Chapter 5 Off-Limits Looks a Lot Like Her
FIVE
OFF-LIMITS LOOKS A LOT LIKE HER
KNIGHT
Our “HQ” is a converted office that’s a closed-down print shop that still smells faintly like toner and broken dreams.
Arrow calls it Riverside because it overlooks the river.
I call it evidence that we’re all one bad decision away from a felony conviction.
The stairwell light flickers as I climb, the metal door at the top guarded by a pin pad, a deadbolt, and the illusion that we’re in control of any of this. I hear the faint sound of music before I punch the code.
The lock clicks.
The second the door swings open, I know something’s wrong.
There’s music blasting—loud, obnoxious, aggressively upbeat. The kind of bubblegum pop song that would never end up on our shared playlist unless someone was actively trying to annoy me.
Also?
The system’s already on.
And someone’s sitting at my station.
“Good morning, sunshine!” Lark Dawson spins in my chair like she bought it, with a wide smile, and fingers sticky with orange dust from an open bag of cheese curls.
On my keyboard.
I stop in the doorway.
Very calmly.
Because if I don’t, I’m going to say something that gets me stabbed with a mechanical pencil.
“How,” I say, “did you get in here?”
She grins. “Door.”
“No.”
“Stairs?”
“Lark.”
She sighs dramatically and points over her shoulder with the half-empty bag of chips. “Arrow thought I should see the place if I’m going to be part of the team.”
My eyes narrow. “Arrow is asleep on the couch with a hoodie over his face. Arrow doesn’t think anything until after coffee.”
She glances over at the couch where Arrow is, indeed, dead to the world, hood up, one arm hanging off the edge, an empty energy drink can on the floor.
“Okay, technically I got here before he passed out,” she amends. “I may have sent him a fake security alert on his phone that said you were under active cyber attack from a North Korean botnet.”
I stare.
“He rushed down here and let me in. Then realized the alert was fake. Then fell over. Kind of impressive, honestly.”
My eye twitches. “You faked a security alert on our secure channel?”
“I tested your incident response time,” she corrects. “You passed. Barely.”
I drag a hand down my face. “Do you own a single respectable boundary?”
“I’m wearing pants,” she says. “That feels like growth.”
She is wearing pants. Tight black jeans, torn at the knees, combat boots laced up her calves. Black tee. Leather jacket hanging off the back of my chair like she plans on staying awhile.
Her hair’s twisted up in a messy knot, with streaks of purple catching the light. There’s a silver hoop in her nose now, and two studs in one ear that weren’t there the last time I saw her at one of Gage’s half-assed family dinners.
She looks like trouble.
She looks like everything I said I’d never touch.
And all my body hears is touch.
I look away, jaw tight. “Feet off the desk.”
She smirks at me, then sloooowly lowers them. The boots hit the floor with a thud. “Better?”
“Barely.”
The music changes tracks. Something even more bubblegum.
I gesture at the speakers. “Turn that off.”
She jabs a few keys. “Rude. You know, Mozart isn’t the only playlist option in the world.”
“I don’t listen to Mozart.”
“You feel like a Mozart person.”
“I feel,” I say flatly, “like changing every password we have.”
She laughs, leaning back, totally at home in a place she should not be anywhere near.
Ozzy shuffles in from the kitchenette, hair messy, t-shirt crooked, holding a mug of coffee that may not technically contain coffee. He blinks at us.
“Oh,” he says. “You told him.”
I turn slowly. “Told me what?”
Lark wiggles her fingers. “That you’re getting a promotion. I’m your new nightmare.”
Ozzy sips, winces, and mutters, “To be fair, she’s been our nightmare for a while now.”
“Ozzy,” I say through my teeth, “why is she inside our secure operations space?”
He shrugs, dropping into his rolling chair. “Because she knows where all our digital bodies are buried and she’ll happily dig them up and parade them across the internet if we say no?”
Lark lifts her bag of cheese curls. “Also, I brought snacks.”
“This is not a democracy,” I growl. “This is a very illegal paramoral operation that requires discipline and trust and—”
“Big words,” she says. “Very inspiring. Ten out of ten, would ignore again.”
I step closer, lowering my voice. “Lark. You are not going on missions with us.”
She cocks her head. “You mean like I didn’t go on the last three?”
I freeze. “You what?”
Arrow stirs on the couch, scratches his chest, mumbles something about “idiots cleared to channel four” and then goes back to sleep.
Ozzy looks up from his screen briefly. “You didn’t know she was following you?”
“No,” I snap.
“I did,” Ozzy says. “She brought donuts once. Good ones.”
I stare at him.
He shrugs. “What? It’s hard to find a decent maple bar in this city.”
My head feels like it’s going to explode.
“I am surrounded,” I mutter, “by traitors.”
Lark swirls the office chair so she’s facing the main monitor wall. Her gaze flicks over live feeds, scripts, lines of code.
She doesn’t look lost.
She looks like she belongs.
And that might be the most dangerous thing of all.
“Look,” she says, pointing at one of the inactive feeds. “Your outer ring cameras on the west stairwell have a thirty-second blind spot every looping cycle. If someone with half a brain and no morals found it, they could get in without tripping half your alerts.”
I move to the console, and she’s… right.
“I patched that weeks ago,” I argue.
“You patched it badly,” she replies. “Your fix made a different hole two directories over.”
I pull up the routing.
…Shit.
She did find it.
She did fix it.
I feel a cold weight settle in my chest.
I don’t like being outplayed.
I especially don’t like being outplayed by Gage’s little sister.
