“And God help me,” he went on, a rough laugh ghosting through the words, “Ilovelistening to you talk about things I barely understand. Shell companies, regressions, whatever financial wizardry you start muttering when you get focused.”
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“You start speaking that language, and I could listen for hours. I think half the time I’m staring at you because your brain is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Except—” His eyes swept over her slowly, reverently. “—you’re also gorgeous. The kind of beautiful that sneaks up on a man and won’t let him look away. Your curves...your eyes...the way you laugh. It undoes me.”
Her breath stuttered—once, sharply.
He leaned in slightly, voice dropping. “That’s what I see, Norah. A brilliant, fierce, ridiculously compelling woman I can’t look away from. Even when I was supposed to.”
A warmth flooded her cheeks so suddenly she was glad for the dim lighting. She felt it everywhere—down her neck, across her chest, a fizzy rush beneath her skin she hadn’t felt since she was a teenager watching him climb out of a swimming pool. Her pulse fluttered, light and ridiculous, and she had to look awaybefore she did something mortifying, like melt into a puddle on the carpet.
She cleared her throat, aiming for steady and landing somewhere near breathless. “Well,” she managed, “that’s...a statistically unreasonable amount of compliments for one person.”
It wasn’t gracious or self-assured, but it was the first thing her panicked, over-warm brain produced.
Marshall’s soft laugh told her he absolutely knew what she was doing—and absolutely adored her for it.
“You deserve every single one.”
She exhaled shakily. “We wasted so much time,” she whispered.
His hand came up to cup her jaw, brushing away a tear with the gentlest sweep of his thumb. “Maybe,” he allowed. “But we didn’t lose it.”
Her breath caught.
“We’re here,” he murmured, forehead touching hers again. “We found our way back, despite everything. That has to count for something.”
Her fingers curled into his shirt, right over his heart. “It counts for everything. And the numbers don’t lie,” she said with a smile.
He let out a disbelieving sound that was almost a laugh—pained in the best way. “You have no idea what it does to me to hear you say that. I love when you talk numbers.”
Norah pressed her palm fully to his chest, feeling the steady thrum beneath it. “Oh yeah? Stochastic volatility models. Nonlinear regressions. Quantitative easing anomalies. Differential lag structures.”
His huffed breath warmed her temple, and he let out a groan. “Sassy, smart kitten.”
CHAPTER 31
MARSHALL
Miranda had bulliedthem both into eating.
Marshall wasn’t hungry, but he’d learned a long time ago that adrenaline lied and your body paid later if you believed it. So he sat at the scarred wooden table in the safehouse kitchen with a paper plate in front of him, a half-eaten sandwich growing cold, and watched Norah take small, mechanical bites of hers.
She’d wrapped both hands around a mug of tea like it was a lifeline, shoulders hunched under one of the navy Black Tower hoodies he kept in his locker. It dwarfed her, sleeves pushed up past her wrists, but a primitive satisfaction filled him at the sight of her in his clothes.
The fluorescent light overhead made the shadows under her eyes look deeper. Every now and then her gaze would flick toward the doorway, as if expecting another threat to materialize.
He hated how familiar that look was. He’d seen variations of it in war zones and refugee camps, in safe rooms and field hospitals. Trauma itself took many different forms, but the symptoms had significant overlap.
“I checked the logs twice,” Miranda was saying, pacing between the counter and the fridge like a short, furiousmetronome. Her dark braid swung behind her. “Three times. There’s nothing. No missed calls, no dropped connection, no partial handshake. It’s like you never dialed.”
Marshall pushed a piece of bread crust around his plate. “I dialed. Or Stephen did, anyway. Trust me.”
Miranda grimaced. “Yeah, that’s what worries me.”
Norah’s fingers tightened around the mug. “Why does that worry you?”
“We route our field traffic through enough redundancies that it shouldn’t happen,” Miranda said. “Even if one node glitches, the others catch it. For a call to go nowhere and leave no record...” She blew out a breath, cheeks puffing. “Someone would have had to ghost it on purpose. Or be inside our system in a way I really, really don’t like thinking about.”
