Chapter 9 #2
“That’s how I read it,” Luke says. “She wanted corroboration from a source she trusted. She got it.”
I think about the dinner. The pasta. The small easing in her face when I gave her the month-and-a-half timeline. A source she trusted. Eight months of trust, carefully built, now delivering exactly the information Evelyn needed it to deliver.
The thing is, I’m the one who chose to say it.
Luke didn’t tell me. Bill didn’t tell me.
I’m not in the loop on the device or the disinformation play.
I said it because it was what I’d know if I were on the outside of this thing, which is exactly what Marin believes I am.
It was true in the way things are true when you’re only holding part of the picture.
Which means I didn’t lie to Marin. I just told her the last thing I believed to be true before my brother started using the device as a weapon.
That’s the cleanest kind of lie.
“She’ll ease off,” I say. “Think she has time she doesn’t have.”
“That’s the idea,” Luke says. He breathes out. “Brandon. I’m going to tell you everything. Soon. I just need a few more days to—”
“I know,” I say. “The order matters. You told me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “It does.”
I hang up. I get in my car. I sit in the parking garage for a moment before I start the engine, the same way I did when I found my research files on the passenger seat three weeks ago.
A different garage, with new information, yet the same quietness of a man who has just grasped something he can never forget.
Marin went home last night thinking she’d done her job. Thinking she’d confirmed the timeline through an unimpeachable source. Thinking she had a month and a half to keep things in place before anything moved against the network she serves.
She’s wrong about all of it.
I start the engine, and I go to work.
LUKE
She comes in at seven, and it only takes me one look at her face to know something has been sitting on her all afternoon, but she hasn’t set it down yet.
Her expression is set with the underlying determination I admire most about her.
Even when she feels the weight of the world on her shoulders, she devises a plan to eradicate the threat and help those in need.
I’m in the kitchen. She sets her bag down, comes to where I’m standing at the counter, and puts her forehead against my shoulder.
Just that. No words.
I put my hand on the back of her head, and I hold her there. With my other arm wrapped around her waist and my hand splayed across her back, she melts into me like I’m the only man capable of holding all the pieces of her together. She’s reached the end of what she can carry alone.
She doesn’t want to need anyone. She doesn’t want to ask for help. This action is one of her tells. Her silence, combined with the intentional physical contact, is how she confirms I’m here and not going anywhere, no matter what hell rains down on us.
We stand like this for about sixty seconds. Then she straightens and says, “I’ll tell you over dinner. I need a minute first.”
“Take what you need, baby,” I say. I can do this for her. I can be this man. For her.
She goes upstairs. I finish making dinner.
She comes back down twenty minutes later, looking like someone who has put something heavy in the right place—not gone, but organized, carried differently.
We sit at the kitchen table, and she tells me about Deja.
The conversation. The name she recognized.
What it connects to in Bill’s documentation.
I listen without interrupting. When she finishes, the kitchen is quiet for a moment.
“She trusted you,” I say.
“She did.” Andi looks at her hands. “I don’t know what that cost her. To say it out loud to an adult. After however many times she’s tried before and had it turned against her.”
“She chose the right person this time,” I say.
Andi looks up at me. Something in her face that isn’t quite a smile but is in that neighborhood.
“Yeah,” she says. “I think so.”
We eat. The conversation finds its way to smaller things—a MaxMorgan distribution call she has tomorrow, Reyes’s adjustment to my footwork that’s been clicking in the last two sessions, and whether the contractor is ever going to fix the back gate.
The ordinary texture of a life that runs underneath everything else.
A life that remains solid in spite everything else.
After dinner, we sit on the back deck with coffee, watching the water in the pool twinkle with the night lights.
The August night in Atlanta is more than warm—it’s still downright sweltering.
But the neighborhood is doing its normal late-evening things—a dog, a car, and someone’s television through an open window.
I have my arm around her, and she’s leaning against me, and neither of us is talking.
“Luke,” she says eventually.
“Yeah, baby.”
“I need tonight to just be this. Just us.”
I look at the yard. At the gate that still needs fixing. At the sky going dark over Atlanta.
