Chapter One #3
The floor indicator ticked upward. My stop lit.
“Don’t get used to it, Maddox. I’m just having an off day.” I adjusted the strap of my bag. “Try not to terrify your supervisors today.”
“I never try,” he said.
“Exactly.” I stepped out as the doors opened, then turned to face him.
Marla, an AV support technician from Thomas’s floor, was staring a shade too long at the back of his head.
I couldn’t blame her. Thomas was more than conventionally handsome.
His chiseled jaw, commanding green eyes, the quiet confidence in his posture, and the unmistakable strength beneath his tailored suit—proof of the hours he spent in the gym—made him difficult to ignore.
A woman would have to be blind or staunchly asexual to claim she didn’t notice.
“See you at lunch,” I said.
He gave me a grin and a quick wink just before the doors slid shut. It was a small, unguarded gesture that somehow caught me off balance. It would annoy me if I thought about it too long. A decade should’ve made me immune, but my husband still managed to steal the air from my lungs with a glance.
The hallway outside the elevator smelled faintly of coffee and printer toner, the two official scents of federal life.
Frosted glass panels broke up stretches of tan walls, each etched with division and section names.
Counterintelligence Division took up most of this wing.
My badge opened the secure door with a muted beep.
Inside, the CI corridor buzzed with low conversation and the occasional ring of a phone.
Analysts and agents moved between cubicles and offices, carrying files or cradling mugs.
Our floor didn’t have the sweeping views some others did.
The windows were narrow and spaced between structural columns, but I could see just enough of the city to orient myself: a sliver of Pennsylvania Avenue, the outline of another federal building, a distant flag barely stirring in the cold.
My office sat halfway down the hall on the right, its door propped open the way I’d left it the night before.
The narrow interior window held a faint reflection of the hallway lights, a thin strip of brightness that cut across the room.
Inside, the desk dominated the space, easily bearing the weight of two monitors.
Beside them a single frame with the smiling faces of Thomas and Stella, holding each other while holding me at our favorite neighborhood park.
Next to that, a familiar tower of files, unchanged in height no matter how many I processed.
A small bookshelf leaned quietly in the corner, its shelves arranged in a way that made sense only to me.
The room wasn’t large, or impressive, but the moment I stepped inside, it settled around me like something I could trust.
I flicked on the light and set my bag on my desk.
The muted, filtered morning light pressed against the glass, gray and clean.
In San Diego, my window had framed part of the freeway, but also the harbor and the bay, with sunlight bouncing off the water every afternoon.
It had been beautiful, and relentlessly distracting.
Here, the view was… efficient. Concrete, angles, sky.
The cold that seeped through the glass on days like this reminded me of Chicago—of early years at the Bureau, learning to read patterns in data instead of people.
It offered a sense of familiarity and comfort that I’d never admit I needed.
I pulled my laptop from my bag, plugging it in as the other two monitors blinked awake.
Inbox, open case files, and overnight intel digests populated the screens in their usual chorus of small demands.
I took a moment just to stand there with my hands on the back of my chair, letting the hum of the building settle around me.
Washington lay just beyond the window, the government’s nerve center, and the place from which emergencies could ripple outward at any hour, some that woke me in the middle of the night.
That weight might have intimidated a younger version of me.
Now, it felt like an extension of the responsibility I’d already accepted when I’d walked into my first field office.
My office wasn’t as grand and didn’t offer a beautiful view like in San Diego, but that’s what I liked about it.
My job wasn’t about optics or even importance. It was about duty.
I sat, plugged my phone into the charging cable, then skimmed my calendar.
Eight a.m., Intel briefing in Conference B-314.
Sixty minutes blocked. My notes for the current CI case waited in a folder on my desktop: cross-border tech transfer, suspected corporate infiltration with a Japanese component.
It was a case that crossed into both Thomas’s world and mine without either of us ever being allowed to talk about specifics at home.
The time in the bottom corner of my screen read 7:34.
Coffee first. I didn’t know then just how much I’d need it.