11. Caleb
ELEVEN
Caleb
I stood there longer than I should have after Novak stepped back.
My body hadn’t gotten the message that the moment was over. My pulse was still hammering, breath shallow, skin tight like it expected him to close the distance again. For a few seconds, I just stared at the space where he’d been standing, my brain trying to catch up with the rest of me.
Jesus Christ.
I dragged a hand down my face. My cock was hard, pressing uncomfortably against my jeans, and the worst part was that some traitorous piece of my brain was still waiting for the feel of Novak’s hand on my jaw, the brush of his fingers on my throat.
Waiting for him to step back into my space as if he had every right to be there.
I swore under my breath and forced myself to move.
The front door was still open. I shut it harder than necessary and slid the lock across, the click sharp in the quiet hallway. The house settled around me again, familiar sounds, familiar air, and I pushed the whole moment aside the way I did with everything else that didn’t make sense.
I forced myself to focus.
Downstairs, the comms room wrapped around me like armor.
Banks of monitors glowed in the dim light while processors hummed steadily, and cables and servers lined the walls.
Screens waited for input, calm and predictable in a way the rest of the world never was.
This was my space—logical, contained, and built on systems that behaved the way they were supposed to.
I dropped into the chair and woke the system with a few quick keystrokes.
Files opened. Databases populated the screens.
Search strings built themselves in my head, and my fingers followed automatically, muscle memory taking over while my brain settled back into the clean lines of data and patterns.
Novak didn’t fit into patterns.
Most people had tells. Motivations that made sense if you tugged at the threads long enough. Novak was different. Efficient violence, zero hesitation, and an unnerving calm that suggested he’d already worked out the outcome before anyone else in the room had realized there was a problem.
And then there was whatever the hell had just happened upstairs.
I ran deeper searches, digging through reports, chatter, and anything connected to the network we were tracking.
The world out there was ugly. Trafficking routes, burner accounts, encrypted drops.
The kind of things you only examined if you were prepared to see how bad people could get when no one was watching.
Hours could disappear in this room if I let them.
Sometimes that was the point.
The soft knock against the door jamb yanked me out of the data spiral.
I glanced up.
Novak was there, with his familiar, steady stare and unreadable expression. He held a mug in one hand, and the aroma of much-needed coffee reached me. He crossed the room without hurry and set it beside my keyboard, along with a bar of Hershey’s chocolate.
“Closest I could find to chocolate donuts,” he said.
I frowned at the bar. Of course, he’d noticed the whole donut thing; it had probably been recorded through his robot eyes.
Or maybe he’s just caring and observant?
Yeah, right.
My fingers hovered over the keys for a second before I took the cup.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he grabbed the spare chair near the wall, turned it around, and sat. Then he pushed off the desk with one boot and wheeled himself back until there was a clear stretch of floor between us.
He stopped about six feet away, maybe a little more.
He always did that, maintaining the same careful distance.
Now he just watched me across the glow of the monitors, silent, patient, the way predators watched the edge of a clearing.
I turned back to the screens, pretending my pulse hadn’t kicked up all over again.
A minute passed in silence, broken only by the soft tap of keys and the low hum of the machines.
“You’re ex-military,” Novak said.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “It’s no secret.”
My years in the military weren’t exactly a secret—some of the missions I’d undertaken were, but for the most part, I’d been intelligence-based and sat with my computers.
I was a brainiac with an Ivy League education who’d hacked the bank responsible for my dad’s death, and that gave the authorities enough leverage to use my skills for five years.
I did my time in Army intelligence, collected enough on things I wasn’t supposed to see to make sure I didn’t have to stay, and the Cave became my landing spot—back to working with Killian, Levi, and Sonya on things that mattered to me.
“You carry a SIG,” Novak continued. “Military issue habit. Army?”
I blinked at him. Most people saw a gun and stopped there. Novak saw the model, the wear pattern, the way it sat within reach.
“Yeah,” I said after a moment. “Intelligence.”
He waited as if there was more coming. There wasn’t. Something in my tone must have told him that, because after a second, he gave a small nod and leaned back a fraction in the chair.
I gestured at him. “I know you were in the infantry.”
“In a way.”
