Behind me, Jack snorts. “Play nice, children.”
Bran steps inside.
The room shrinks.
I’m only five-two on a generous day. My apartment is built to scale for someone five-eight, maybe, tops. Bran is…not that. He’seasily six-four, maybe six-five with the boots. His shoulders take up a disturbing percentage of the available air.
He does a slow, automatic scan of the space—door, windows, kitchen, hallway. It’s surgical, impersonal—kind of like the way I look at code.
“You’ve got acceptable locks,” he says, turning to look at the door as he closes it behind him. His voice is low, a little rough around the edges. As though he doesn’t use it very often. “Deadbolt’s decent. Chain is shit. This wood frame is useless.” He wanders over to the windows and inspects them. “Your windows are the best part of this set-up.”
“Thank you?” I say. “I think?”
He nods at the tiny camera nestled in the corner of the living room ceiling. “Where does that feed?”
I bristle. “Are you asking because you’re impressed or because you’re about to tell me everything I did wrong?”
“Both,” he says without missing a beat.
Jack looks like he’s trying not to smile.
“The cameras feed to my laptop and an encrypted external,” I say grudgingly. “Plus a cloud server with redundancy. If he tries to cut my power or my internet, I still have copies.”
“And the system alerts…who?” Bran asks.
“Me,” I say. “Obviously.”
“Nobody else?” His brows twitch. “Not Brodie? Not Brady? Not any third-party security?”
“I didn’t want to spam them with alerts every time a raccoon walks by my window,” I say. “I handle triage; I text when it’s actually important. But I did loop Brodie in.”
He looks at me for a long second. “That’s changing.”
I feel my hackles rise. “Excuse me?”
“If you’re the one in danger, you don’t get to be the only one who knows when something pings.” He moves past me into the living room, putting himself between me and the front door without seeming to think about it. “Brodie’s good. We’re tying your feeds into Jack’s system. Mine.”
“Like hell we are,” I say.
Jack clears his throat. “Twiggy.”
“No.” I whirl on him. “You are not piping my entire digital life into ECI’s servers because a man with a bad haircut knocked on my window. This is my apartment. My network. My data.”
“It’s your life,” Bran says quietly. “We’re trying to keep it happening.”
I hate that that lands.
I also hate that my stupid body has noticed he’s exactly the same kind of big he was last year but somehow…more. Filled out. Or maybe it’s just that I’m on my home turf instead of Brodie’s, and the contrast is sharper.
His gaze flicks to my tree, to the hummingbird swinging near the bottom, and slides across to the bed only half-hidden behind the partition. It's still made, the blankets undisturbed. Something moves behind his eyes. It might be recognition, might be nothing.
“You sleep at all?” he asks.
I bristle at the casual intimacy of the question. “You always ask inappropriate questions right after barging into someone’s home, or am I just special?”
“There a reason you’re vibrating like you’ve had eight espressos?” he counters.
I look down at my hand. The fingers of my empty hand are drumming against my thigh. I hadn’t realized.
