Chapter 1 #2
Almost. She uses that word like a blade, cutting close enough to draw blood without breaking skin. Almost charming, almost tolerable, almost interesting. Every almost is a reminder that I haven't crossed whatever line she's drawn, along with the unspoken question of whether I'm going to try.
I finish my notes and close out the inspection log. "Everything checks out."
"What a relief. I can sleep tonight."
"You don't sleep. That's the other national security risk."
The corner of her mouth loosens. Nox doesn't smile at me.
But the set of her jaw gives a fraction, something behind her eyes shifts, and the hard edge she keeps locked in place slips for half a second before she puts it back.
I don't blink. If I blinked, I'd miss it, and I've been chasing that fraction for weeks.
"Is there anything else, Lieutenant, or can I return to the work your inspection so rudely interrupted?"
"Just doing my job, Bradshaw."
"Yes, well. Some of us have jobs that produce results."
I pocket the tablet and head for the door. I pause in the frame. "Same time next week?"
"I'll count the minutes."
Her voice follows me into the corridor, and the worst part is that I believe her. Not the sarcasm, but the heat underneath it that she buries in clipped consonants and British disdain. The same heat that makes her track my movements around her workspace when she thinks I'm not paying attention.
I'm always paying attention. And that's becoming less of a professional asset and more of a personal problem.
Holden is waiting by the water fountain outside the comm building, arms crossed, leaning against the wall with the kind of deliberate nonchalance that means he's been watching and has already drawn every conclusion worth drawing.
A pair of junior officers pass us on the sidewalk, stopping to salute as they go.
Somewhere across the quad, a diesel engine turns over in one of the motor pool bays, and the flag above the admin building snaps in the onshore wind that's been building since morning.
Tidewater hums like this at midmorning, the constant low-grade machinery of a joint base running at operational tempo.
Personnel moving between buildings, radios squawking from open vehicle windows, the distant thud of a helicopter lifting off the pad near the waterfront.
Holden pushes off the wall and falls into step beside me, matching my pace the way he's done since BUD/S. He's half a head shorter than I am but covers the ground like he owns it, steady and unhurried, a man who figured out a long time ago that speed and urgency are different things.
"How'd the sweep go?" he asks.
"It was clean."
"Uh-huh. And Nox?"
"Alive. Caffeinated. Hostile."
"So, your type."
"I don't have a type."
Holden laughs, the low, knowing sound of a man who used to make this exact denial and lost the argument.
He's settled now, solid in a way he wasn't six months ago.
Fallon did that, or Fallon gave him permission to stop pretending he didn't want it.
Either way, he moves differently these days.
He's less coiled. Like a man who stopped running surveillance on his own life and decided to live in it.
"I walked past the comm building last Tuesday," he says. "Heard her laughing. Your voice was the only other one in the room."
"She wasn't laughing. She was mocking me. There’s a significant difference."
"Is there?"
Holden stops walking. He waits until I stop too.
"Griff." He holds my gaze with the patience of someone who's earned the right to say whatever comes next.
"I did this exact thing for months with Fallon.
The denial, the deflection, the insistence that professional interest is just professional interest. I'm not giving you a speech because you'd hate it and I'd feel stupid.
But the fact that you time your Tuesdays around that security sweep tells me more than anything coming out of your mouth right now. "
"I time my Tuesdays around the duty roster. She happens to be on it."
"Sure."
"I'm serious."
"I know you think you are." He claps my shoulder and starts walking. "Fallon's making dinner Thursday. Come by. Bring beer. Don't bring excuses."
He heads toward the SEAL compound without waiting for a response, because Holden doesn't argue past the point where he's already won. It's an infuriating quality in a best friend. A useful quality in an operator.
The rest of the day grinds through routine ops, the kind of methodical busy work that fills hours and keeps hands occupied and should keep my head from circling back to a pair of green eyes and a mouth that turns every sentence into something I want to answer. It should. It doesn't.
My loft sits a short drive off base, a converted warehouse on the waterfront. Second floor, exposed brick, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the bay. It's an open plan with minimal furniture. People who visit call it curated.
What they actually mean is empty. A couch, a bed, a kitchen island, a flat-screen mounted to bare brick. There are no photographs on the walls. Nothing that says someone built a life here rather than just parked one temporarily.
I didn't design it this way. It just happened, the same way everything in my life just happens. Temporary posting, temporary quarters, temporary arrangements with women who understand the terms upfront and don't stick around long enough to leave evidence.
I approach, I assess, I render safe, I walk away. The same philosophy that keeps my hands steady on a wire keeps everything else stripped to essentials.
I've been at Tidewater for years and the walls are still bare. That used to feel like discipline. Lately it's started to feel like the inside of an empty casing. All the right dimensions, all the right structure. Nothing at the core.
I drop my gear by the door, pull a beer from the fridge, and settle onto the couch with my phone. A base-wide personnel update has been sitting in my inbox since noon, the kind of administrative email nobody reads but everyone receives. I scroll through out of habit and stop on a familiar entry.
Staff Sergeant Griff Morrison assigned permanent EOD position effective immediately.
Staff Sergeant. Morrison.
I'm a Lieutenant. My last name is Holland.
Admin has butchered it on every update since I transferred to Tidewater, and at this point correcting them feels like defusing the same device twice.
The month before, I was "Sergeant First Class G.
Holloway." Before that, "Chief Warrant Officer Griffin.
" The only thing they consistently get right is the EOD part, and even that had a typo once.
I set the phone on the armrest and let the grin sit for a while, staring at the wall across from the couch.
Bare brick, same as the day I moved in. There's a nail hole about halfway up where a previous tenant hung something.
A picture, a clock, a mirror. Something that said this is where I live and I intend to stay.
I bought a framed print once, a black and white aerial shot of the Texas Hill Country that reminded me of the view from my uncle's ranch.
It's still leaning against the wall inside the bedroom closet, wrapped in the brown paper it came in.
I told myself I'd hang it when I had the right hardware.
That was over a year ago, and the hardware store is ten minutes from my front door.
Bay light shifts amber through the windows, then copper, then the deep blue-gray of a Virginia coast evening. A gull screams somewhere over the water. The refrigerator hums.
This used to be the best part of the day. No obligations. No entanglements. No one on the other side of a door waiting for something I'm not built to give.
Tonight the quiet just feels like quiet. The kind with nothing in it.
My phone buzzes on the coffee table, and the caller ID reads CMDR HARTWELL. I sit up, the beer abandoned, because Hartwell doesn't dial personal phones after hours for anything routine.
"Holland."
"Lieutenant. I need you at the comm building in thirty." Hartwell's voice is tight, stripped down to an operational minimum. "We have a situation."
"What kind?"
"Our communication systems have been breached.
Classified training schedules were accessed and transmitted to an unknown external recipient.
" A beat of silence follows, the kind that precedes a controlled detonation.
"Ms. Bradshaw is already on-site. Her routine audit just became an active counterintelligence investigation. "
The beer goes warm on the table. The loft recalibrates from rest to operational.
"On my way."
I'm reaching for my boots as the call disconnects.
Weeks of security sweeps. Sharp banter and green eyes and coffee strong enough to strip paint.
Weeks of telling myself that Nox Bradshaw was a Tuesday obligation, a checkbox on a duty roster, another temporary arrangement in a life designed around temporary everything.
The comm building is minutes away if I push it.
I push it.