Chapter 23
Tom left the way he always left — a few quiet words, no ceremony attached to any of it.
Reagan and Piper went with him, Piper still arguing about the oppressive tyranny of curfews while Reagan pretended not to listen.
Owen and Skye disappeared upstairs a few minutes later, still debating whether rayon counted as legitimate cold-weather gear and whether toothpaste tablets were “an elegant minimalist solution” or “a crime against civilization.”
The door at the top of the stairs closed behind them, and the basement dropped one degree quieter.
Not silent. Never silent anymore.
The Rig hummed steadily in the corner. One of the old pipes above the bakery knocked softly as heat cycled through the building. Wade sat in front of the security monitors with his long legs stretched out and his arms folded loosely across his chest, looking almost relaxed if you didn’t know him.
Gabe knew better. Wade at rest was still Wade on overwatch. His eyes tracked constantly: alley camera, Harbor Street, loading dock, marina feed, back again.
Cara stood near the whiteboard end of the table, making notes in the margin of something Tom had printed earlier. Flight windows maybe. Cargo weights. The manifest. Her coffee had gone cold twenty minutes ago and she clearly hadn’t noticed.
He’d been watching her for the last hour. Not obviously. Or maybe obviously. He wasn’t entirely sure anymore.
She’d held the room together all evening without appearing to do it.
Piper’s energy. David’s insistence on inserting himself into danger.
Owen’s academic panic spiral. Skye pretending she hadn’t nearly gotten herself killed six hours earlier.
The Norway decision hanging over all of them like incoming weather.
Cara absorbed the friction of all of it and redistributed the weight so smoothly nobody else seemed fully aware it was happening.
He knew exactly what kind of work that was. He’d been doing versions of it himself for most of his adult life.
The farther this thing went, the harder it became to separate operational thinking from personal instinct.
He’d spent the last hour running Norway contingencies through his head while simultaneously tracking whether Skye’s hand was swelling through the bandage, whether Owen would survive Arctic temperatures dressed like a substitute philosophy professor, whether Cara had eaten dinner at all.
Too many moving pieces. Too many people he cared about now in Neptune’s path.
He’d spent years with the Bureau training himself not to think that way. Caring clouded judgment. Attachment created hesitation. Hesitation got people hurt.
Except somewhere along the line Haven Cove had turned into a town full of people he’d apparently burn his life down to protect, and now Neptune wanted to drag all of them onto a glacier at the top of the world.
He looked back at Cara.
Still writing. Still carrying the room. Still pretending the cost of that didn’t exist.
Above them, faintly muted through old bakery beams and several floors, came the sound of Owen objecting passionately to something followed by Skye saying, “Your commitment to avoidable suffering is honestly inspirational.”
Cara smiled despite herself without looking up from the paperwork.
The sight of it hit Gabe unexpectedly hard.
Suddenly, he wanted a piece of that happy Cara for himself. Just a few precious minutes of her undivided attention.
He crossed toward her before he fully decided to do it. “Walk outside with me for a minute.”
She looked up immediately.
He watched her assess the request in real time. Not suspicious exactly. Just careful. Cara evaluated everything before stepping toward it — exits, angles, and emotional terrain.
He expected her to decline. Instead she capped her pen, reached for her jacket, and said, “Okay.”
The alley behind Sugar & Salt ran narrow and quiet.
Harbor damp drifted inland off the marina, carrying salt, diesel, cedar pilings, and cold Pacific air.
Haven Cove this late at night had layers of silence to it: distant rigging tapping against sailboat masts, the muted pull of tide against the docks, somewhere farther uphill the faint bark of a dog.
No foot traffic. No idling engines. No movement.
They stayed close to the building as they walked. Wade had drilled that into all of them months ago: never silhouette yourself unnecessarily when you already knew hostile surveillance existed.
Neptune absolutely had eyes on the bakery by now.
That was the part Gabe kept circling tonight. Not the flights. Not the cold-weather logistics. Not even the conference itself. Those were solvable problems.
What kept catching in his head was the certainty that Neptune wanted them in Norway. He hated walking into somebody else’s geometry blind.
Beside him, Cara shoved her hands deeper into her jacket pockets against the cold. He still hadn’t fully figured out what he wanted to say. He’d started four different conversations in the stairwell and abandoned every one of them before it reached language.
This was not, generally, how he operated.
“I don’t want David and Sophie there,” he admitted finally. “David’s brilliant, but not at this. You know what happened last time. If Neptune grabs him again…”
Cara reached over and squeezed his hand once, brief and grounding. “They won’t.”
