Chapter 17
TOMMY
A fter the overlook, we go back to work.
Two hours of countermeasure simulations in Kane's office while Dar runs threat models at her station, the operational rhythm absorbing whatever passed between us on the mountain the way the mountain absorbs everything.
By the time Kane dismisses me, my eyes are burning and the corridor to my quarters feels longer than it should.
Dar is in my quarters when I arrive.
She's sitting on my bed with her shoes off and her laptop open, her legs crossed underneath her like she's been here for a while.
One of my hoodies is draped over the back of my desk chair, and I don't know if she pulled it out or if I left it there, and it doesn't matter because the image of her in my space, surrounded by my things, laptop screen casting blue light across her face like she belongs in a room lit by monitors, lands somewhere behind my ribs and stays.
"Your door code needs work," she says without looking up. Her fingers move across her keyboard in that burst-and-pause rhythm I've memorized. "I got through it in under a minute."
"Some of us use door codes as a polite suggestion, not a security protocol."
"Some of you need better security protocols." She closes the laptop. Looks at me.
Her eyes in the low light are darker than usual, the kohl heavier, and I realize she hasn't slept since the briefing.
Neither have I, but I spent the last two hours in Kane's office running countermeasure simulations while she spent them doing whatever she does when the weight of her past becomes a load she can't distribute.
Something hooks behind my sternum and pulls. It's been doing that a lot lately.
The feeling defies categorization, which offends the part of me that organizes everything into systems, and I should probably examine it except the diagnostic would require admitting the cause, and the cause is sitting on my bed with her rainbow hair and her sharp face and the particular stillness in her hands that means she's keeping something contained.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
"Define bad."
"On a scale of one to GCHQ."
Her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. "Seven."
I close the door. Lean against it. My glasses need cleaning, which is what I tell myself when I take them off and polish them on my shirt.
The truth is that removing the barrier between my eyes and the room is a decision, and right now I'm making it because she came here. She didn't go to the workspace. She didn't go to the overlook. She came to my room and sat on my bed and waited.
"Marsh was the kind of person you forget five minutes after meeting them," she says.
Flat. Clinical. "Quiet. Did his work. Went home.
He sat in meetings where I warned them, and he said nothing.
Not because he disagreed with me. Because saying something would have required him to risk something, and Neil Marsh has never risked anything in his life. "
I put my glasses back on. She's watching me with an expression I can't parse, and I need the full resolution.
"When Callum died and the institution needed someone to carry the blame, Marsh didn't volunteer for the review.
He didn't have to. He just didn't push back.
That was enough. Silence was enough. And now he's building weapons for the Committee because the Committee is just another structure that rewards people who don't push back. "
"Dar."
"He's not a monster. That's the part I keep catching on.
" Her fingers lift from the laptop and hover, suspended.
Not tapping. Not still. Caught between states.
"Monsters are simple. Marsh is a coward who defaulted to institutional compliance because resistance requires conviction, and conviction is expensive. He took the cheap option. Every time."
I push off the door. Cross the three steps to the bed. She watches me approach with the focused attention she gives to unfamiliar code, reading the variables, assessing the function.
"What do you need?" I ask.
"I need to stop thinking about Neil Marsh."
"I can work with that. Want me to start a spirited debate about tabs versus spaces? That usually occupies at least forty minutes and most of my available brain cells."
"No." She reaches up and takes my glasses off. Folds them. Sets them on the bedside table with a precision that borders on reverent, and the room goes soft at the edges because without my glasses the world loses its sharpness and the only thing in focus is what's closest.
She's closest.
"I want the version of you nobody else sees," she says.
Flat. Precise. Like she's placing an order, except the faint unevenness in her breathing gives her away.
"The one in the gym after midnight. The one who hides underneath the humor and the glasses and the chocolate and the man behind the screen. "
My heart rate spikes. A step function, zero to sixty, the physiological equivalent of a system alert.
"That version comes with fewer jokes and more awkward silences."
