Chapter 19
Will
Ronnie had asked me the same question three times before I realized he was talking to me.
“Sorry, what?” I looked up from the drink selection I’d been staring at without actually seeing.
“I asked if you’re planning to pick something or just admire the selection?” He opened the refrigerator door and pulled out a can of iced coffee. “You left the server room so fast, I figured you’d be back in your room by now.”
“Right. Sorry.” I grabbed an orange juice, instinct taking over where my distracted brain failed. My mind kept drifting back to the beach—Brie’s fingers in my hair, her leg around me, the sound she’d made when I’d shifted against her.
And then how she’d fled the moment it was over.
“Everything okay?” Ronnie asked.
“Just tired.” I glanced around, looking for Brie. “I thought my wife was going to meet me here, but I must be out before she is.”
He nodded, apparently satisfied, and patted me on the shoulder before heading toward the dessert display.
Had I pushed her too far? Read signals that weren’t there? The kiss had felt real—intensely, undeniably real. But maybe for her, it had been mission protocol, and I was the idiot projecting my own feelings onto it.
I needed to see her, to talk to her, to figure out what the hell was happening between us. This had been the most logical place for her to go after her shift, given she hadn’t messaged me in hours. Or did she go to the room looking for me instead?
“Where are you, Bug?” I muttered as I typed a message in the Mnemis app, where whoever was monitoring their security could read it: Shift’s done. Want to eat now?
A minute passed. Then two.
No response.
Where was she? Ronnie and I had stayed in the server room an extra half hour to finish an inspection, so perhaps she’d already gone back to our room.
But why wasn’t she answering my texts? I’d sent her a few since she declined dinner, and she hadn’t responded to a single one.
She’d answered that one, so she had her phone.
What if she simply needed space, and I was being clingy?
But what if something had gone wrong?
You’re overreacting.
If she’d been caught, security would have come for me by now. Wouldn’t they?
She’s probably having a shower. That makes sense.
“Will!” Claire entered the cafeteria area, heading straight for me. “Everything okay? You look worried.”
I consciously relaxed my jaw, so I didn’t look so stressed. “I’m looking for my wife. Have you—” I caught myself. If Brie was somewhere she shouldn’t be, I couldn’t risk drawing Claire’s attention to her absence.
“Trouble in newlywed paradise?” Claire’s smile seemed friendly enough, but something about the way she asked felt off, as though she were testing my reaction.
“Nothing like that.” I cracked my juice bottle open. “We’d planned on meeting for dinner.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about this morning.” She fell into step beside me as I walked out of Davy’s, toward the central core of The Grotto. “You mentioned working in a molecular lab? At Dalhousie University?”
My shoulders tensed before I could stop them.
This morning, her questions had sounded like normal curiosity.
Now, with her walking alongside me despite my clear signals I was busy, it felt different.
Pointed. Like she was circling back to something I hadn’t given her enough information about the first time.
“Nothing exciting,” I said, taking a sip of my juice. “I was there for a semester during my engineering program to design custom equipment and help maintain their computer systems. Fairly standard tech support.”
“What kind of research were they doing?”
The question came too quickly and was far too specific. Most people would have moved on by now, but she was drilling deeper.
“Something with tissue responses to topical agents, I think?” I shrugged, trying to project the disinterest of someone who’d simply done a job without caring much about the details.
“I understood the equipment requirements better than the actual science. Built what they needed, made sure their computers didn’t crash. ”
“Ever work with any dangerous materials?” She asked it with a smile, still keeping pace with me as we neared the exit from The Grotto.
“Me? No. I was just the tech guy.” My phone buzzed, and I nearly sagged with relief. Brie’s text: In our room. Long day.
Thank god.
“Sorry, my wife’s looking for me,” I said, stopping in the open doorway leading to the residential area. “I should go.”
“I did some lab support myself before Mnemis. The protocols were fascinating. All those safety measures.”
What was she doing? I’d given her a clear out, but she kept pushing.
“It was just one semester. Barely remember most of it.” I took a half-step back and put up my hand, clearly ending the conversation. “Thanks for the chat, though.”
“See you tomorrow. Oh, and Will?”
I paused. Why did I pause? “Yeah?”
“If you ever want to talk more about your engineering experience, I’d be genuinely interested.” Her smile was pleasant, completely at odds with the insistent questioning. “We’re always looking for ways to improve our systems here.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I forced myself to walk at a normal pace until I was out of sight, then moved faster. Claire had zeroed in on the lab detail from this morning—specific questions about dangerous materials and protocols. And she wouldn’t leave me alone after multiple hints.
I’d certainly known my share of people who didn’t understand social cues—Brie was one of those at times—but was that all it was?
When I opened our door, Brie was pacing the length of the room. Her movements were tight, controlled. The way she got when her brain was moving too fast for her body to keep up.
“Hey,” I said, closing the door behind me.
Her eyes were wide, urgent, and not in a way that had anything to do with us. Whatever I’d wanted to say about the kiss would have to wait.
“We need to talk about Claire,” she said, her voice low despite us being alone.
“What about her?”
“She’s—” Brie crossed to me, lowering her voice even more. “I went to the gaming room after my shift to try and probe for some information. I played Velocity Championship with some of The Bridge staff, and Claire joined us for a race.”
Wait. Claire knew I’d been looking for Brie. Why didn’t she tell me they’d been playing a video game together?
“After she left, everyone started talking about her. Will, she built the AI that monitors the Wi-Fi. The entire thing. From scratch.”
My mind stuttered.
“Apparently, it was her personal project, and management loved it so much they implemented it facility-wide.” Brie started pacing again. “But there’s more. During her second week working here—her second week—she tried to bypass the Hardware Security Modules.”
