Chapter 10 #2
He passes me the bottle. The brush of his fingers against mine is brief and warm and completely unnecessary for the mechanics of handing someone a drink.
"Took him months to come back. Fallon's the one who finally pulled him all the way back, not me.
I just watched." His voice flattens. "And what I took from all of it was that caring like that is a liability.
That depth costs more than distance ever will.
That the smartest play is to keep everything surface-level because surface-level doesn't wreck you when it's gone. "
"And now?"
"Now I'm standing on a balcony with a woman who reorganized my kitchen and I'm telling her things I haven't said out loud, and the lesson I learned from watching Holden is starting to look like the wrong one."
"The wrong lesson," I say.
"The wrong lesson." He looks at the water. "Turns out the problem isn't depth. The problem is building your whole life on avoiding it and then wondering why nothing holds."
The words settle. I let them. And because my brain is a traitor that deflects from vulnerability the way his deflects from depth, the detail I fixate on is the other part.
"I didn't reorganize your kitchen."
"You moved the mugs to the shelf above the kettle, put the coffee filters next to the machine instead of above the fridge, and shifted the utensil crock to the left side of the stove." He still doesn't look at me. "You reorganized my kitchen."
I did do all of that. I didn't think he'd notice, or maybe I thought he'd notice and say nothing, which is the kind of distinction that matters when you're standing on a narrow balcony with a man who catalogues everything and comments on almost none of it.
"It was inefficient," I say.
"It was."
"You kept the changes."
"I kept the changes."
Something cracks open in my chest that has nothing to do with bourbon and everything to do with the fact that he noticed what I moved, remembered where I put it, and never rearranged it back.
That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, the least small thing anyone has done for me in a very long time, and he delivered it like a weather report.
I don't reach for him. He doesn't reach for me. But neither of us creates distance, and the space between us stays exactly what it is, close enough that his shoulder almost touches mine, close enough that the warmth from his body registers against my arm through two layers of fabric.
The night is quiet, and the bourbon is warm in my belly, and I am standing on a narrow balcony with a man who just dismantled the logic I've been living by for a decade by describing his own. The parallel is precise enough to be uncomfortable and honest enough to be impossible to dismiss.
Neither of us speaks. A cargo vessel groans somewhere out in the channel, its running lights barely visible through the haze, and the sound rolls across the water and settles over the balcony like a pulse.
Salt crusts the railing under my fingers.
The cold bites at the back of my neck where my hair has shifted, but the entire left side of my body is warm because Griff runs hot the way large, dangerous, stupidly attractive men apparently do, and my skin is tracking his proximity with a precision that my monitoring software would envy.
His hand rests on the railing near mine, knuckles loose, fingers half-curled, forearm corded with the kind of tension that says relaxed is a performance.
If I shifted two inches, my pinky would brush his.
I don't shift. He doesn't shift. And my body is furious about it.
This low, electric pull behind my sternum wants me to close the distance and resents me for holding still and absolutely refuses to be reasoned with.
I've dismantled encryption protocols that the NSA couldn't crack. I should be able to manage my own nervous system.
The cargo vessel's horn sounds once, low and long, and fades into the dark. Griff's thumb traces a slow line along the railing, absent or deliberate, and either option is a problem.
My phone buzzes inside the loft. The sound hits sharp against the glass top of the island, cutting through the quiet like a blade, and my spine straightens before the thought fully registers.
I push off the railing and cross to the island. The monitoring framework has flagged an alert, red and blinking against the blue of the screens.
Garrick's credentials have been wiped. His access logs show a systematic purge initiated within the last hour: authentication tokens revoked, session histories deleted, contractor profile scrubbed from the Meridian Systems directory.
The deletion sequence is methodical, executed in reverse chronological order, newest records first, oldest last, the way someone trained in operational security would sanitize a digital footprint.
Every command followed the last without hesitation, each deletion clean and complete. The entire purge completed in minutes.
"This wasn't panic," I say, and Griff is behind me before I finish the sentence, close enough that his chest nearly touches my shoulder, reading the timestamps on the screen.
He smells like bourbon and salt air and clean skin, and the operational part of my brain files that away under irrelevant while the rest of me disagrees.
"He ran this like a checklist. Rehearsed. "
"Go-bag protocol." Griff's voice has shifted.
The balcony is gone, the bourbon is gone, and what's left is the operator, low and clipped, three moves ahead.
His hand lands on the back of my chair, and his thumb grazes the space between my shoulder blades once before it goes still.
"He had an exit built before he ever started. "
I pull up the NCIS surveillance feed and cross-reference it against his known locations.
His apartment is dark. His vehicle is gone.
The physical surveillance team reports a gap in coverage during the afternoon shift rotation, when Hartwell's expanded task force briefing pulled resources for reassignment.
Garrick timed his exit to the window, which means he knew the coverage pattern or he got lucky. My money is on the former.
Rivera's number is dialing on my phone before I've finished reading the surveillance log. I can feel Griff still at my shoulder, his weight settled, his focus locked on the same data.
"He's running," I tell Rivera when she picks up. "Credentials wiped, devices scrubbed, apartment appears empty. He knows we're watching, and he's burned everything."
Rivera's voice is tight and controlled. "When?"
"Within the hour. The purge was systematic, and the surveillance gap lines up. He planned this."
"Which means the timeline just moved up," Griff says, loud enough for Rivera to hear. "If Garrick ran, the handler knows we're close. They won't wait for the exercise to go live. They'll trigger early or accelerate."
Rivera is quiet for a beat. "I'll wake Hartwell. Briefing first thing."
The call ends. The loft is silent except for the low whir of cooling fans and the weight of Griff still standing behind me.
The joint exercise is less than two days out, and the man who was supposed to trigger the attack has vanished, which means either the attack dies with his disappearance or someone else picks up the detonator.
I know which one is more likely. Anyone who builds infrastructure this patient, this layered, this resilient doesn't hang an entire operation on a single point of failure.
Griff moves to the couch. He stretches out on his back with one arm behind his head and his boots still on, positioning himself between the front door and the island where I work, the same way he's positioned himself in every room we've shared since the B&B device.
He's not going to bed while I'm awake. That stopped being about security protocol weeks ago.
"Get some sleep," I tell him.
"I'll sleep when you do."
"Then you won't sleep."
"I know."
His eyes close within minutes anyway, his breathing settling into the slow, steady rhythm that means his body overruled his intention. Even asleep, the line of his jaw is set, and one hand rests on his chest in a loose fist that could tighten in a second.
The monitors glow blue. The code scrolls. The conspiracy architecture I built this morning stares back at me from the center screen, clean and thorough and missing the one piece that matters: the handler's identity, the person at the top.
I'm going to find it. Not just because the mission requires it or because Hartwell ordered it or because Rivera's career depends on it.
Because the man on the couch behind me bought a monitor arm without being asked and learned how I take my tea and stood on this balcony tonight telling me things that cost him.
And somewhere between the shortbread on his counter and the rings I leave beside his coffee maker every morning, I stopped calculating the exit.
My fingers settle on the keys. Behind me, Griff breathes. The cursor blinks.
I start pulling the thread.