Chapter 6
Tucker
She talks in her sleep.
Not coherent sentences—fragments. Character names, plot points, what sounds like an argument with someone named Ryan. Her brow furrows, and her lips move, and at one point she murmurs, "That's not how he'd say it," with such conviction that I almost answer.
I didn't move her hand. I should have. I didn't.
Now I'm propped on one elbow, watching her sleep, and I'm aware of how this looks.
The word creepy comes to mind. But it's not that.
It's protective—the same instinct that makes me check exits and count heads and position myself between the threat and the principal.
Except Kassidy isn't a principal. She's a woman who fell asleep mid-sentence about narrative structure and who, in the gray morning light, looks younger than twenty-nine.
Softer. Without the armor of sarcasm and self-deprecation, her face is open in a way that makes my chest hurt.
Her hair is everywhere. A dark tangle across the pillow, across her face, one curl stuck to her lip. Without thinking, I reach out and tuck it behind her ear.
She stirs. I pull back. Her eyes flutter open—unfocused, confused—and for a beat she looks at me with no defenses at all. Just warmth. Then reality boots up, and she blinks.
"Morning."
"Morning. Hurricane's dying down."
She sits up, scrubbing a hand over her face, and her hair achieves a new dimension of chaos. "What time is it?"
"0630."
"Is that... six-thirty?"
"Affirmative."
"I don't speak military, Tucker. Just say six-thirty."
"Six-thirty."
She squints at the window. "Still raining."
"Yeah. Roads are closed at least through today. Maybe tomorrow."
This information lands on her face in stages—first frustration, then resignation, then something that might be carefully concealed relief. She's not as upset about being stuck as she wants me to think.
The morning unfolds in careful choreography—two people sidestep awkwardness, pretending they didn't just share a bed for eight hours.
She takes the bathroom first, and I hear her swear at her hair through the door.
I change in the main room, pulling on jeans and a fresh shirt, folding the sweatpants with military precision and tucking them into my bag.
When she emerges, she's wearing an oversized sweater over leggings, face scrubbed clean, hair surrendered to a messy knot on top of her head. She looks like a college student on a Sunday morning, and the sight of her—casual, unperformed—hits me somewhere low and certain.
"Breakfast," she says, with the decisiveness of a general issuing orders.
The inn's restaurant is closed. Power outage killed the kitchen at 0300, and the generator is prioritizing heat and emergency systems. The lobby has a vending machine, a coffee maker that's running on a prayer, and a basket of slightly stale muffins someone produced from the back office.
"This is breakfast?" Kassidy stares at the muffin in her hand like it's personally offended her.
"Breakfast of champions."
"Breakfast of people trapped in a hurricane with no contingency plan."
"You didn't outline this?"
"I didn't outline any of this." She tears the muffin in half with more force than necessary. "My outline for this week was: arrive, write, attend workshops, write more, go home with a finished manuscript. Nowhere in the outline was flee hurricane with security guard, share bed, eat sad muffin."
"Sometimes the best stories happen off-outline."
She gives me a look—sharp, assessing—and then takes a bite of the muffin. "That's either profound or motivational poster material."
"Can't it be both?"
We commandeer the small conference room adjoining the lobby—empty except for a folding table and two chairs.
Kassidy spreads out the vending machine haul like a buffet: granola bars, peanut butter crackers, two bags of chips, a candy bar, and two cups of coffee that taste like they were brewed in a car engine.
"Picnic," she announces, settling cross-legged in her chair.
"Not exactly the Ritz."
"The Ritz doesn't have this view." She nods toward the window, where rain streaks the glass and the street outside is a river of brown water. "Very atmospheric. Good for writing moody scenes."
"Are you always thinking about writing?"
"Are you always thinking about security?"
"Yes."
"Then yes."
We eat in companionable quiet, and I notice the way she arranges her food—crackers in a row, granola bars perpendicular, chips to the side.
Even her snacking has a system. It should be amusing, and it is, but there's something underneath it that I recognize.
Control. The same impulse that makes me check a room's exits before I sit down.
The need to impose order on a world that won't cooperate.
"Tell me about the breakup," I say, because I'm apparently incapable of small talk with this woman.
She freezes, cracker halfway to her mouth. "Why?"
"Because you mentioned it last night, and it sounded like it broke more than your heart."
The cracker goes down. She's quiet for a long moment, staring at the rain.
"Ryan and I were together for three years. He's a tech guy—startup, apps, the whole Silicon Valley package. When we met, he thought the writing thing was charming. A cute quirk. Like a hobby that happened to pay bills."