“She tried to hack the HSMs?” That was bad news. “Why would someone working here legitimately—”
“Exactly.” Brie stopped pacing to look at me. “And instead of firing her for it, she still got white-level access faster than anyone in the facility’s history.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why give top-level access to someone who’s an obvious security threat?”
“I don’t know. But I’m still not done.” Brie resumed her pacing. “When she left the gaming room, she said she was going to hit her rack. That’s not how normal people talk.”
“No, it’s not.” The term wasn’t strange on its own, but with the rest of it?
I sat on the bed. “She found me in the cafeteria and asked more questions about my time at Dalhousie. Very specific questions. I thought she was being nosy this morning, but when I ran into her just now…” I met Brie’s eyes. “It was like she was interrogating me.”
“She worked at the BumbleHive—the government’s intelligence hub.”
“She’s not really tech support, is she?” I said slowly. “She’s looking for something.”
“Or, she’s a spy.” Brie sat on her desk chair, leaning forward. “What if the government put her here? Not to steal data, but to monitor for exactly the kind of thing we’re doing.”
“Why hack the HSMs if she’s monitoring the site?”
“To spy on people, of course. That’s kind of why I wanted to get into the HSMs, so I could log in with other people’s credentials and snoop through the network. I’m only looking for Fenix, but with that kind of access, I could have looked at anyone’s logs, their personal data, whatever I wanted.”
I shook my head. “Which explains the surveillance AI. Maybe it’s got a back door, so she can access everything it’s sucking in?”
“Or it’s searching for more than people spilling Mnemis’s secrets,” Brie countered. “What if it’s also looking for other illegal activities, like espionage?”
I stood, moving to the window display, which was still off since last night. In it, I saw my reflection. Behind me, Brie perched on the edge of her chair. She’d been avoiding me all day. Now here we were, finally talking, and it was about Claire instead of what happened on that beach.
Focus. Claire first. The rest later.
“Okay, but if she’s working for the government, why interrogate me? Why not report me and let official channels handle it?”
“Maybe she’s not sure yet. Or she needs more evidence before she can act. Or…” She trailed off, chewing her bottom lip.
I turned back to face her again. “Or what?”
“Or she’s not government at all, and I’m wrong.
” Brie folded one leg under herself. “I mean, why tell people you worked at the BumbleHive if you’re trying to sneak around?
Maybe she’s here for corporate espionage or to sell secrets.
Maybe she’s just read one too many spy thrillers, and she’s playing secret agent. ”
“Or we’re the ones who’ve read too many spy thrillers?”
She snorted a little laugh. “Possible. Although I am reconsidering attacking the HSMs myself, though.”
“You’re probably better than her.”
“Possibly.” She gave a little shrug. “But if we assume she’s on the lookout for bad actors, and she tried hacking the HSMs, I’d bet she’s watching for someone else to try it.”
“And her white-level access—”
“Means she can probably trace it back to me, if I get in.”
“This has to explain why my work at the lab caught her attention.”
“Does it, though? Or is there another angle we aren’t thinking about?”
“What do we do now?” I asked. “We can’t avoid her without looking suspicious.”
“We keep playing our roles. But we’re more careful.” Brie unfolded herself and swiveled her chair to face her laptop. “No more slip-ups. No more giving her anything to work with.”
“I tried to keep it vague today,” I said, revisiting both conversations with Claire. “Stuck to the truth about designing equipment and maintaining systems.”
“Part of this job felt like a game at first, but now?”
“It never was a game.”
Her shoulders hunched, and I had to fight the need to put my hands on them, to massage the tension out. Before I’d left for London, that’s what I would have done, without second-guessing. Hell, before this morning’s kiss, that’s what I would have done.
She sighed. “Do you think Gideon knows?”
“About Claire?” I’d thought a briefing from the data center’s owner would have fully prepared us. But there were too many gaps in our intel. “If he did, either he didn’t think we’d pique her attention or he’s actively sabotaging us by leaving out important details.”
“Should we go up to Little Haven and call the team now? See if Drew can get anything useful out of Gideon?”
“We could…”
“But?” She craned her neck to raise an eyebrow at me.
I rubbed my jaw, the stubble prickly against my fingers. You should shave. “We have to go up top during daylight hours for our vitamin D exposure. That’s mandated. If we go now, it might raise questions.”
“Couples walk along the beach under moonlight all the time. That’s not suspicious.”
“Neither is doing tech support in a lab during college.”
“You have a point.” She huffed out a breath and turned back to her laptop, pulling up a weather map. “We need to be as inconspicuous as possible—just like Scarlett told me to.”
“She does have a lot of experience.” I stood and crossed over to her, looking at the map. The weather system swirled on the screen, and I leaned closer. Close enough to smell the hint of vanilla from her hand cream. Close enough that if I shifted slightly, my arm would brush hers.
Stop it. Focus.
“Lorenzo’s headed northwest.”
“Yup.” She tapped her mouse, and the map began moving, showing the hurricane nearing the Bahamas in a couple of days. “Access to Little Haven might close if it gets too close.”
We’d still have Rav, but we’d be cut off from the team. For a few days at least, if the cloud cover on the radar was right.
“Claire may be a spy, but you were trained by Scarlett Reynolds.” My hand found her back, intending to offer her comfort, but she tensed.
Goddammit! Brie actually tensed at that tiny touch.
Worse yet, she didn’t move away from it. I made her recoil, and she didn’t want me to know it.
The rejection stung more than it should have. This morning, she’d pulled me closer, making me think she wanted me.
No. Making Claire think she wanted me.
And now she couldn’t even handle my hand on her back.
I stepped away from her and swiped my sleep shorts from my drawer. “I’ll shower and get out of your way.”
Was that petty? Did it sound bitter?
Either way, I didn’t wait for a reaction.