The second the door swings open, I know something’s wrong.
There’s music blasting—loud, obnoxious, aggressively upbeat. The kind of bubblegum pop song that would never end up on our shared playlist unless someone was actively trying to annoy me.
Also?
The system’s already on.
And someone’s sitting at my station.
“Good morning, sunshine!” Lark Dawson spins in my chair like she bought it, with a wide smile, and fingers sticky with orange dust from an open bag of cheese curls.
Onmykeyboard.
I stop in the doorway.
Very calmly.
Because if I don’t, I’m going to say something that gets me stabbed with a mechanical pencil.
“How,” I say, “did you get in here?”
She grins. “Door.”
“No.”
“Stairs?”
“Lark.”
She sighs dramatically and points over her shoulder with the half-empty bag of chips. “Arrow thought I should see the place if I’m going to be part of the team.”
My eyes narrow. “Arrow is asleep on the couch with a hoodie over his face. Arrow doesn’t think anything until after coffee.”
She glances over at the couch where Arrow is, indeed, dead to the world, hood up, one arm hanging off the edge, an empty energy drink can on the floor.
“Okay,technicallyI got here before he passed out,” she amends. “I may have sent him a fake security alert on his phone that said you were under active cyber attack from a North Korean botnet.”
I stare.
“He rushed down here and let me in. Then realized the alert was fake. Then fell over. Kind of impressive, honestly.”
My eye twitches. “You faked a security alert onoursecure channel?”
“I tested your incident response time,” she corrects. “You passed. Barely.”
I drag a hand down my face. “Do you own a single respectable boundary?”
“I’m wearing pants,” she says. “That feels like growth.”
She is wearing pants. Tight black jeans, torn at the knees, combat boots laced up her calves. Black tee. Leather jacket hanging off the back of my chair like she plans on staying awhile.
Her hair’s twisted up in a messy knot, with streaks of purple catching the light. There’s a silver hoop in her nose now, and two studs in one ear that weren’t there the last time I saw her at one of Gage’s half-assed family dinners.
She looks like trouble.
She looks like everything I said I’d never touch.
And all my body hears istouch.
