Chapter 3 #2
"This building has four exterior doors, a wraparound porch with lattice skirting that provides concealment on three sides, and no security system beyond a deadbolt that a determined teenager could defeat with a credit card.
Whoever planted that device walked onto the property, climbed an exterior staircase, placed an IED outside your door, and left without a single person in this building noticing.
It's a soft target, Nox. Too many access points, too many blind spots and whoever did this knows exactly where you sleep. "
"I have a secure terminal in that room. Encrypted VPN, hardware firewall, endpoint protection I built myself. My equipment is upstairs."
"Your equipment can be moved. You can't be rebuilt if the bomb maker decides to get serious about hurting or killing you."
"I'm not running because someone left a firecracker on my doorstep." Her voice is sharp and steady, but the white knuckles on her arms tell a different story. "I have work to do, and I can't do it from some safe house where I'm cut off from my systems."
"Nobody's cutting you off from anything.
But this isn't just about you." I let that land before I continue.
"The Kellaway has other guests. The innkeepers sleep on the first floor.
This device was small and targeted, but whoever built it has access to bigger charges and better placement, and they've already proven they can walk onto this property without being seen.
You stay here, and the next device might not be calibrated for a warning.
And it might not be outside your door. It might be under the porch where an elderly couple sleeps ten feet from the foundation. "
The fight is right there behind her eyes, coiling.
She wants to tell me to go to hell. She wants to tell me that she's survived worse than a pressure switch and a training-manual charge, that she didn't cross an ocean and claw her way through a career in defense contracting by letting men in uniforms make her decisions.
All of it is loading behind that green stare like rounds in a magazine.
But the innkeepers got her. I can see the exact moment it lands, the shift from defiance to calculation, because Nox Bradshaw will fight for herself all day long but she won't put civilians in the crossfire.
"Where?" she asks.
"My place. It's a converted warehouse loft on the waterfront with a single controlled entry, concrete construction, and clear sightlines from every window.
I have a second bedroom that I use for gear storage, but I can have it cleared in an hour.
" I hold her gaze and keep my voice level, tactical, stripped of anything that could be interpreted as personal.
"The B&B is indefensible. My loft is a concrete box with one easy access point through the door and a more difficult one—via what passes for the balcony. That's the math."
That's what I tell her. The math. Because if I phrase it any other way, if I let even a fraction of what went through me when I heard her name and the word explosive in the same sentence leak into this conversation, she'll use it as a reason to refuse.
Her safety matters more than whatever boundaries I'm about to obliterate by putting her in my space.
Hartwell's call confirms what I expected. He orders protective custody. Nox, listening from a few feet away because she refuses to be discussed in absentia, counters that protective custody removes her from the investigation.
The compromise takes longer than it should, negotiated over speakerphone in a parking lot while Nox stands on cold asphalt and I stand between her and the building where someone left a bomb.
She stays on the investigation. She moves to my loft.
Hartwell assigns a security escort for her commute to the comm building.
Rivera will coordinate the NCIS forensic analysis of the device.
Nox packs in twenty minutes. She fills two duffel bags with clothes and personal items, stacks four cases of equipment by the door, adds a pile of external hard drives, and grabs the half-eaten sleeve of shortbread from the plate the innkeepers leave outside her door every evening.
She loads it all into my truck with the efficiency of someone who has moved too many times to be sentimental about the process, and she doesn't look back at the Kellaway as we pull away from the curb.
My loft in the early hours looks exactly the way it always looks, all exposed brick and bare walls with the floor-to-ceiling windows framing dark water.
The kitchen island is clean because I cleaned it yesterday.
The couch faces the flat-screen. The bedroom door is open, and beyond it the bed is made with military corners because some habits survive everything.
Nox stands just inside the front door with her duffel bags at her feet and surveys the space the way she surveyed the breach in Tidewater's network: systematically, cataloging every detail.
"It's very you," she says.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning there's nothing in it."
The observation lands somewhere between my ribs, precise and unapologetic. I ignore it because she's right and because arguing would confirm it, and I haul her equipment cases past her toward the second bedroom.
The gear room takes half an hour to reorganize.
I shift the tactical vests to the bedroom closet, consolidate the weapon maintenance supplies onto one shelf instead of three, and fold the cot I keep for post-deployment decompression against the wall so the double bed that's been buried under equipment bags is actually usable.
The mattress is practically new. The sheets are clean because they've never been slept on.
When I come back to the main room, she's already claimed the kitchen island.
Three monitors are arranged in a semicircle on the granite counter, cables running to the power outlets built into the island.
Her primary laptop sits open in the center, flanked by two external hard drives and the stack of shortbread, which she's placed next to the coffee maker like it belongs there.
She's changed out of the silk robe into leggings and an oversize sweater with the sleeves pushed to her elbows, and she's typing with the focused intensity of someone who has already forgotten that her world shifted two hours ago.
"I have rules," I say.
Her fingers don't pause. "Of course you do."
"Front door stays locked. The deadbolt and the chain. You don't leave without an escort and without telling me where you're going and when you'll be back. If something feels wrong, you tell me. Not tomorrow, not after you've analyzed it, immediately."
"Is there a curfew as well? Perhaps a dress code?"
"You don't answer the door for anyone you don't recognize. If I'm not here and someone knocks, you call me first."
"Riveting. Are we done?"
"One more. NCIS has the device components, but I documented everything on scene and I'll be reviewing my analysis with Rivera's forensic team on base tomorrow.
If we find something, you'll be the second person I tell after Hartwell.
I'm not going to keep you out of the loop.
But I need you to stay alive long enough to use the information. Fair?"
Her typing stops. She looks up from the screen, and something shifts in her expression that I haven't seen before.
The sarcasm is still there, but underneath it there's a reassessment happening, the same adjustment she made in the comm building when I asked about the trigger mechanism and she realized the question meant I'd been paying attention.
"Fair," she says.
"Your room's the second door on the left," I tell her. "Clean sheets, empty closet. You've got your own bathroom in there."
Her typing pauses for half a second. "How domestic of you."
"I have my moments. Get some rest when you're ready. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."
She doesn't answer, which I interpret as acknowledgment because Nox Bradshaw doesn't concede anything.
She'll sleep when the adrenaline fades and the code stops making sense.
Until then, she'll work at my kitchen island in a loft that was empty twelve hours ago, and I'll try to sleep knowing the deadbolt is set, the chain is on, the security system is armed, and there's only one way in.
Sleep comes in fragments, broken by the unfamiliar sound of someone else breathing in my space and the soft, persistent rhythm of her typing through the wall.
Every time I surface, the blue glow of her monitors is still visible under my bedroom door.
At some point the typing stops, and I hear the creak of the guest room door and the quiet click of it closing, and I let myself sink the rest of the way under.
Morning comes on base with the taste of vending machine coffee and the smell of the EOD evidence review room.
Rivera's forensic tech has the device components laid out on the examination bench under fluorescent lights, each piece tagged and logged into NCIS evidence custody.
Rivera gave me access to do the technical analysis alongside her team because nobody on the NCIS side has the ordnance training to read what this device is actually saying.
I work through the components methodically.
The battery pack is a standard nine-volt, available at any hardware store.
The detonator is electronic, commercially manufactured but modified with a solder joint that's cleaner than factory spec.
The wiring is color-coded in a pattern I recognize from the advanced demolition modules at the Naval School Explosive Ordnance Disposal at Eglin.