“I’m sorry,” Wren says. “That feels unfair.”
“Don’t be and it’s not. I’ll be honest, I’ve never felt nervous with a partner before. I’ve always been the one in control, and generally, club girls don’t tend to care what you do. I feel like my usual moves won’t cut it with you. I’ll admit I love the idea of fucking you, being with you in that way, however it starts. But if you need to steer because of the shit that’s happened to you, I’m cool.”
Wren slips their hands around my neck and tugs me to them. “You’re a good human being.”
“So are you. Thank you for trusting me. And for the record, you deserved better.”
Wren runs their hands down my bare chest, over my nipples, and slowly make their way over my abs.
“You doing okay there, sweetheart?” I say when I notice their mouth is open a little.
“Shut up. You’re pretty and you know it.”
“So do you, apparently.”
“Fine, you have decent abs and stunning ink.”
“Wow, that was almost a complete compliment.” I see my phone where I placed it before I tugged Wren to their feet. “Wait. You’re distracting me. This is important. The reason I was looking for you. Let me show you what I was looking at.”
Wren glances at my phone, and I show them the photograph of the bird I was looking at.
“You’re a closet birdwatcher?” Wren asks.
“No.” I shove the phone closer to them so they can see what I saw. “Willa wants me to paint a mural in Maddie’s room.”
“You’re an artist too? A regular renaissance man.”
“Hardly. But Maddie loves birds, so I thought I could do birds from around the world. I was just scrolling, looking for interesting ones. This is a bicolored wren.”
Wren looks closely, then looks up at me. “I’m still not certain what prompted this bird to be so important that you stampeded through the house naked. I mean, it’s cool, but?—”
“No. Not cool. Look at its Latin or whatever the fuck language a bird’s real name is written in.”
Wren leans in and reads it. “Cam…pylor…hynchus Griseus.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Say it again.”
Wren does as I say. “Campylorhynchus Griseus.
And then it finally dawns on them. “Oh, God.”
“Yeah. CamGriseus6. It was no accident you were hired for that hack, Wren. It means bicolored wren.” He touches the endsof my hair. “And I double-checked. Griseus means gray. Didn’t you say that before your hair was green, it was gray? Bicolored wren was referring to you and your two-tone gray-and-black hair. Whoever it was, they were always looking for you.”
Wren slumps back onto the stool and places a hand over their heart. “This is bad. None of this is a coincidence.”
I stroke a hand over their hair. “I know. But we can figure this out together.”
“How? It means they’ve been watching me. For a while. Long enough to know what my hair looked like before I changed it. That’s not just data scraping or facial recognition from a public feed. That’s personal. It’s way too close.”
Wren looks around the kitchen like somehow the perpetrator is going to emerge from the shadows. I step closer and grip their arms, hopefully grounding and not scaring them.
“Hey, look at me.”
Wren does. Barely.
“We already knew someone was targeting you,” I say quietly. “But this? It tells us more. Yes, they’ve been watching and planning. And who knows, maybe this clue, they wanted you to figure it out. Or maybe they thought you never would. Either way, it’s a mistake.”
“A mistake?” Wren echoes.