“You can’t know that.”
“No.” She looked out toward the harbor lights. “But your brother’s tougher than you give him credit for.”
“I know he is.” Gabe exhaled sharply. “I know. He’s an asset. Sophie’s an asset. I’m not saying otherwise.”
“But?”
He scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “I spent years keeping him away from this part of my life. That was the deal. He dug for facts and stayed out of the dangerous stuff. Now he dives right into the deep end, headfirst.”
The words landed heavier than he intended.
Fog drifted slowly across the mouth of the alley while they stood there. Gabe looked toward the marina lights and tried not to think too carefully about all the ways Norway could go wrong.
Neptune already knew about Owen. And Skye.
Almost certainly him. Maybe Cara.
And somewhere inside all of that sat the possibility that Neptune expected them to chase this lead all along. He hated that possibility most of all.
Because it meant they weren’t advancing the board. They were already on it.
“You run a group like somebody who grew up managing siblings,” he said after a minute, partly because he needed the subject to move somewhere less dangerous. “Oldest child energy. Definitely.”
Cara’s face changed instantly. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it. But something unguarded crossed her expression before she sealed it back up again. She looked away, toward the harbor.
“I’m an only child,” she said quietly.
But there was far more. Gabe waited.
“I had a family once,” she continued after a moment. “Not a real one. A crew. People who worked together long enough to start believing that meant something permanent.” Her mouth curved faintly without humor. “Shared mythology. Shared rules. Shared disasters.”
“Where are they now?”
Cara tucked dark hair behind her ear and avoided his eyes. “No idea. I went straight. They didn’t.”
Gabe considered everything he knew about her then, which somehow still managed to feel both substantial and painfully incomplete.
The woman who nurtured half the town. The woman whose past was so radioactive she was still running from it.
The woman he wanted to make his far more than he should. Instead of voicing his thoughts, he knew he had to keep things light. Asking her for revelations, for emotions she was too afraid to share would only send her running.
“Yet another piece of the puzzle that is Cara Sweet,” he said lightly. “Honestly, this explains so many things.”
She smacked his arm, the kind of hit that was really a laugh trying to figure out what shape it wanted to take, quiet and warm and carrying more relief than the joke itself deserved.
He laughed first. To his infinite relief, she laughed, too. He savored the tiny glow of joy, until it faded into the alley around them.
He turned to face her now, stepping close enough he could smell the light vanilla scent that always lingered around her. .
She didn’t retreat, just stared up at him, her body going quiet. Not stiff, as if ready to run. No measuring of risk versus disclosure. Just Cara standing in fog-softened harbor light looking at him like she’d stopped bracing for impact for one minute.
That nearly undid him. Because he knew exactly how much trust that cost her. He’d asked her outside without knowing what he intended to say, but suddenly the words were clear. He reached for her, cupping her shoulders and pulling her close.
“I can’t promise tomorrow,” he said quietly. “Not with this. Not with Norway.” He shook his head once, eyes searching hers. “But when all this is over… I’d like to think maybe there’s something on the other side of it for us.”
He watched her understand exactly how much that cost him to say.
Not the forever he wanted to promise. Just hope.
And somehow that felt even more dangerous.
The tension left her shoulders in one slow exhale. She smiled, a tiny grin, but it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. “I’ll take it.”
Her response rocked him back on his heels, making his heart pound against his ribs. “You will?”
She pressed a finger to the zipper of his hoodie. “Yes, Mr. Sawyer, I will. I shouldn’t but––“
He didn’t wait for her to finish, just pulled her hard against him and kissed her. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t reckless. Just real.
And it was heaven.
When he pulled away, she was smiling. He wanted to kiss her again, but he knew he couldn’t. If he did, he might forget for a minute that Neptune existed.
A door opened behind them.
Wade stepped into the bakery doorway, gaze moving automatically across the alley, the opposite rooftop, the camera mounted over the loading dock. “Earth to Sweet and Sawyer,” he said dryly. “We should head inside. Neptune almost definitely has eyes on this alley.”
Cara exhaled once beside Gabe, quiet enough that he felt it more than heard it. The harbor fog drifted around them.
“Come on, kids,” Wade said again, softer this time.
Gabe took one last look at Cara before following Wade back toward the stairs. Upstairs, somewhere above them, Owen and Skye were probably still arguing about Arctic layering systems like the world wasn’t narrowing toward Norway one careful step at a time.
Monday, they’d start moving.
Tonight, for the first time in months, Gabe let himself want something he couldn’t put into an operational plan.