His mouth crashed into mine. Fierce, demanding, possessive. The kiss held no gentleness. No question. Just a declaration made in front of a witness, intentional and brazen.
My coffee mug almost slipped from my grip.
When he pulled back, he locked onto Havoc for one beat. Two. Then he released me, picked up the axe, and returned to the woodpile like nothing had happened.
I stood there, breathless, face burning despite the cold.
Havoc’s eyebrows had climbed toward his hairline. “Well then.”
The axe bit into timber with a sharp crack.
“Point taken,” Havoc muttered, resuming his work with what might have been amusement flickering at the corner of his mouth.
I took a long drink of coffee. Ignored the flush still spreading across my skin. “Where’s Hellhound?”
“Making calls. Coordinating with contacts. Planning the impossible infiltration you so graciously bought us time for.”
Right. The infiltration. Geneva headquarters. Dresner’s servers.
Two weeks to pull off something that would probably get them killed.
Outstanding.
“So.” The blade kept moving. Casual. Like we were discussing weather instead of life and death. “What’s your plan here? You think there’s a happily ever after waiting at the end of this?”
I blinked. “What?”
“You. Him.” He gestured vaguely with the tool. “You’re falling for a dying man with a kill switch in his brain. That’s not romance, that’s tragedy.”
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion on my love life.”
I kept my voice even.
“You didn’t. I’m giving it.” He looked up. The teasing faded into something more serious. “I’ve seen this play out before. Good people getting attached to broken weapons. It never ends well.”
“He’s not a weapon.”
“He was built to be exactly that.” Havoc set down the carved figure. “The conditioning, the chip, the training, Oblivion designed him to kill on command. You can’t love that away, Clare. You can’t fix him with enough determination and medical expertise.”
My fingers tightened around the coffee mug. “I’m not trying to fix him.”
“No?” The scraping resumed. “Then what do you think you’re doing?”
“Keeping him alive long enough for you bastards to get those deactivation codes.” I took another drink. Bitter. Hot. Real. “What he does with the time after that is his choice.”
“Assuming there is an after.” His tone gentled slightly. “You understand the odds, right? Even if we get the codes, even if we shut down the overdose, these people don’t just recover. I’ve seen what happens when the conditioning breaks down completely.”
He stopped carving. Met me directly.
“They fragment. Lose themselves piece by piece. The personality you’re falling for might just be a temporary state before everything collapses entirely. Before he becomes something you don’t recognize.”
Pressure built in my ribs. “You’re saying he might never recover.”
“I’m saying the man you know might not exist in two weeks. Might never have existed at all, just a gap between what Dresner made him and what the malfunction turns him into.” Havoc leaned forward. “And even if he does recover his memories, you need to understand what you’re signing up for. Every single operative Dresner kidnapped came from somewhere dark. Criminals. The worst kind. Men who did things that landed them in places where people like Dresner could pluck them out and remake them.”
The implication hung heavy between us.
“You think Xavier was...”
