12. Novak
TWELVE
Novak
Climbing was the easy part. It always was.
The trees along the perimeter of the compound were old-growth, thick-trunked, and tall enough to push above the surrounding canopy.
Their bark was ridged and rough, perfect for climbing without spikes, and the branches were spaced wide enough to support both my weight and the equipment Caleb wanted positioned along the ridge.
Correctly placed cameras would give us a full view of the compound approach roads, the perimeter patrol routes, and the outer buildings where movement tended to cluster when a place was active.
Below me, Caleb crouched at the base of the tree with the equipment case open beside him. Inside, the cables were coiled into loops, each camera wrapped in a matte-black casing designed to eliminate reflections. He had laid them out with the same neat precision.
He handled the technology. I handled everything else.
“Higher,” he murmured into his mic, not even looking up. “Angle needs to clear the ridge line.”
I climbed another few feet, shifting my weight carefully until my boot wedged against a branch thick enough to anchor my balance. From that height, the forest opened, and the compound came into view through the break in the trees.
The place was bigger than it had appeared on the satellite imagery.
A long gravel approach road fed into a central yard where two larger buildings sat under floodlights, while several smaller structures clustered closer to the tree line.
The perimeter fence cut a rough square through the forest, reinforced in places with secondary wire where the terrain dipped.
Generator noise drifted through the trees, low and constant.
Movement flickered near the eastern fence line. A guard patrolled along a predictable route nowhere near us, but I kept an eye on them. The security for this place extended five feet from the fencing all around, but we were placing what we had, twenty, sometimes thirty feet, beyond that.
I locked the mounting bracket into the bark, then adjusted the lens until it covered the main road and the outer gate where vehicles would have to slow before entering.
Once the camera was set, I paused and studied the compound again.
Two guards were near the main building—one patrolling the perimeter.
Light spilling from a side structure that could have been storage or living quarters.
The pattern of activity suggested some lack of discipline.
A professional security team would conduct overlapping patrols and provide coverage of blind spots.
They were trying to do the right thing, but their thinking stopped halfway through the problem, and people like that were easy to kill.
Footsteps.
Slow and unhurried, the rhythm of someone who believed the woods around them were empty.
A guard drifted along the narrow trail that ran parallel to the fence line, the glowing tip of his cigarette flaring orange every few seconds as he inhaled. He walked with the lazy gait of a man killing time on a patrol he didn’t expect to become dangerous.
“Movement on your six,” I whispered.
I pressed closer to the trunk and slowed my breathing. Below me, Caleb had already gone still. One hand rested on the equipment case while the other hovered near the cable he had been threading through the bark.
The guard stopped less than ten feet from where Caleb crouched in the shadows, flicked ash into the dirt, and stared into the trees as if they were nothing more than background scenery.
I studied the distance between us.
Measured the drop.
Two seconds to reach the ground.
One second to cover the space between us.
Another second to drive the knife under his jaw and sever the artery before he understood what was happening.
The calculation was automatic.
But killing him would create issues. A missing guard triggered searches, and searches triggered lights, radios, and men sweeping the forest with flashlights and rifles.
The probability of discovery would increase with every person I killed.
That kind of attention would put Caleb in the open.
The guard could live—for now—because keeping Caleb unseen mattered more than satisfying the simple efficiency of eliminating a threat.
Unless he came closer, and then all bets were off.
Eventually, he finished his cigarette, crushed the butt under his heel, and wandered back along the trail toward the compound lights.
Only when the sound of his footsteps faded into the hum of the generators did Caleb release the breath he had been holding.
The sound pulled something inconvenient to the front of my thoughts—the memory of the way he had breathed earlier when we broke apart after the kiss, his mouth still so close to mine that if the interruption hadn’t come through the comms, we wouldn’t have stopped where we did.
I shut that line of thinking down immediately.
“Done?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, landing beside him without sound.
We headed to the next tree along the ridge, keeping to the darker line of cover where the branches blocked the compound lights. The terrain sloped here, the ground damp under the moss and scattered with fallen branches from storms.
Caleb stepped over one of them, and his boot slid on the slick moss beneath it, and his balance went sideways fast.
I closed my fingers around his arm while my other palm braced on his chest to steady him and the momentum brought him hard against me.
He was breathing faster now, more from surprise than exertion, and I could feel the rise and fall of it under my hand.
In the dim light filtering through the branches, I could see the line of his jaw, the faint scar near his mouth I had cataloged earlier, the way his eyes flicked toward mine as if assessing whether I was going to let go.
It would have been simple to release him straight away.
Instead, my hand stayed where it was a fraction longer than necessary. Not because he still needed the support—his balance had already returned—but because releasing him felt final, and I found I hadn’t finished assessing the solid weight of him against me.
The proximity sharpened everything—the warmth of his breath, the tension in the muscles under my palm, the memory of the way his mouth had tasted earlier when he closed the distance between us without hesitation.
“Careful,” I said quietly.
“Yeah,” he muttered, though he hadn’t pulled away yet either.
There was a crackling and rustling of something in the undergrowth to our left.
My knife was in my hand before the sound stopped.
I stepped forward, positioning myself between Caleb and the direction of the noise. The narrow gap between two trees formed the most likely approach from the trail, and I filled that space without thinking.
