Chapter 16
Six months ago:
Mercury: We’re digitizing the historical collection at the library. Some patrons are upset.
Binary: Why? Digital preservation is more reliable than paper.
Binary: The information content is identical.
Mercury: But the experience isn’t. The paper someone touched. The ink that faded a certain way. Some things matter because of how they exist, not just what they say.
Binary: That’s inefficient sentiment.
Mercury: That’s human, Binary. We’re inefficient by design.
Lincoln had been staring at the same line of code for seventeen minutes.
He knew it was seventeen because his system clock occupied the upper right corner of his primary monitor, and he’d been tracking the minutes since he’d woken at dawn, watched Morgan sleep for longer than he’d admit, and finally made himself leave the guest room.
The command center hummed around him—six monitors cycling through their usual displays, servers running their quiet protocols, everything functioning exactly as designed. Normal. Routine.
Nothing felt normal.
His mind kept sliding away from the data streams on his monitors, away from the cross-referencing algorithms his systems were still churning through. Instead, it circled back to the same set of images, replaying them with a precision that rivaled Morgan’s own memory.
The way she’d looked at him last night. The weight of her body against his. The sound she’d made when—
He shook his head, irritated with himself. His brain was supposed to be an asset, not a distraction.
He’d been wrong. That was the variable he’d miscalculated so badly it should have been embarrassing.
He’d spent two days convinced she was pulling away because of the kiss at the cliff.
Two days of rehearsing apologies and preparing for rejection.
Two days of watching her push herself to exhaustion and assuming it was about him.
It hadn’t been about him at all.
I’m scared. Of something else. Something I can’t explain.
She’d said it like the words cost her something. And then she’d kissed him, and everything after that had become sensation and closeness and the overwhelming relief of not being alone.
She’d looked at him like she actually saw him. Not the awkward parts she had to tolerate, not the social deficits she had to navigate around—all of it. The whole architecture of who he was. And instead of finding it strange or off-putting, she’d pulled him closer.
He hadn’t had to translate himself. Hadn’t spent the whole time running parallel processes, trying to decode her expressions while simultaneously performing the appropriate responses. He’d just been present. With her.
That had never happened before.
An alert flashed across his secondary monitor. Lincoln leaned forward, his body shifting into operational mode before his conscious mind fully registered the threat.
Someone was probing his systems.
Not sophisticated enough to be government. Too targeted to be random. The intrusion attempts were focused on his communication logs, his recent network activity—the sectors where evidence of Morgan’s presence might have left traces.
Randall’s people. Looking for breadcrumbs.
Lincoln’s fingers flew across the keyboard. He’d anticipated this—had been running countermeasures since the night of the rescue—but seeing it happen in real time sharpened his focus to a knife’s edge. They were hunting her. Actively, persistently hunting her.
He erased traces before they could be cataloged. Laid false trails that would lead their searches into dead ends. Rerouted their probing algorithms into honeypots designed to waste their time and resources. Every move they made, he was three steps ahead.
This was what he’d built himself for. Data warfare. Digital chess. The satisfaction of outmaneuvering an opponent who didn’t know they were already beaten.
But even as he worked, part of his mind was running a parallel search. Hunting the hunter.
“Gary. Status on the Randall trace.”
“Still running. Results remain underwhelming.” A pause. “The name ‘Randall’ doesn’t appear in any criminal networks you’ve mapped. Facial recognition from the warehouse footage failed—image quality was insufficient. No digital footprint corresponds to the profile Morgan described.”
“Expand the search parameters. Cross-reference with known federal breach operations. Coordinated attacks on multiple agencies.”
“Already done. Twice.” Another pause, longer than strictly necessary. “Either ‘Randall’ is an alias wrapped in more aliases, or this individual has professional-grade invisibility. Someone with significant resources has made him very difficult to find.”
Professional-grade invisible. Lincoln’s hands stilled on the keyboard.
He was used to finding people—used to the certainty that enough data would always reveal the pattern.
The fact that Randall had stayed hidden suggested connections, expertise, and infrastructure that went far beyond a simple criminal operation.
Not some amateur. Something bigger. Something with reach.
His tertiary monitor flickered with another batch of messages. Lincoln glanced at the senders, and his stomach dropped.
Treasury. FBI. Homeland. His NSA back channel. All marked urgent. All asking variations of the same question they’d been asking for days.
Can you help us locate the fire sale suspect?
He’d been deflecting them. Responding with vague assurances—still analyzing the attack vectors, will advise if I find anything useful—while providing nothing of substance.
It was a delicate game. Too helpful and they’d expect results.
Too evasive and they’d wonder why. He’d spent a decade building these relationships on a foundation of reliable intel.
Now he was feeding them empty calories and hoping they wouldn’t notice the difference.
She was being hunted from both directions. Randall wanted his asset back. The government wanted their scapegoat. And Lincoln was the only thing standing between her and both of them.
He switched to his dark web monitoring channels. The chatter there was illuminating.
