Chapter 20
CIPHER
The morning settled quietly over the backcountry, sunlight warming the windows while Bex studied at the section of the long table she had taken over.
Pink, blue, and yellow notes spread across the dark wood in bright clusters beside neatly stacked textbooks, making her end of the study look alive against the order I had maintained for years.
The contrast should have distracted me, but I’d discovered I liked seeing proof of her in every room almost as much as I liked waking with her body tangled around mine.
The argument over her vehicle and driver the night before had ended with Bex pressed beneath me, still flushed with temper while I kissed every grumbling complaint out of her mouth.
Remembering the way her legs had locked around my hips sent blood into my cock, leaving the thickening length trapped uncomfortably behind my sweatpants as I watched her chew the end of a pink highlighter.
She caught me staring before I redirected my attention to the household-security report on my screen, and the pleased curve of her mouth told me she knew exactly where my thoughts had gone.
Her cheeks warmed as she rearranged two pages, placing a yellow sheet between a blue one and a row of pink tabs, then noticed me watching the system she’d built. “Do the colors bother you?”
“No. The lack of sequence did until I figured out what each one meant.”
Bex blinked. “You decoded my study notes?”
“You use pink for definitions, yellow for cases, blue for procedures, and green for anything you expect to appear on the exam.” I leaned back in my chair as surprise spread across her expressive face. “The orange tabs mean you disagree with the textbook.”
Her laugh moved through the room, but the humor slowly faded as she studied me in return. Then she laid the highlighter beside her tablet and rested both arms on the table.
“You figured all of that out without asking me one question. Is that why patterns are easier for you than people?”
Bex wanted the part of the answer that belonged to Corbin Ralston, which made refusing impossible. If I wanted Bex to give me all of her—and I wouldn’t settle for anything less—then she deserved the same from me.
“Patterns don’t change the answer because they’re uncomfortable with it. People do.”
Bex waited patiently for me to continue. I closed the security report, pushed the laptop aside, and looked at the bright notes covering the table that was bare before her. The room had changed because she had entered it, and apparently I had too.
“My father repaired naval electronics. I grew up near Oceanside learning to solder connections and rebuild radios before I was old enough to drive. He could diagnose a failed board from the smell alone, but if something happened inside the family, he’d work around it until everybody was expected to understand without anyone saying the words. ”
Bex’s expression softened, though she stayed quiet.
“My mother kept everything functioning through long shifts and deployments. Food appeared, bills got paid, rides were arranged, but whatever she felt stayed buried under the next practical task.” I dragged one thumb along the edge of the table, following the grain instead of looking away from Bex.
“Nobody was cruel. They just believed handling the useful parts meant the rest should take care of itself.”
“And machines didn’t make you guess.”
“Broken systems behaved according to cause and effect. Even corrupted data left evidence of what happened.” I lifted one shoulder. “People could decide the truth was inconvenient and act like it had changed.”
Bex stood and walked over to my desk, waiting until I pushed my chair back before settling herself in my lap.
Her eyes dropped to the dog tags resting beneath my shirt before lifting to my face.
She had touched them in bed, usually fiddling with them while lying across my chest, but she had never asked about the small, deformed round hanging from the same chain.
She drew the tags out of my shirt, the metal sliding warm across my skin as she cradled the flattened round in her palm. “Is this connected to why they call you Cipher?”
“Yeah.” I pulled the chain over my head and placed it fully in her hand, giving her something no one else handled. “JSOC operation. We hit a three-story compound in a dry river valley after weeks of tracking a courier tied to an attack network.”
Bex clenched her fingers around the tags while I continued, watching me with the same focus she gave frightened callers.
“The breach damaged most of the electronics inside the target room. We recovered a phone and an encrypted drive that had both taken enough heat and fragmentation to make conventional extraction almost useless.” I rested my hands on the curves of her hips, my voice remaining level even while the old sounds returned.
“The building was still taking fire, but I found enough intact memory to reconstruct pieces of a coordinate set and several short messages.”
“You worked on them while people were shooting at you?”
