Chapter 11
THE SANCTUARY
TORQUE
The suite is quiet. The kind of quiet that usually precedes an explosion.
Three hours until the gala. Three hours to kill in a room that suddenly feels too small for two people who just bought velvet handcuffs as a “cover story.”
I toss the black bag onto the bed. It lands with a soft thud that sounds obscenely loud in the stillness.
“Phoenix is completely silent,” Sarah says from the desk. She hasn’t looked at me since we walked in. She’s buried in her tablet, shoulders tight, rebuilding the armor I spent the last two hours chipping away at. “No flags. No alerts. The purchase hasn’t triggered anything.”
“Told you.” I move to the minibar. Need something to do with my hands. “Newlyweds being impulsive. It tracks.”
“It’s reckless.”
“It’s human.” I crack a sparkling water—wishing it was whiskey, deciding against it—and turn to her. “You should try it sometime.”
“I am trying.” She finally looks up. Her eyes are dark, guarded. “I’m wearing the ring. I bought the dress. I let you buy—accessories.”
“Props,” I correct. “They’re just props, Sarah.”
“Are they?”
The question hangs there. Weighted.
“They are if you want them to be.” I take a long drink. The cold burns going down.
She holds my gaze for a second too long, then looks back at her screen. “Phoenix download is at fifty-eight percent. It’s accelerating. We’ve lost twenty hours. Based on the current rate, it hits ninety-nine percent around 0600 tomorrow.”
“And then?”
“And then it locks us out. Permanently. And whatever it’s building becomes self-sustaining.” She taps a key, hard. “We have tonight. Costa has to give us those codes.”
“He will.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am.” I walk over to the window. The Strip is waking up below us, shadows stretching long across the desert floor. “He saw you today. The real you. Not the director.”
“He saw a woman having a panic attack in a sex shop.”
“He saw a woman who’s terrified,” I say softly. “And terror is honest. Costa deals in lies. Honesty is the one thing he can’t ignore.”
Her gaze burns into my back. I don’t turn around. If we make eye contact right now, in this quiet room with the bed five feet away, the conversation is going to shift to something we can’t come back from.
“I need to shower,” she says abruptly.
“Go ahead. I’ll take second watch.”
I listen to her footsteps retreat to the bathroom. The click of the lock. The hiss of the shower starting.
I let out a breath.
Fifty-eight percent. The number glows on the laptop screen I set up on the dresser. A progress bar creeping toward the end of the world. But right now, looking at that closed bathroom door, the end of the world feels abstract.
The sound of the water is real. The knowledge that she’s standing under it, stripping off the layers of the day, is real.
I drop into the chair by the window and force myself to focus on the download stream. Data packets flying by. Encryption keys cycling. The language of the enemy.
It’s safer than thinking about the language of the woman in the next room.
Safe. The word mocks me.
Jake used to say I didn’t know the meaning of the word. You fly like you’re trying to outrun your own shadow, Levi, he told me once, drunk on cheap beer in a hangar in Kandahar. One day you’re going to catch it, and then what?
Then what.
I spin the phone on the table. It’s not my keys—Sarah hates the keys—but the tic is there, demanding release.
The water shuts off.
Silence returns, heavier than before.
I stand. Pace to the door. Pace back. The energy in the room has shifted. Charged. expectant.
When she finally opens the door, steam billows out, carrying the scent of hotel soap and damp skin. She’s wrapped in a robe, hair wet, face scrubbed clean of the makeup she wore earlier.
She looks younger. Softer.
“All yours,” she says, not meeting my eyes.
I brush past her. The air between us crackles—static electricity, or maybe just the friction of two people trying desperately not to touch.
“Sarah.”
She stops. Turns.
“We’re going to win this,” I tell her. “Tonight. We get the codes. We stop it.”
She nods. A small, fragile motion. “I know.”
“Good.”
I go into the bathroom and close the door before I do something stupid. Like tell her that winning the war is starting to matter less than making sure she survives it.
Twenty minutes later, I’m dressed. Tuxedo. Holster under the left arm. Knife in the boot. The uniform of a different kind of war.
I stand by the window, adjusting my cuffs, watching the lights come on across the city. The transformation. Vegas putting on its face for the night.
Behind me, the bathroom door opens.