Asset still missing. All traces cold.
Librarian vanished. Boss is not happy.
Someone helped her. Looking for the connection.
Let them look. Let Randall stew in frustration while his investment stayed hidden behind firewalls and encryption and a man who’d decided to stop playing by the rules.
But Lincoln knew it couldn’t last. Eventually, someone would find a thread. Eventually, the noose would tighten.
They had to move faster.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Lincoln glanced up as Morgan appeared in the doorway, her hair still damp from a shower, wearing one of the soft sweaters he’d ordered. She looked pale. The skin beneath her eyes had darkened to bruises.
“Morning,” she said from the doorway.
Lincoln turned. She was hovering at the threshold like she wasn’t sure of her welcome, and something about that made his chest ache. After last night, after everything—she still wasn’t sure.
“Hi.” The word came out softer than he intended.
A small smile flickered across her face. Not much, but real. “Hi.”
For a moment, neither of them moved. The air felt different between them now—charged with the memory of skin against skin, of her breath against his neck, of falling asleep tangled together.
Lincoln wanted to say something about it.
Wanted to acknowledge that things had changed, that she’d changed them, that he was grateful.
But the words wouldn’t organize themselves into anything coherent.
Morgan crossed to her workstation and sank into the chair. “I couldn’t sleep anymore. Figured I might as well be useful.”
The moment passed. Whatever needed to be said would have to wait; they both understood that without discussing it. There was too much work, too much danger, too many puzzle pieces still scattered across Lincoln’s servers. The personal would have to fit itself around the urgent.
They fell into their rhythm.
Lincoln kept his attention split between his own screens and Morgan in his peripheral vision.
She recited coordinates in that flat, mechanical voice she’d developed—the one that stripped the emotion from the data so she could get through it.
He cross-referenced, mapped, searched for patterns that refused to emerge.
But his gaze kept drifting back to her.
The way she rubbed her temples every few minutes, fingers pressing hard against skin. The moments when she went still and distant, her eyes fixed on nothing, her lips moving in silent words. Her fingers tapping that iambic rhythm against her thigh—da-DUM, da-DUM—faster than usual, almost frantic.
She was sad. He was fairly certain she was sad. But he was bad at reading emotions, and the usual indicators weren’t resolving into anything actionable.
Was she regretting last night? Regretting him?
The thought made his lungs feel too small. He wanted to ask, wanted to understand, but he didn’t know how to phrase the question without making things worse. His brain supplied seventeen possible approaches, and his experience rejected all of them.
So he stayed quiet. Kept working. Watched her and felt increasingly helpless.
By midafternoon, he’d stopped pretending to focus on his own screens.
He just watched her—the way she repeated a coordinate string twice without seeming to notice, the visible flinch when she caught herself, the trembling hands she kept pressing flat against her thighs.
Whatever was happening inside her head, she wasn’t ready to tell him.
He couldn’t fix what he didn’t understand. But he could do something else.
“It’s Saturday,” he said.
Morgan looked up, startled by the break in their rhythm. “What?”
“Saturday. I go into town on Saturdays. The Eagle’s Nest—it’s Oak Creek’s local bar. My cousins, Theo, some other friends, sometimes. We meet there on Saturdays.” He turned his chair to face her fully. “I think we should go.”
She stiffened. “Lincoln, I can’t just—”
“You met Bear and Derek and Theo already, although I don’t know if you remember them.
They’ve been asking about you almost every day since the rescue.
” He kept his voice matter-of-fact. Stating data, not making a plea.
“They want to know how you’re doing. They want to meet you properly, when you’re not unconscious in the back of a vehicle. ”
Something flickered in her expression. Surprise, maybe. That people she’d never really met had been thinking about her.
“Their partners will be there too,” he continued. “Joy is Bear’s fiancée. Eva is Theo’s wife. Derek is newly married to Becky for the second time.”
“The second time?”
“It’s a long story. But I know they want to meet you.”
“Why would they want to meet me? They don’t even know me.”
“They know you matter to me.” The words came out before he could filter them. He let them stand. “That’s enough for them.”
Morgan was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers had stilled on her thigh, the iambic rhythm finally interrupted.
“What if someone recognizes me? My face isn’t public yet, but—”
“Oak Creek is small. The Eagle’s Nest is smaller.
And believe it or not, there are bigger secrets than you being kept in this town.
Theo Lindstrom is technically not even alive when it comes to the government.
” He paused. “These are people I trust with my life. I trusted them with yours when I called them to help get you out of that warehouse.”
She looked at him. Really looked, searching his face for something he couldn’t name. “What about the work?”
“You need a break,” he said quietly. “We both do. The data will still be here tomorrow.”
The silence stretched. Lincoln waited, resisting the urge to add more arguments, more logic, more persuasion. He’d made his case. The rest was up to her. He couldn’t force her.
“Okay,” Morgan said finally. Her voice was small, uncertain. “Okay. I’ll come.”