37. Elena
ELENA
The apartment was too quiet for a night before a war, and I kept waiting for it to feel wrong that it didn't.
Sergei stood at the window with two glasses of wine he hadn't touched, looking down at the lights strung along the water the way he always did when his mind was somewhere else.
I'd learned to read the line of his shoulders the way I used to read code, for the small errors that told you where the real problem lived. Tonight his shoulders were a wall.
"You're doing the thing," I said.
He didn't turn around. "What thing?"
"The thing where you stand very still and pretend you're thinking about wine."
"I like this window."
"You like this window on nights when you don't want to look at me."
That got him to turn. He had the expression he wore when I'd caught him at something and he'd decided it was easier to be caught than to keep hiding, a small, rueful tilt at the corner of his mouth.
He crossed the room and put one of the glasses in my hand, his fingers brushing mine longer than they needed to.
"I don't want to talk about the warehouse tonight," he said.
"I didn't say the word."
"You were thinking it very loudly."
He wasn't wrong. Redwood City had been sitting behind my sternum since the planning session earlier that evening, a stone I kept swallowing that refused to stay down.
Ash had run the timeline until the numbers blurred, Tank had checked every exit twice, Renner had gone quiet in the particular way federal agents go quiet when they're scared and trying not to show it, and Jaz had made a joke about earpieces that nobody laughed at.
Odette had fed us all like it was any other night, and that had somehow been the thing that undid me, the ordinary clatter of her spoons against her pots while we planned how not to die.
"Odette sent something home with me," I said, because if I didn't fill the silence with something small it was going to fill itself with something large. "In my bag. She wouldn't say what."
"She does that."
"She patted my cheek like I was going off to war."
Something crossed his face, there and gone, the flinch of a man who knew exactly how close that joke sat to the truth. "You are," he said, quiet, and then, quicker, like he wanted to take the shape of the sentence back before it finished forming, "You're going to be extraordinary."
He stopped there, right at the edge of the word we'd both been avoiding all evening, and let the sentence end early instead.
I watched him choose that, watched the small effort it cost him, and neither of us reached for what he'd almost said.
It sat there in the room with us anyway, a shape we both walked around without touching.
"I brought the laptop," I said instead. "In case Ash needs eyes on the backup relay before we sleep."
"Elena."
"What?"
"Put the laptop away."
I set my wine down harder than I meant to. "You don't get to tell me not to prepare."
"I'm not telling you not to prepare. I'm telling you that you have prepared. You have prepared all day. Tonight I am telling you to put the laptop in the other room and sit with me instead, because there is a difference between diligence and hiding, and you are extremely good at both."
He wasn't wrong about that either. I hated how often he wasn't wrong.
I sat with him instead. We ended up on the couch with the wine going warm and untouched on the table, my legs pulled up under me, his arm along the back of the cushions not quite around my shoulders, like he was leaving the choice of closing that last inch to me.
I closed it. He exhaled like he'd been waiting all evening for permission to.
"Tell me something that has nothing to do with what's coming," I said, and heard myself talk around the word even as I asked him to do the same.
He thought about it, really thought, the way he did everything, like even a distraction deserved his full attention. "I checked something five weeks ago."
"That's oddly specific for a random fact."
"It isn't random." He was almost smiling now, the real one, the one that made the sharp planes of his face go soft. "Do you remember the decoy document? For Renner. Back when we were still pretending you weren't already ours."
Heat climbed my neck, half memory and half something more immediate. "I remember you told me it was too well written. That nobody in government writes that clean."
"And you said you'd add a typo."
"I did add mistakes."
"You added a comma splice in the second paragraph and a verb that disagreed with its subject in the fourth.
" He counted them off on his fingers like a man presenting evidence in a case he'd clearly already won.
"Neither of those is a typo, Elena. A typo is a misspelled word.
You gave me a grammar problem and called it camouflage. "
"Ash told me to add three."
"Ash tells everyone to add three of everything. It is not a sound editorial philosophy." He turned his head against the cushion to look at me properly. "Did you ever actually check whether your typo survived?"