“Then that’s what it is,” I say.
We stay on the deck until the coffee is gone. Then we go inside.
ANDI
The bedroom is ours in the way rooms become yours—not just the furniture and the photographs, but the quality of the dark, the sounds the house makes at night, the low hum of the AC unit that kicks on at intervals and has become as familiar as breathing.
At this moment, I need him. I need to feel loved in the way only he can give.
I reach for him in the dark at the exact moment he reaches for me, our hands finding each other as if neither of us ever really let go.
The air feels warmer where he’s close, the quiet deeper, like the room itself has agreed to hold still for us.
Our desire for each other isn’t dampened by the trials and tribulations.
This—the feel of his skin against mine, the warmth of his touch, the silky sensation of his tongue sliding against mine—anchors me in the present. And this moment is ours and ours only.
Luke is everything I need him to be. He isn’t rushed. He never is, and he knows this is what matters. Us. Our bond. Our connection. When he speaks, his voice is low—steady, textured with restraint—and I can feel the care in it as clearly as the warmth of his body against mine.
What he gives me isn’t urgency. It’s attention. Chosen. Sustained. Whole. This is the intentional attention of a man who loves me with all that he is, who is fully present, and who is pouring all his love into me.
There’s no weight from the day in the room with us. No Evelyn. No Deja. No file, no documentation, no evidentiary thread waiting to be pulled.
Only this.
Us, held together in the quiet, creating something that belongs only to this moment.
Afterward, we lie in the dark, and he has his arm across me, and his breathing slows toward sleep. I’m almost there myself—the earned exhaustion of a day that held too many things and is finally releasing them.
The last thing I think before I go under is, This is what it’s for. All of it. This is what we’re protecting.
LUKE
I wake at three in the morning for no reason I can name—the body surfacing from somewhere deep, from the alarm system training built long before I ever asked it to.
Something is different in our bedroom.
Andi is asleep beside me, steady and deep.
I stay still and begin to catalog the room on instinct: the window closed the way it should be, the door standing open exactly where I left it, the familiar house sounds of three a.m. settling into their usual places.
Everything reads as normal, except for the quiet tension running underneath it.
My phone.
I left it on the nightstand when we came to bed—right side, screen down, charging cable connected. Habitual. Automatic. Years of muscle memory.
It’s on the dresser instead. Four feet away. Screen up. Not charging.
I didn’t move it.
I get up without waking Andi and move through the house the way I move through gyms after closing—familiar enough to navigate in the dark, careful enough to notice what doesn’t belong. I check every room. Every door. Every window.
There’s nothing. No sign of entry. No sign of presence.
Just a phone that moved itself four feet while we slept.
I stand in the living room and let the meaning of that settle.
This is a man who can enter a secured gym, a house that was swept clean, and a hospital pharmacy.
A man who doesn’t take or use things because that isn’t the point.
He moves them to say: I was here. While you slept.
Your measures don’t stop me. They don’t even slow me down.
I go back to the bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed.
Andi opens her eyes immediately.
“Something’s wrong,” she says. Not a question. She reads me even in the dark.
“He was in the house,” I say. “While we were asleep. He moved my phone.”
She’s quiet for a moment—the stillness that means she’s placing the information carefully where it belongs.
“We need Daniel to move faster,” she says.
“Yes. We need to figure out how to contact him. How to get him to contact us. To come out of the hole he’s hiding in and help stop this madness.”
“We need Bill to move faster with everything he’s doing too.”
“Yes. This was already out of hand, but it’s just ridiculous now. I’d rather stand and face my opponent head-on and get it over with than keep up this psychological warfare bullshit.”
She reaches for my hand in the dark and finds it.
“Come back to bed,” she says. “We can’t do anything about it tonight. We need to be rested if we’re going to do anything about it tomorrow.”
I lie down. She fits herself against me the way she always does—careful of her knee, her head on my chest, her hand flat over my heart.
Outside, the neighborhood sleeps. Somewhere in the dark, a man who can go anywhere he chooses has delivered his message and gone.
We stay awake longer than either of us admits.
But eventually, we sleep.