And there it was. An admission that not everything I saw with Novak was real. What did he mean by saying “in a way” when all it did was make my frustration mount? I needed information and to understand.
“All I can find is that you appear to be thirty-four. How close is that?”
“I’m thirty-five, and you’re thirty-two.”
I wasn’t going to ask how he knew that and forged ahead.
“Then there’s a reference to you working recon on an Eastern Europe rotation.
Then, a dishonorable discharge for dereliction of duty resulting in the death of a fellow soldier.
Your file is redacted to the point that I could scrape the black off the paper and start an ink factory. ”
“I solved a problem,” he said simply. For a second, his gaze settled on me, steady and unblinking, but there was a flicker of something that might have been anger… or regret. Was that even possible? Then it was gone, wiped clean as if it had never existed. “Command disagreed with my method.”
“And the problem was?”
“My target was out of control. I was his backup on an incursion, and to expedite his demise, I didn’t back him up.”
“Why is any and all information about you redacted?”
“You know why.”
“Dangerous information,” I summarized, and he nodded. “So, tell me what it says there.”
“Not yet.”
“Then when?”
“When you’re…” he stopped and frowned. “…ready.”
The silence that followed felt heavier than the hum of the machines.
I cleared my throat and forced myself back into work mode.
“Whatever,” I said as if knowing who Novak really was didn’t matter. Tapping a key and pulling a satellite image onto the main screen. “Here’s what I’ve got so far.”
Novak’s attention moved to the monitors.
“Compound sits just inside the tree line here.” I zoomed in, outlining the buildings with the cursor. “Three main structures, two smaller outbuildings, and a perimeter fence. Aerial footage came from open-source satellite passes and a couple of archived survey flights.”
He leaned forward slightly but didn’t interrupt.
“Most of the chatter about them comes through domestic extremism monitoring—DHS fusion center reports, a few ATF notes, the kind of stuff that flags when a prepper group starts stockpiling too much hardware or preaching apocalypse.” I switched to another image.
“They’ve been on the radar for a while after they purchased the compound from the government.
Cult-adjacent ideology, isolationist, armed. ”
Novak studied the layout without comment.
“We’re roughly five miles out from them at this cabin,” I continued. “Too far for clean visual confirmation from the ground without getting spotted, and I can’t put a drone up.”
“Why not?”
“Too risky.” I tapped the screen again. “If they’re the kind of group the reports suggest, they’ll be watching their airspace. One drone buzzing over their compound and they’ll know someone’s looking.”
I pulled up another window, bringing up the surrounding terrain.
“So, we do it the old-fashioned way,” I said. “We get eyes on the place ourselves and set a few cameras along the perimeter.” I glanced at him. “We’ll go tonight. Darkness gives us the best chance of getting close without them clocking us.”
I reached for the chocolate bar, peeled back the wrapper, and snapped off a square. The crack sounded loud in the quiet room.
“Chocolate’s your weakness,” Novak said. “I like Peanut Butter Cups,” he said.
“The robot eats candy?”
He tilted his head. “Only that.”
I took a bite of the chocolate and leaned back a little, eyes on the screens but attention split between the data and the man sitting six feet away.
Sharing food wasn’t intimate, but the room suddenly felt warm and enclosed.
He didn’t step closer. He never did. Always that careful distance, but he watched me eat the chocolate.
I felt it without looking—the weight of his attention tracking every small movement, the way a predator watched something it hadn’t decided whether to catch or let go.
I kept typing, chewing slowly, pretending it didn’t make the back of my neck warm.
Six feet of space separated us.
“What’s with the distance shit?” I blurted, glancing up from the keyboard. “Always six feet.”
“Because six feet is the distance I need to anyone,” he said after a pause, his voice calm in that same matter-of-fact tone he used when explaining how to break a man’s neck. “Closer than that and people start to think they’re safe. They start to believe I won’t hurt them.”
His eyes held mine without blinking, but there was no threat in his gaze, no attempt to intimidate me—just a statement of fact delivered by a man who had already run the numbers and understood what he could do if the line in his head ever slipped.
“And if I ever forget that someone dies.” The words landed in the room without drama, as calm and certain as gravity.