And she is.
“On what?”
“Her research. She kept it on her the whole time. I set her up with a sterile computer. She’s digging in.”
Not just on the drive.
On what the fuck we are now.
But I don’t tell that to Ghost. He doesn’t need to know any of that shit.
“Good. You know the drill. Keep a low profile. We’ll let you know when to move.”
THIRTEEN
Eliza
THE PATTERN
The laptop screenglows in the dim kitchen light, casting blue shadows across my face as I stare at the data that nearly got me killed. My coffee went cold hours ago, but I can’t stop scrolling through the files. Numbers. Patterns. Linguistic signatures that shouldn’t exist in two-thousand-year-old Roman military dispatches.
Focus, Eliza. Ancient linguistics. Frequency analysis. Mathematical patterns.
Don’t think about how Cooper looked at me when I admitted what I wanted. Ignore the way my body still hums from his touch, and is tender in places I never knew could feel anything. And definitely—the most important—forget how he said my name when he made me confess my deepest fantasy.
Work. That’s safe territory.
I pull up the frequency analysis software—my creation from those intense DoD years—and run it against the cipher fragments for the fourth time. The same impossible results appear on screen. Modern encryption algorithms embedded within historicaltexts. Someone is using my academic research as camouflage for real-time communications.
“Wait, that’s not right,” I murmur to myself, leaning closer to the screen. “Unless the mathematical signatures are intentionally masked to appear historical while actually being…”
My fingers fly across the keyboard, cross-referencing the patterns with contemporary encryption protocols. The comparison results make my blood run cold.
“Oh my God. That’s brilliant. That’s absolutely brilliant.”
And terrifying.
The implications hit me like a physical blow. This isn’t just academic curiosity anymore. This is active, ongoing criminal activity using our research project as cover. Sarah, David, and Lisa discovered this same pattern.
Phoenix killed them for it.
Now it wants to kill me.
“But why?” I ask the empty room, my voice echoing off the kitchen walls. “What makes this information worth murdering linguistics professors?”
I need to think out loud. Process verbally. It’s how my brain works, how I’ve always worked through complex problems. Cooper gave me space, but I need more than space. I need a sounding board.
And he’s the only someone around.
The thought of facing him makes heat flood my cheeks. After what we did. After what I confessed. After the way he commanded me and I obeyed without question.
Don’t rewrite what happened, his voice echoes in my memory.Don’t you dare rewrite what happened.
I close the laptop and walk toward the bedroom, my bare feet silent on the hardwood floor. The hallway feels longer than it should, each step weighted with everything unspoken between us.
The bedroom door stands ajar, and I pause at thethreshold.
Cooper sits in the chair by the window, fully dressed, weapon holstered at his thigh. He’s positioned so he can see both the street and the doorway—tactical even in rest. When he notices me, those intense eyes lock onto mine with an expression I can’t quite read.
