Chapter 22 #2
Lincoln stood in the empty foyer, listening to the truck’s engine fade down the drive. The security system logged the departure with clinical efficiency. Gate closing. Perimeter secure. Threat assessment: unchanged.
But everything had changed. He’d just lied to a man who’d trusted him. Burned a bridge that had taken years to build. Callum would remember this—not with anger, maybe, but with the kind of disappointed wariness that never fully healed.
The cost of protecting Morgan was adding up.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs. He looked up to find her standing at the landing, her arms wrapped around herself, her face pale in the afternoon light filtering through the windows.
“I heard,” she said. “On the monitor.”
“I know.”
“He gave you a chance to tell the truth.” She descended slowly, each step careful, like she was walking on ice that might crack. “You lied to protect me.”
“Yes.”
“Your friends lied too. All of them. Bear, Joy, everyone.” She reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped, close enough to touch but holding herself apart. “They covered for you without even being asked.”
“That’s what family does.”
She flinched at the word. Family. The thing she’d never had. The thing she’d spent her whole life watching from the outside.
Before either of them could speak, his secure channel pinged.
Lincoln crossed to the command center, Morgan following. Another message had come in from the Treasury Department, from a contact he’d worked with for years.
Another someone who’d trusted him the way Callum trusted him.
He opened it.
Bollinger—We know you have resources we don’t. Morgan Reece remains a priority. Your continued lack of results is being noted. We expect a substantive update within 48 hours.
Being noted.
Lincoln stared at the words. Professional language wrapped around a threat.
They were building a file on him now—documenting his lack of cooperation, preparing to revoke the access he’d spent a decade earning.
Forty-eight hours, and he’d have to produce something useful or become a liability instead of an asset.
“What does it say?” Morgan had moved to stand beside him.
He tilted the screen toward her. Watched her read it, watched the color drain from her face.
“They’re giving you an ultimatum. They’re suspicious of you.”
“Statistically likely.” He closed the message. Opened the next one from this morning that he’d been avoiding—FBI, similar tone. Then Homeland. Then his NSA back channel, the most pointed of all. Your expertise has always been reliable. We’d hate to question that reliability now.
The walls weren’t just closing in. They were crushing him.
Morgan’s hand found his arm. “This is bad.”
He pulled up his monitoring dashboard. Callum’s visit, logged and analyzed. The federal messages, multiplying like a virus. And somewhere out there was a facial recognition search, still running, still hunting for the match that would end everything.
Once Randall knew who Lincoln was, this place wouldn’t be safe for them. Nowhere in Oak Creek would. It was only a matter of time.
It was time to discuss the contingency plan.
It had been running in his head for days, but he’d never said it out loud. Voicing it meant accepting that everything he’d built might not be enough.
“I have money,” he said. “Millions, accumulated over years. Enough to disappear. Enough for both of us.” The words came out steady, though something was cracking open in his chest. “There are countries without extradition. I know which ones are viable. I know how to get there clean—no trail, no records, identities solid enough to last decades.”
Morgan’s face had gone still. Frozen. “Lincoln—”
“If we can’t crack this. If we can’t decode what’s in your head, can’t find Randall, can’t clear your name before everything closes in—” He held her gaze, letting her see what this cost him to say. “Then I take you somewhere they’ll never find you. We go together.”
“But your life is here. Your family. This house.” Her voice came out barely above a whisper. “You’d have to walk away from everything.”
“I know.”
“You’d have to become someone else. Give up thirty years of being Lincoln Bollinger.”
“I know.” He reached for her hand, and she let him take it—her fingers ice-cold, trembling.
“Then how can you even consider it?”
“Because I’ve also calculated what it would cost to lose you.” He lifted her hand, pressed it flat against his chest where his heart was beating too fast, too hard. “And the math is simple, Morgan. You’re worth more.”
She stared at him. Her mouth opened, closed. Opened again.
“I’ve never been worth more.” The words came out barely audible. “To anyone. I’ve always been the one people transferred out, or tolerated, or eventually got tired of. I’ve never been the one someone chose.”
“You are now.”
Morgan went still. He watched her process it—the words moving through her the way data moved through his systems, finding no existing framework to attach to. Her eyes searched his face like she was looking for the catch, the exception, the fine print that would make this make sense.
“Why?” The question cracked in the middle. “Lincoln, why would you give up everything for someone you’ve known in person for two weeks?”
He considered the question the way he considered everything—looking for the logic, the pattern, the framework that would make the answer make sense.
“Two weeks in person,” he said slowly. “But two years of knowing you. Two years of waiting for nine o’clock.
Two years of conversations that made me feel like my brain wasn’t a liability.
” He paused. “Somewhere around message one hundred, I started prioritizing our exchanges over everything else. I didn’t have a word for why. I just knew I needed them. Needed you.”
Morgan’s breath caught.
“I don’t know what love is supposed to feel like,” he said slowly.
“I’ve read about it. Watched other people experience it.
But I’ve never been able to map it onto anything in my own head.
The chemicals, the psychology, the evolutionary biology—I understand all of that.
But the actual feeling?” He shook his head.
“I don’t have a baseline for comparison. ”
Morgan was watching him, tears still threatening but held back. Waiting.
“What I do know,” he continued, “is that when I thought you’d left—when you went silent in our messages and were no longer interested in talking—my systems stopped functioning.
I couldn’t focus on work that should have interested me.
I kept checking a forum I knew would be empty.
There was this…” He paused, searching for words.
“This hollow sensation. Like something essential had been removed.”
“Lincoln—”
“I also know that when I’m with you, my brain goes quiet in ways it never has with anyone else.
I know that protecting you feels more important than protecting myself.
And I know that if I have to choose between keeping my life as it is or changing it all but having you in it—” He met her eyes.
“The choice is already made. It was made before I even realized I was making it.”
She was crying now. Silent tears tracking down her cheeks.
“If that’s love, then I love you,” he said. “If it’s something else, I don’t care what it’s called. The result is the same.”
Morgan reached up and touched his face. Her fingers were trembling.
“It’s love,” she whispered. “That’s what it feels like.”
He didn’t know how to respond to that. So he just pulled her closer, wrapped his arms around her, and let her cry against his chest while he processed the weight of what they’d both just said.
“I don’t want you to have to give up everything,” she managed. “I don’t want to be the reason you leave your life and friends and family behind.”
“Then we keep trying to find another way for as long as we can.” He pulled her closer. “We have pieces that don’t fit yet. Data that hasn’t connected. But we’re not done.”
“We keep trying as long as we can,” she repeated. Her hands fisted in the back of his shirt, holding on like he was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting.
They stood like that until her breathing steadied. Until the trembling stopped. Until she pulled back and met his eyes with resolve.
“Okay,” she said. “Back to work.”
They returned to their stations. Side by side, facing the screens that held the scattered fragments of a puzzle that might save them or destroy them.
Lincoln pulled up the next batch of coordinates.
Morgan wiped her face with the back of her hand and reached for her cold tea, grimacing at the taste but drinking it anyway.
He hoped it wouldn’t come to disappearing. Hoped they’d find the thread that unraveled everything before he had to choose between his past and her future.
Lincoln Bollinger always had a contingency plan.
But he’d never wanted so badly not to have to use one.