She must read something in my face because her smile softens. Just a little.
“Relax, Hayes. I’m not trying to ruin you. If I wanted to, you’d already be trending online with a really unfortunate filter.”
“That’s… not helping.”
She shrugs. “I’m not the enemy.”
“That’s exactly what someone untrained would say before getting themselves killed.”
She leans back, and for a split second, I see her how she used to be—Lark at fifteen, hair in braids, oversized hoodie hanging off one shoulder, giggling on Gage’s couch while she stole fries off my plate and asked invasive questions like why don’t you ever smile?
Back when she was just Gage’s kid sister.
Back when she was off-limits in a way that was easy.
She’s not a kid now.
Nothing about the way she looks is easy.
Her eyes drag over my face. “Why do you act like I’m breakable?”
“Because,” I say tightly, “I remember when you were fourteen and cried for an hour because some senior boy canceled a date. And I told Gage I’d break his legs if he came near you again.”
She snorts. “You’re talking about Tommy Howard. He cried more than I did.”
“Doesn’t matter. You were young.”
“I was annoying,” she corrects. “I’m still annoying. I’m also twenty-four, trained in Krav Maga, and capable of reciting every password you’ve changed in the past eighteen months.”
That last part is not comforting.
“At the end of the day,” I say, “you’re still Gage’s little sister.”
“Newsflash,” she says, standing, the bag of cheese curls now abandoned. She steps into my space like boundaries are a suggestion. “I’m not a ‘little’ anything anymore.”
She’s close.
Too close.
I catch the glint of a silver chain at her throat, the edge of a tattoo curling up the inside of her wrist. Her lashes are clumped with mascara, and there’s a tiny smudge of orange cheese dust on her lip.
I want to swipe it off with my thumb.
Or my mouth.
An electric pulse ticks under my skin.
I break eye contact first.
Because if I don’t, I’m going to do something incredibly stupid.
Behind us, Arrow groans and sits up, hood falling back. “Why are you two arguing at a volume that makes my soul hurt?”
“Your fault,” I say. “You let her in.”
Arrow blinks at Lark, then at me. “You two still doing the denial tango?”
Lark grins. “He doesn’t believe in my immense value.”
“She is unauthorized,” I counter.
“She’s also holding our encrypted activity logs hostage,” Arrow reminds me. “So maybe don’t piss her off before coffee.”
I glare. “You agreed to this?”
Arrow shrugs. “I agreed to evaluate. Big difference.”
Lark lifts her chin. “And how’s my evaluation going?”
Arrow sips whatever’s in his mug and sighs. “You broke in, tested our systems, found vulnerabilities, and didn’t hand us to the police. I’d say you’ve got potential.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“I still don’t like it,” I mutter.
Arrow looks at me. “You don’t have to like it. You just have to make sure she doesn’t die.”
I go very still.
He’s not joking.
He is absolutely, horrifyingly sincere.
Lark watches my face like she’s waiting for the verdict.
My brain catalogs the reality: she knows too much, can do too much, and has already inserted herself into our operations. Cutting her out now would be like trying to remove a virus with a hammer.
My heart catalogs something else: a flash of her swinging that bat, the way she moves—quick, efficient, unafraid. The spark in her eyes when she taunts me.
She is chaos.
I am control.
We could be lethal.
Or we could be a disaster.
Probably both.
I exhale, slow. “Fine.”
Arrow raises a brow. “Fine?”
“Fine,” I grind out. “She can shadow. Under strict conditions.”
Lark’s grin could power the grid.
“I get a vest, right?” she asks. “And a comm? And one of those little earpieces? I always wanted an earpiece.”
“No,” I say.
Arrow laughs. “Yes.”
Ozzy smiles. “She can have mine.”
I stare at the three of them. “You’re all dead to me.”
Lark bounces on her toes. “When’s our next mission?”
“Not our,” I correct immediately. “Mine. You are observing. Quietly. From a safe distance.”
She tilts her head, batting her lashes. “Sure, Knight. Whatever you say.”
She’s lying.
I can tell.
She knows I can tell.
And she doesn’t care.
She steps backward, snagging her jacket from the chair, twirling her bat once. “Text me the deets. I’ll bring snacks and backup.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Lark.”
“Yeah?”
I meet her gaze and hold it. “You’ll stay in the car.”
She smirks. “Absolutely not.” She saunters out, humming that stupid pop song, boots heavy on the stairs.
When the door shuts behind her, I stand there for a long moment in the quiet hum of the monitors.
Arrow whistles low. “You are so screwed, man.”
Ozzy nods. “It’s like watching a cat fall into a bathtub in slow motion.”
I sit down at my console, fingers flying over the keyboard, pulling up the next target file just to give my brain something to focus on that isn’t Lark’s mouth.
“She’s Gage’s little sister,” I say under my breath.
“Uh-huh,” Arrow replies.
“She’s off-limits.”
Arrow nods like he isn’t buying it. “Sure.”
“I’m not touching that.”
Ozzy snorts. “Keep telling yourself that, big guy.”
I scowl at the screen.
Lark’s right.
I hate that she’s right.
We leave trails. We leave loose ends. We don’t always finish.
If she really can help us close those gaps, I’d be an idiot not to use her.
But as I watch the security feed of her walking down the block, spinning her bat and smiling like she just won a prize, one horrible, inescapable thought hits me—
I’m not sure who’s hunting who anymore.
And I have a sinking feeling…
I’m the one being stalked.
By my best friend’s little sister.
In combat boots.
With a bat.
And God help me, I’ve never wanted to be prey so badly in my life.