“Wasn’t the first time.” Her mouth tightened at the answer, so I added, “Was working alongside Stryker’s Delta team, and they held the building while my element cleared the remaining rooms. We had cover.”
“The bullet says your cover had flaws,” she guessed.
My mouth shifted because she wasn’t wrong. “Round hit my plate while I was rebuilding the coordinate sequence. Didn’t penetrate, but it cracked the carrier and left a bruise across half my chest.”
Bex’s thumb moved carefully over the flattened metal. “What did the coordinates show?”
“An ambush along our planned extraction route.” I remembered handing the screen to Stryker, seeing his expression change once before he redirected every man without hesitation. “We altered the route, came out through higher ground, and brought everybody home.”
“And this connects to your road name?”
“One of Stryker’s men looked at the recovered coordinates and said, ‘We don’t need a cipher. We’ve got Ralston.’” I leaned back and lost some of my tension beneath the warmth in Bex’s eyes. “It stuck. I broke systems nobody else could read, and most of the men around me couldn’t read me either.”
She glanced down at the round again. “Why do you still wear this?”
“Stryker pulled it from my plate carrier on the flight out and tossed it into my lap. Told me to keep the receipt.” A rough breath left me, something similar to a laugh.
Bex turned the metal slowly between her fingers before placing the chain on my desk. “That explains why you trusted Stryker.”
“He made decisions based on what protected his people, even when changing the plan cost him.” I looked toward the window, not trying to escape the memory, but taking a momentary reprieve from the weight of it. Then I looked back at Bex. “The Navy made it more complicated near the end.”
She picked up one of my hands and threaded our fingers together before I continued.
Telling her didn’t feel like exposing a weakness.
It was giving her a piece of myself I had kept from everyone else because it belonged only to me.
But now that I had Bex in my life, nothing belonged to only me anymore.
“On my final deployment, I recovered information tying a politically useful intermediary to a hostile network. He’d been giving them patrol schedules, names attached to safe locations, and windows when civilian contacts would be unprotected.
” My grip tightened around Bex’s fingers as the old fury moved through me with the same clean edge it had carried then.
“Good people died because of the information he sold.”
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing.” The word tasted exactly as foul as it had years earlier.
“Senior leadership ordered the report sanitized because exposing him would’ve damaged an alliance and disrupted negotiations already in motion.
He was silently removed from duty but retained his rank and title until he was honorably discharged a short time later.
They called it protecting the bigger picture. ”
Bex’s expression turned sad. “The bigger picture had names.”
“Exactly. I refused to certify the sanitized version. Finished my obligation, declined reenlistment, and walked when the twelve years ended.”
“Did Stryker know?”
“He was one of three people who got the full truth.” I rubbed my thumb across her knuckles, remembering the night he found me after I left the teams. “He flew out, bought a bottle neither of us needed, and after the hangover cleared, he told me to stop breaking codes for people who didn’t care whether I came home.
Offered me a job at Black Castle and a place beside brothers who did. ”
Bex absorbed the story and her gaze moved over my face with quiet understanding.
“Trusting a person doesn’t mean predicting every decision they’ll ever make.
It means believing that when the choice matters, they’ll make the right one—even if it costs them.
You trusted yourself to choose what was right when the institution didn’t. ”
She rose from my lap, and stood between my knees, placing her palms on my cheeks so she could kiss me. I wrapped both hands around her hips and drew her closer, deepening the contact.
When she pulled back, her fingers slid through my hair, pushing the stubborn lock off my forehead with a tenderness I’d never experienced.
“I trust you too.”
Her lips curved. “Even though I’m making you disable the remote access to my car?”
“Still going to track your phone.”
“I would’ve worried if you stopped.”
I pulled her onto my lap again, this time settling her astride me while her arms circled my neck.
The soft heat between her thighs pressed directly over my cock, turning it rigid beneath the thin layers separating us as my hands slid under the hem of the shirt and closed around her bare waist. She breathed my name against my mouth, and hearing Corbin in that intimate voice tore through the last distance between reflection and need.