"Can you adapt?"
"I'm trying to." Her hands move, tracing wires, testing connections. "But there's something here I don't understand. A component that doesn't fit the pattern. It could be a decoy, or it could be the key to everything."
I watch her work, seeing the doubt creeping in. She's been brilliant all night, outthinking Greer at every turn, but exhaustion and fear are eroding her confidence. And Greer knows her well enough to exploit that—to plant doubt, to make her second-guess, to turn her greatest strength into a vulnerability.
"You're smarter than him," I say, pitching my voice to carry to her without being loud enough to startle. "You've always been smarter. That's why he resented you, why he's doing all this. Because he could never accept that you were better."
She glances back at me briefly, with fear in her eyes. "What if I'm not? What if he finally found my blind spot?"
"Then trust yourself anyway. Trust your training, your instincts, everything that makes you Carolina Sutton—the best EOD instructor the Army ever had, the woman who designed a system so good it took three years and obsessive planning to weaponize." I hold her gaze. "You've got this. I know you do."
She holds my eyes for a long moment, drawing strength from somewhere—my words, or her own reserves, or the simple fact that someone believes in her absolutely. Then she turns back to the device, and her shoulders settle. Her hands steady.
"Okay," she murmurs. "Okay. I see it now."
Her hands move with renewed confidence, choosing a path through the circuitry that looks random but must make sense to her understanding of Greer's psychology. She makes three cuts in rapid succession, each one deliberate, and then reaches for a bypass connection I don't understand.
"This is it," she says. "If I'm right, this disables the primary trigger. If I'm wrong..."
She doesn't finish the sentence. Doesn't need to. We both know what wrong means.
She makes the final connection, and for a heartbeat, nothing happens. Then the timer display flickers and goes dark. The device powers down, components going inert one by one, and Carolina sits back with a gasp that's half sob.
"It's done," she says, voice shaking. "It's done. Device Four is disarmed."
Relief crashes over me so intensely it's almost painful. She did it. We did it. Every device is neutralized, Greer's plan is defeated, and we're both still alive to see it.
FBI and bomb squad personnel flood into the terminal, but I only have eyes for Carolina, who's turned around and is crawling toward where I'm propped against a support pillar, her face wet with tears.
She reaches me and her hands go immediately to my chest, seeing the way I'm breathing, the sweat on my face. "Oh God, Flint. Your ribs—you're hurt worse. I should have?—"
"I'm okay." I catch her hands. "You did it. It's over."
She's shaking, adrenaline crash hitting hard, and I wrap my arms around her as best I can with the pain in my chest. We stay like that, both of us breathing—her easily, me with increasing difficulty—both of us alive.
She pulls back just enough to look at me, her hands framing my face, thumbs brushing across my cheekbones. Her eyes search mine—checking that I'm really here, really okay—and what I see in them makes my breath catch. Fear, yes, and relief, but also something deeper. Something that looks like what I'm feeling.
"I thought I lost you," she whispers, voice cracking.
"I'm here." I turn my head to press a kiss to her palm, then another to her wrist, feeling her pulse flutter against my lips. "I'm here, Carolina. We both are."
She makes a sound that's half laugh, half sob, and then she's kissing me. Not the desperate, hungry kiss from before—this one is softer, slower, thorough. Like she's trying to memorize the taste of me, the feel of my mouth against hers, proof that we're both alive and whole and together.
I kiss her back despite the pain, despite the blood loss trying to drag me under, despite the fact that we have an audience of FBI agents and Guardian operators. None of it matters. All that matters is her mouth on mine, her hands gentle on my face, the way she's holding me like I'm something precious.
When she finally pulls back, we're both breathing hard. She rests her forehead against mine, and I can feel tears on her cheeks—or maybe they're mine. Hard to tell anymore.
"Don't do that to me again," she says fiercely. "Don't almost die on me. I can't... I can't lose anyone else."
"Not planning on it." My hand comes up to tangle in her hair, and I pull her down for one more kiss—brief but intense. "But Carolina? Worth it. You were worth it."
The thing we're going to figure out, after we survive.
“You did it,” I murmur, the words barely making it past the roughness in my throat.
Carolina’s eyes find mine, wide and shining in the dim light. Relief. Shock. Something else simmers beneath the surface—something that feels like gravity pulling us together.
“Flint,” she whispers, voice trembling.