The bushes rustled, and I bent my knees, ready to kill.
Then a raccoon burst across the trail and disappeared into the darkness beyond the trees.
Behind me, Caleb released a breath that sounded suspiciously like suppressed laughter. “Good to know you’re on top of the raccoon threat.”
I didn’t turn around immediately. My pulse had already settled back into its normal rhythm, and the knife remained steady in my grip, ready in case the animal had only been masking something larger.
After another few seconds of silence, I slid the blade back into its sheath.
“Next camera,” I said.
Work first.
Everything else later.
By the time we returned to the cabin, it was an hour before dawn, and the temperature had dropped enough that the spring air carried the clean, sharp smell of pine and damp earth.
Caleb went straight to the table, dropping his bag beside the laptop before opening the machine and powering it up. The screen flickered to life, pale light spilling across the room as he began connecting to the cameras we had placed along the ridge.
One by one, the feeds appeared: four cameras, then five.
Each window displayed grainy night-vision images of the compound—perimeter fence, approach road, and the yard between the buildings, where two guards were still talking under the floodlights.
“We’ve got coverage,” Caleb said, leaning closer to the screen as he adjusted the zoom on one of the feeds.
I stayed near the counter and watched him work.
When he was inside a system, his posture changed, shoulders angled forward, his attention narrowing until the world around him seemed to fall away. He pulled up additional overlays—heat signatures, a slow scan of wireless traffic bleeding out from the compound buildings.
It made it easier for me to study him.
He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, unaware that I was watching him from across the room.
The memory of him stumbling into me replayed with annoying persistence.
My hands remembered the exact shape of the moment—where his arm had been, the pressure of his chest, the quick shift of his balance—and some quiet, analytical part of my mind classified it the same way it did terrain or exits, as if confirming where Caleb was safest when things moved too fast. The weight of him against my hands. The warmth of his chest under my palm.
And the kiss earlier, the way he had closed that final inch between us as if hesitation had never occurred to him. Attraction usually came down to three simple things: proximity, opportunity, and timing. Right now, we have all three, which meant I needed to be careful.
My gaze drifted to the camera feed showing the perimeter trail where the guard had smoked earlier.
Anyone who came through those woods would appear on our screens long before they reached the cabin, their route picked up by at least two of the cameras Caleb had positioned along the ridge.
And if they didn’t…
Then they would meet me first, and the encounter would be brief.
Behind me, Caleb’s chair scraped softly across the wooden floor and I turned enough to see him in my peripheral vision as he leaned back from the laptop and rolled the tension from his shoulders.
He had been hunched over the keyboard for nearly twenty minutes, eyes on the shifting grids of data and camera feeds, but now he stood and stretched, one hand braced against the edge of the table, his shirt tight across his back before he pushed his fingers through his hair and exhaled slowly.
“Everything’s stable,” he said. “Cameras are holding, signal’s clean, and their network traffic is exactly as messy as I hoped it would be.” He glanced toward me. “You can stop glaring at the monitors.”
I hadn’t realized how still I had been standing.
“I’m not glaring,” I said.
Caleb’s mouth twitched slightly. “You absolutely are.”
Silence settled between us again. The cabin was small enough that the sound of every movement carried—the quiet hum of the laptop fan, the faint rustle of wind against the walls, the slow rhythm of Caleb’s breathing as he watched me across the room.
Proximity. Opportunity. Timing.
The variables were still present, and testing a theory was rarely a mistake.
I pushed away from the counter and crossed the room in a few steps, and Caleb didn’t react or shift when I stopped in front of him, as if settling in to see what I was going to do next.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me as if you’re solving something.” His eyes narrowed. “Am I a problem you’re trying to figure out, Novak?”
“Possibly.”
That answer earned a short, disbelieving laugh. “Jesus,” he muttered. “You’re unbelievable.”
I touched his face, and his gaze snapped back to mine.
“You keep doing that,” he whispered.
“You keep letting me,” I replied.
I felt the subtle shift in his posture before he reached out and caught the front of my shirt.
The pull was sudden, but for a fraction of a second, Caleb hesitated, gripping my shirt. His gaze flicked to my mouth, then back to my eyes, the question there—one last chance to stop.
The distance between us disappeared.
The kiss wasn’t hesitant this time. Caleb closed the last inch with the same decisiveness he had shown earlier, his mouth crashing into mine as if the argument between us had already been settled somewhere in his head and this was the conclusion.
The impact pushed me half a step back, his hand still gripping the front of my shirt as though he had no intention of letting me retreat.
For a brief second, I did nothing except register the shock of contact and the sharp rush of adrenaline following it, the quiet, dangerous awareness that this had crossed the line from curiosity into something far harder to step away from.
Caleb exhaled against my mouth, a rough breath that sounded more like frustration than hesitation, and the sound snapped the last thread of restraint I still had in place.
My hand tightened on his jaw, holding him there as I answered the kiss properly this time. The distance we had kept between us all night collapsed in an instant, the tension that had been building since the woods breaking as I pulled him closer rather than letting him go.
The laptop continued to hum behind him, camera feeds glowing across the screen as the compound carried on unaware in the distance. Outside the forest, the cameras remained still, watching every approach road and perimeter path we had mapped earlier in the night.
Inside the cabin, however, the careful distance we had maintained since we’d first met was gone.