"Your career."
"Exactly. My career. But he never saw it that way. It was always your little books and your writing thing. And I let it slide because he was smart and attractive and my mother loved him, and when you're in a relationship, you make accommodations."
She picks at the cracker wrapper, folding it into smaller and smaller squares. Origami of avoidance.
"Then my fifth book hit a list. Not a big one, but enough that my agent called it a breakthrough. And instead of being happy, Ryan got... weird. Distant. Competitive, almost. Like my success was a threat."
"Was it?"
"To his ego, apparently. He started making comments. That my plots were formulaic. That I wrote the same book over and over. That I was predictable." She says the word like it has thorns. "He said I outline my books the way I outlined my life—rigid, controlled, no room for surprise."
"And then?"
"And then he left. For someone who was 'spontaneous.
' His word." She meets my eyes. "Which would have been survivable, except the things he said about my writing—they burrowed in.
Every time I sat down to write, I heard his voice.
Predictable. Formulaic. The same book over and over. And the words just... stopped."
The rain drums against the windows. Somewhere in the inn, a door opens and closes.
"He was wrong," I say. Not to be comforting—because it's true. Because anyone who reduces another person's work to a dismissal doesn't deserve the authority she's given his opinion.
"Maybe. But knowing someone's wrong and feeling it are different things."
"Yeah. They are."
She looks at me—really looks—and I see the moment the question forms. "What about you? What's the thing you know but can't feel?"
The answer is immediate and honest, and I give it before the professional part of my brain can intervene.
"That I made the right call, getting out.
The teams were everything. My identity, my purpose, my family.
When I left—when I chose to leave—I knew it was right.
My body was breaking down, and I'd lost people, and the odds were getting worse.
But knowing it was right doesn't make 0430 feel any less empty. "
She's watching me the way she watches her characters—with total attention, like my words are a scene she's trying to understand from the inside.
"So we're both stuck," she says.
"Looks that way."
"I'm stuck in a book and you're stuck in a life."
"Something like that."
"At least we're stuck together." She says it lightly, like a joke, but the look in her eyes is anything but light, and the space between us—across the folding table, between the vending machine wrappers—feels impossibly small.
My phone buzzes. Channel 16.
Riggs: morning, lovebirds. how was the slumber party?
Decker: Storm's weakening. ETA 24 hrs for road clearance.
Calder: Tucker, status on Hartwell.
I type a quick update, pocket the phone. When I look up, Kassidy is watching me with an expression caught between amusement and something else—something that makes her eyes darker and her breathing slightly uneven.
"Your team again?"
"Calder wants a Hartwell update."
"Is that all they wanted?"
"Riggs wanted to know about the slumber party."
She covers her face with both hands. "Oh God."
"He's harmless."
"He's going to think we—"
"We didn't."
"I know we didn't."
"Then it doesn't matter what Riggs thinks."
She drops her hands, and her face is flushed—from embarrassment or something else—and we stare at each other across the remnants of our vending machine picnic.
The moment stretches, taut and warm, and somewhere in my chest, a decision starts to form.
Not about the job. Not about Salt & Steel or civilian life or purpose. About her.
"Kassidy."
"Yeah?"
The word is almost a whisper. She's leaning forward, just slightly, and her lips are parted, and the rain fills the silence between us like a held breath.
My phone erupts. Not a text—a call. Calder.
"Brennan."
"We've got a development. One of Hartwell's staff found a letter slipped under her door. Same handwriting as the previous threats. I need you on her floor in five."
The world snaps back into focus. Mission. Principal. Threat. "Copy. Moving now."
I stand, and Kassidy's expression shifts from something soft and open to something guarded. The moment is gone—whatever it was, wherever it was going—replaced by the reality that I'm here to do a job.
"I have to go. Hartwell situation."
"Go." She waves a hand, but her voice is thin. "Go. I'll be here. With my sad muffins."
At the door, I turn back. She's sitting in the conference room with rain streaking the windows behind her, hands wrapped around a paper cup of bad coffee, and she looks like the opening scene of every book she's ever written.
"Kassidy?"
"Yeah?"
"For the record—your books aren't predictable. And neither are you."
The flush deepens. She opens her mouth, closes it, and settles for a smile that's small and real and wholly hers.
I should be grateful for Calder's timing. Ten more seconds in that conference room and I would have said something I can't take back.
The problem is, I'm not grateful. Not even close.