But studying his face in the growing light, the tension finally smoothed from his brow, mouth relaxed, looking younger.
I pressed my back closer to his torso, breathing in the scent of him. I memorized the weight of his arm. The texture of his skin. The heat of him.
If this was all I got, one night of peace before the storm wiped us off the map, I would take it. I would hold it. I would sharpen it into a weapon to use against the grief waiting in the wings.
Because tomorrow, he entered hell.
And for the first time since I found him bleeding in that alley, I couldn’t follow.
Chapter 21
Xavier
The weapon in my hand felt more familiar than the woman I had left sleeping in a warm bed three hours ago.
That was the tragedy of my existence.
I sat in the back of the car, the silence so heavy it felt pressurized. On the roof, freezing rain hammered, turning to sleet as the Geneva temperature plummeted. It sounded like static.
My thumb engaged the safety, then disengaged it. Engaged. Disengaged.
Click. Click.
I knew the weight of the trigger pull, the exact grain of the rounds in the magazine, how the recoil would travel up my arm and settle in my shoulder. All of this, and I had absolutely no memory of ever learning it.
“Stop clicking, Blackout.” Havoc didn’t turn around from the front seat. “You’re making the air anxious. And the air is already freezing.”
I stilled my thumb. “Not Blackout.”
“Right. Xavier. Sorry. Hard to keep track of the existential crisis when we’re five minutes from committing treason.”
Havoc was typing on a tablet, the blue light washing out his features, making him look like exactly what he was: a killer built in a lab who coped by treating the world like a bad joke.
I looked down at my hands. Large, scarred, lethal. Currently trembling.
Just a phantom vibration. A microscopic tremor in the left index finger. To anyone else, it would be invisible. To a sniper, it was a missed shot. To me, it was a countdown clock.
Clare.
Her name cut through the static. I closed my eyes for a second, summoning the image of her. Not the terrified woman in the alley, but the fierce, exhausted creature who had fallen asleep in my arms hours ago. The heat of her skin. The phantom pressure of her head on my chest.
Come back to me.
Her voice was the only thing loud enough to drown out the sleet.
“We have an eighteen-minute window.” Hellhound’s voice was low, granite-rough. He sat in the front, checking his own gear. “Security sweep rotations leave a gap on the northeast grid between 02:50 and 03:08. We need to be in, up to the twelfth floor, and plugged into Dresner’s terminal before the grid resets.”
“Eighteen minutes,” Havoc muttered, snapping a magazine into his sidearm. “Nothing says ‘good plan’ like breaking into a black site with a dying man who might have a seizure mid-infiltration. Top-tier strategy.”
Hellhound ignored him. His hazel eyes locked onto mine. They were calm, measuring. He knew exactly what a liability I was. He also knew I was the only key that fit the lock.
“You good?” Not a question about my mood. A question about whether I was going to collapse and get us all killed.
I gripped the gun harder, forcing the tremor into submission. My knuckles turned white.
“Good enough.”
Hellhound held my gaze for a second longer, assessing the truth of that statement. Then he nodded.
