“That’s not a thing,” Bran mutters.
“It is when you do it,” she fires back, already heading out. Her perfume—something soft and expensive—lingers in the doorway after she’s gone.
The room feels smaller without her. More private. The kind of quiet that makes every little sound—keyboard, breath, heartbeat—feel amplified.
I open my laptop, fingers hovering over the keys.
The Nightjar icon sits in the dock, glowing faintly. The SmartLittleBird chat is minimized. There’s a tiny red dot—one unread message.
My chest tightens.
Bran’s eyes flick to the screen, then to me. He’s still at the doorway, but now his focus is narrowed, like a spotlight.
“Not yet,” he says.
“I know,” I say, even though my fingers itch to click.
He finally pushes off the frame and comes into the room fully, the air shifting around him. Instead of taking the couch, he circles to the empty leather chair beside me and lowers himself into it, knee bumping mine as he settles. The contact is brief but electric, a low-grade current running straight up my spine.
“Start with what you can control,” he says. “You said you had other data to organize. Old cases. Maps. We do that first.”
“We?” I echo.
He leans in, forearms braced on his thighs, close enough that I can see the darker stubble along his jaw and the tiny scar at his temple. I catch a whiff of him—soap, clean sweat, the faint ghost of smoke like he’s lived through more fires than he talks about.
“Yeah,” he says. “You talk. I listen. I’m not letting you spiral alone.”
For a second, I just stare at him.
It would be easier if he were an asshole. If he were all orders and no softness, all muscle and no care. If I could tuck him into the “dangerous but uncomplicated” file and move on.
But he’s…this. Big and blunt and terrifying when he wants to be, then quietly offering to sit beside me while I unravel someone else’s darkness on a screen.
That’s dangerous.
“Okay,” I say. My voice does a stupid little wobble I hope he doesn’t notice. “Fine. We can start with the maybes list.”
I pull up the spreadsheet again, the one with missing persons and unsolved cases. The glow from the screen washes over both of us. He rolls his chair closer so we can see, the arm of it brushing mine. His thigh presses warm and solid against my leg under the edge of the desk.
I talk. He asks questions. Occasionally he reaches past me to scroll, his knuckles grazing my wrist, the side of my hand, my forearm.
Every touch is accidental. None of them feel like it.
Heat pools low in my stomach, inconvenient and loud. I keep my mouth running faster to cover it, rattling off dates and locations and pattern anomalies like I’m not cataloguing every inch of skin he brushes.
We work through two counties’ worth of data before my brain starts to blur around the edges. The words on the screen swim. My focus slips sideways to the minimized chat window.
I don’t even realize I’ve clicked it until the messages pop open.
Two new lines.
rude, little bird. i missed you.
did you like my present?
The room tilts.
The cursor blinks like a heartbeat. My own breath stutters, sharp in my ears. Present. Is he talking about the woman?
