Robbie: “Ohhh… okay then.” A beat, then: “Later!” he called, chipper and already walking away.
I groaned and buried my face in Lyric’s shoulder. “Kill me now.”
Lyric chuckled. “No chance.”
His fingers brushed through my hair again, and neither of us moved to get up.
Not yet.
TWENTY-ONE
Lyric
Nearly a week had passedsince that moment on the sofa—a week where the heat between us never cooled, even if everything else around us stayed frozen. We were no closer to cracking the LyricNight system, no nearer to breaking open any of Kessler’s files without lighting up some alarm that would bring him down on us.
Days blurred together—long hours in the same room with Jamie, our screens glowing, fingers flying, brains fried. I’d gotten used to it. Used to the low hum of tension in the back of my skull, used to only heading downstairs for lunch breaks, used to not setting foot outside Redcars.
Nights were… different.
Nights were Rio.
He’d put himself on more or less permanent guard duty—which really just meant we fucked as often as we could get away with. Sometimes hard, sometimes slow, sometimes as if we were trying to erase the world. Every time felt like a line drawn in blood and sweat:You’re still here. I’m still yours.
And I needed that. Neededhim. Even if I didn’t know what the hell we were building between us, for however long it lasted, before they killed Kessler, or a contract on me succeeded, I felt real.
“And then you just put the dough balls in the sugar and cinnamon and roll them around.” Robbie’s voice was all bright energy and kitchen logic. He demonstrated with confidence, tossing a perfectly round blob of dough through a shallow dish of sugar and spice.
I tried to copy him, but I flattened mine.
He winced. “Okay, well, not like you’re squashing a bug.”
“Sorry,” I muttered, trying again with a little more finesse.
“No, no, it’s good,” he said, reaching over to adjust the next one. “You’ll get it. It’s just muscle memory. You’ve got the muscle part, anyway.”
That got a huff of amusement from me.
Redcars was closed, Jamie was at the Cave, Rio was out on a late evening pickup, and Enzo was in the office, which left me and Robbie at loose ends. Hence, the kitchen smelled sweet and buttery, with cinnamon thick in the air. I didn’t know what had possessed Robbie to drag me into cookie-making, but he’d walked into the upstairs room earlier with an apron and a mission, and somehow I hadn’t said no.
“You ever made cookies before?” he asked.
“Not really.” I paused. “Rainbow and Cedar Moonbeam weren’t the cookie-making type,” I added with a shrug. “I don’t think they ever quite got over creating a son who was more into building firewalls than building protest signs. Saving the planet one march at a time didn’t click for me.”
Robbie chuckled. “You don’t call them Mom and Dad?”
I shook my head. “They said it put a label on the relationship that implied ownership. Wanted me to have agency and self-direction or some shit. We didn’t do boundaries or rules. Just… vibes.”
He gave me a look I couldn’t quite read, and I laughed. “Don’t give me that pitying face. I had a good life. Weird, yeah, but good.”
“Not pity,” Robbie said. “Envy. I never knewwhat it was like to have parents at all.” Something shifted in the air between us, quieter, weightier. I felt as if I should apologize orsomething. But Robbie forged ahead with more questions. “That’s where Lyric comes from?”
“Nah,” I said, rolling another dough ball between my palms. “I chose Lyric. The name they gave me was—get this—Sunshine Nova Starseed. No joke.”
Robbie blinked. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” I said, laughing. “I think Rainbow was tripping on something when they filled out the birth certificate. I changed it as soon as I could access the systems I needed to hack, a practice run for all the other tasks I completed around the time I was talking to Jamie online.”
“And you chose Lyric yourself.”