The question stopped me for a second, because I hadn't, not once, not in all these weeks. "I assumed you would have mentioned it if anyone had cleaned it up."
"Nobody did. I checked five weeks ago."
"You've known for five weeks and said nothing?"
"I liked knowing something about you that you didn't know I knew.
" He said it lightly, but his hand had found mine on the cushion between us, his thumb moving slow across my knuckles like he needed the contact more than the conversation.
"I liked that it was mine to keep. A small, useless, perfect fact.
You never fixed it. You never even tried. "
"I got busy," I said, which was true and also nothing close to the whole truth, because the whole truth was that some nights back then I'd lain awake rewriting that stupid document in my head and telling myself I'd get to it eventually, and eventually kept not arriving, and now here we were on the actual eve of something that might not let either of us have many more evenings like this one at all, laughing about a comma splice like it was the safest thing in the world to laugh about.
Maybe it was. Maybe that was exactly why we'd found our way to it.
"I'm glad you never fixed it," he said. "It means there is a document sitting in a federal file somewhere with your fingerprints on it. Uncorrected. I like that you're careless in exactly one place, and it's a place that's mine."
"I'm not careless."
"No," he agreed, and lifted my hand, and pressed his mouth to the center of my palm the way he had the very first time he'd found the small pale scar there, back before either of us had said anything true out loud.
His thumb traced the raised line at the base of my palm now, slow and unhurried, back and forth, the way you'd check a seam to be sure it still held. He didn't ask about it this time.
He already knew the story, the wet cutting board, the kitchen, my father wrapping my hand in a bar towel and telling everyone there I'd earned my stripes, the walk home afterward with my face wet and my hand throbbing and me proud of myself anyway.
He didn't need the words tonight. He only needed his fingers against the proof that I was still whole, still here, still real under his hands.
I felt that touch travel up my arm and settle somewhere under my ribs, warm and frightening at once, because there was no reading it as anything but what it was.
He was checking. Making sure of a fact that mattered more than any fact should be allowed to matter, the night before a warehouse by the water and a man named Wren who wanted us both silenced.
"Sergei."
"Mm."
"Stay here tonight. All of it. Don't let Tank call you at some ungodly hour about contingency plans."
"Tank already knows not to call before dawn." His voice had gone lower, rougher at the edges. "I told him the only emergency that gets through tonight is an actual fire."
"That's oddly specific too."
"I've learned to be specific with Tank. He takes things literally.
" He turned fully toward me then, and whatever had been holding him upright and careful all evening finally let go, and I watched it go, watched the wariness drain out of his face and leave something rawer underneath.
"I don't want to spend tonight bracing, Elena.
I've spent six weeks bracing. Tonight I want to spend on you. "
I didn't answer him with words. I answered by closing the last distance between us and kissing him.
The first press of his mouth was soft, almost questioning.
Then I parted my lips and he answered with a deeper stroke of his tongue, a quiet sound of hunger catching in his throat.
One hand rose to frame my jaw, his thumb tracing slow along my lower lip as if he wanted proof of the kiss beyond just feeling it.
We stayed on the couch like that for a long time, kissing slowly, thoroughly, until the air between us felt charged. When he finally drew back, his eyes were darker than I had ever seen them.
"I need you in the bedroom," he said, voice low. "There's not enough room out here for what I want to do to you."
We stood together. His hand stayed at the small of my back the entire short walk down the hall, as if he were afraid I might change my mind. Inside the bedroom, he turned me to face him and took a moment just to look, eyes traveling over my face, my throat, the open collar of my shirt.
"I've been holding myself back all evening," he said quietly. "Trying to be careful. Trying not to want too much. I'm done with that tonight."
He kissed me again, deeper this time, his hands already working at my clothes with deliberate care.
Each button of my shirt was opened slowly.
When the fabric fell open, he eased it down my arms and set it aside without looking away from me.
His hands settled on the bare skin of my waist, thumbs stroking just above the waistband of my pants.