you thinking?” Her voice shook as much as her hands. “You can’t just sneak up on people! Do you have any idea what could have happened if this reached the equipment? These systems are worth more than—”
“Hey, whoa. I wasn’t sneaking. I said your name,” I offered, already blotting the edge of the brown tide, trying not to make it worse. “Let me help—”
“I’ve got it.” She snatched the paper towels from my hands, her face flushed red from neck to hairline. “I just need… I need space. To work. Without distractions. Without people hovering. Without—”
She gestured and dotted my forearm with coffee constellations.
“I wanted to make sure you eat something,” I said, aiming for gentle. “A blood sugar crash won’t help anything. It’ll just slow you down.”
“Why didn’t you just say that?”
I offered her my best smile. “I did. Multiple times. Starting from when I entered the room.”
“Oh.”
I took the paper towels out of her hands. Time to change the subject. “I know the code looks like a foreign language to somebody like me. It’s amazing that that gibberish is actually life-and-death stuff.”
Her head snapped up. “Gibberish?”
The temperature in the room dropped at least ten degrees. Maybe fifteen. Fuuuuuck. “That’s not what I—”
“Of course not.” She grabbed more towels and crumpled them. “Why would someone like you understand quantum computing?”
Bull in a china shop. I didn’t need the words; I could read marquee messages when they lit across my forehead.
“I’ll leave you to it, Dr. Gifford.” I stepped back, hands up in a show of no more sudden moves around the electronics.
Something flickered—surprise, maybe, or regret; a tiny crack in the armor—but it closed quick. She slid a backup keyboard from a drawer like she’d rehearsed this exact spill drill a dozen times, triaged her desk, and rebuilt her battlefield.
I just got the fuck out.
Back at my station, my chair squeaked again like it wanted to file a complaint.
I stared at entry logs until the columns blurred and tried to convince my rib cage to unclench.
I was here to guard a lab, not impress the person in it.
I’d screwed up day one with the coffee request and doubled down with today’s coffee reenactment.
At this point, if she designed an anti-Ty perimeter, I couldn’t blame her.
My phone buzzed. Text from Ben.
Don’t get shot. Don’t get fired. Don’t fall for the genius.
I did not plan on doing any of the three.