Chapter 20
Twenty
Grace stayed at the console a second longer after the transfer finished.
Not because she needed to.
Because once she turned around, the next part started.
Behind her, the room had changed. The pressure that had ridden all of them since the lava tube had eased just enough to feel it.
Gunnar still held the door they’d come through, weapon trained back down the corridor.
Tiikaan stayed near the center aisle, watching the opposite side of the room.
Astryde sat at the monitoring station with green security feeds washing across her face while Bj?rn moved slowly along the racks, checking the room one more time.
But they were breathing differently now. They’d done it. Not out yet. Not safe. But the impossible part was behind them. Magnus was watching her from beside the vault door. Not tracking angles. Not scanning exits.
Just her.
Something in her chest tightened hard enough to hurt.
“We got it,” he said quietly.
We.
The word landed like a crack through ice.
Not the mission.
Them.
Grace swallowed and forced herself to move. Each step toward him felt heavier than the last.
Magnus’s eyes stayed on her the whole way across the room.
She stopped in front of him. Close enough to feel the heat trapped beneath his gear. Close enough that if she leaned forward half an inch, she’d touch him.
“You okay?” The question nearly broke her.
After Montana. After Oliver. After ten months of silence and every lie stacked between them, he still looked at her like the answer mattered.
Grace nodded once.
His hand came up and brushed a short, blonde strand of hair behind her ear.
Gentle.
Careful.
Like she was something worth handling softly.
“We’re going to get him back,” he said.
Certain. Steady. There was no version of the world where Magnus Rebel stopped walking toward Oliver.
For one terrible second, Grace saw Oliver on the flight home, asleep against Magnus’s shoulder, one hand twisted in his shirt like he was afraid someone might take him again.
She saw Magnus in a kitchen somewhere, pretending he hadn’t cut the crusts off Oliver’s sandwich because Oliver was “old enough to eat like a man now.”
A life she had never meant to want this badly.
Her fingers closed around the front of his vest before she realized she’d moved.
Then she kissed him.
It landed wrong at first. Too fast. Too desperate. Their mouths barely finding each other before Magnus went still.
A sharp inhale against her lips.
Then his hand slid behind her neck, and he kissed her back.
Not tentative anymore.
The force of it stole the breath from her lungs. Weeks of restraint disappeared all at once. Corridors. Near touches. Foreheads pressed together in the dark while both of them pretended they still had room to keep this from happening.
Gone.
His other arm wrapped around her waist and pulled her against him hard enough that the edge of his vest pressed into her ribs. The sound he made against her mouth nearly shattered what little control she still had left.
She kissed him deeper before she could stop herself.
One more second.
One more breath.
One more impossible thing to take with her.
She could have stayed there. That was the terrifying part. Not Lars waiting. Not the inevitable.
This.
How badly she suddenly wanted to stay.
Grace pulled back first. Magnus followed her half a step automatically before catching himself. His forehead stayed close to hers. His hand was still at the back of her neck. His eyes opened slowly.
Soft still.
Unprotected.
“Grace...”
Her hand slid behind her. Found the override panel beside the vault door. Magnus’s gaze dropped. She watched the exact moment he understood. Everything in his face changed.
“Grace,” he said again, sharper now, and took one step toward her. “Don’t.”
She hit the override.
A red warning light flashed once across the ceiling as the blast door began to descend. For one suspended second, nobody moved. Then the room exploded.
“Move!” Gunnar barked.
Magnus moved. Fast enough that she barely saw it. The blast door started down between them.
Gunnar shouted something behind him. Davis lunged toward the threshold. Astryde shoved back from the monitoring station hard enough
that her chair slammed into the racks.
But Magnus was closer.
He hit the narrowing gap just before the steel sealed shut. His palm slammed against the descending door.
“No!”
Then the blast door crashed into place hard enough to shudder through the floor beneath her boots.
“Grace!” Her name came through muffled by steel and hydraulics and the roar of the locking mechanisms engaging.
The second door behind Grace started dropping.
She moved.
Through the anteroom. Under the descending barrier. Into the corridor beyond just before the door slammed shut behind her with another bone-deep impact.
Silence rushed in after it.
Grace turned back once. Thirty feet and two blast doors separated her from Magnus now. She pressed her palm flat against the cold steel anyway. His voice came through faintly on the other side. Her name again. Raw enough that she had to shut her eyes against it.
She lifted her hand from the door and forced herself to turn around.
The corridor stretched ahead in sterile blue-white light. Empty. Silent. The Aegis Key rested in her pocket. The evidence drive pressed against her ribs.
And Magnus’s kiss still burned on her mouth.
But Lars was waiting on the roof.
And somewhere deep beneath eight years of planning and code and rage, something old and conditioned still lifted its head when he called.