"I know." She pulls her hoodie over her head. Black tank top underneath, pale arms, the silver pendant catching the light as it settles against her collarbone. "I'll take the trade."
I should say something. Something witty, something deflective, something that maintains the layer of humor between who I am and who she's asking to see.
That's the protocol. That's the operating procedure I've been running since I was a kid with a laptop who realized that being funny was easier than being known.
I don't say anything.
I pull my shirt over my head instead, and the look on her face when she sees me without it is worth every hour I've spent in that gym after midnight pretending the workouts don't matter.
Her gaze drops from my eyes to my chest to my shoulders to my arms, and her lips part on an exhale she didn't authorize.
Her fingers reach toward me with a deliberateness that strips the gesture of anything casual.
Her palm lands flat against my sternum. Over my heartbeat. Her fingers spread, reading the rhythm the way she reads code, and whatever data she collects from the pattern makes her exhale through parted lips.
"You hide this," she says.
"Everyone hides something."
"You hide this on purpose." Her hand slides up, over my collarbone, along the side of my neck.
Her thumb traces the tendon there, and my skin maps the contact with an accuracy that my screens would envy.
"You let them see the version that's safe.
The funny one. The one who eats chocolate and runs the comms and makes everyone laugh so nobody looks too close. "
"You're looking close."
"I'm looking at you." She says it simply, without emphasis, and the simplicity is what undoes me because Dar doesn't waste words and the ones she chose mean exactly what they mean.
She's looking at the man underneath all of it, and the exposure is more intimate than anything she could do with her hands.
She pulls me down.
The kiss is different from the first two times. The desk was combat, two people fighting through physical contact because words had become inadequate. The server room was controlled, deliberate, a study in precision.
This is neither. This is Dar's mouth against mine with an urgency that doesn't come from anger or adrenaline but from something rawer. Need. The stripped-down, unencrypted version that she's spent her whole life refusing to transmit.
My hands find her waist. The tank top rides up and my palms meet warm skin and her breath catches against my mouth, a small sound that bypasses every defense I have left because it's involuntary. She didn't mean to make it. She didn't choose to let me hear it.
I pull the tank top over her head. Her bra is plain, black, functional, and it's so completely Dar that something behind my ribs aches. No performance. No costuming.
Just the body underneath the armor, lean and angular, the silver pendant falling between her breasts on its chain. She always tucks it inside her collar. She keeps it hidden, close to her skin, and now it's visible and she doesn't reach to cover it.
I lower her back onto the mattress, and she goes, which surprises us both.
Dar doesn't yield. Dar doesn't let someone else set the trajectory. But she's looking up at me with her dark eyes and her rainbow hair fanning across my pillow, and the woman who fights for control in every arena she enters has just handed me the one she doesn't know how to navigate.
"Tell me what you want." My voice comes out lower than I expect. Steadier. The gym-after-midnight version of me has a different register, and Dar hears the shift because her pupils dilate and her fingers dig into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks I'll feel tomorrow.
"You," she says. "Without the commentary."
My mouth finds the curve of her neck. The soft depression at the base of her throat. Her pulse is fast against my tongue, and I stay there, tasting the rhythm while my hands work the clasp of her bra.
She arches to help me, impatient, and the press of her bare chest against mine when the fabric falls away pulls a sound from my throat that I don't have a name for.
I take my time. Not because I'm patient but because she expected fast and giving her the opposite is a kind of power I didn't know I had until this moment.
My mouth traces the line of her collarbone, the slope of her breast, the soft skin underneath where she shivers and her hand fists in my hair.
When my tongue circles her nipple and closes over it with slow, deliberate suction, her spine lifts off the mattress and the sound she makes is something between a gasp and a curse and it goes straight to my cock.
"You're doing it again," she whispers. Her voice is rougher than I've ever heard it. "Studying."
"You like it."
"I didn't say I didn't."
I move lower. Kiss the notch between her ribs, the flat plane of her belly where her muscles contract under my mouth.