He wears a military challenge coin on a chain around his neck that escaped his shirt during the fighting. Someone else's coin, not his own, which means loss, which means guilt, which means he carries ghosts the way I'm learning to carry betrayal.
"We're clear," he says, voice carrying back to me. "Extraction point's five minutes out."
I should ask where we're going. Should demand credentials, verification, and proof that he is who he says he is. But Guardian HRS is real, and CJ came through.
And more than that, my instincts—the same ones that saved me from Nathan's needle three nights ago—say this man will keep me safe or die trying.
Three nights ago. Thursday. Nathan and I had worked late on the cryptocurrency case, and ordered Thai food to the office like we had a hundred times before.
Nathan was distracted, kept checking his phone, but I figured it was work stress. The Prometheus communications were hidden in the blockchain data we were analyzing, but I didn't know that yet. Wouldn't know until after.
We went back to his place around midnight. Nathan wanted to shower first—said the office air made him feel grimy. I was at my computer, running one more analysis on the blockchain patterns that had been nagging at me all day, when I found it.
Communications hidden in the transaction hashes, using a cipher I recognized because Nathan had shown it to me months ago as a theoretical exercise.
"Hey, babe," I called toward the bathroom, "remember that cipher you were working on? I think someone's using a variant for?—"
The bathroom door opened, and Nathan stood there in just a towel, expression strange. "What did you find?"
"Hidden communications in our crypto case. Look, if you decode the hashes using—" I turned back to the screen, excited by the discovery.
That's when I saw the reflection on my monitor. Nathan behind me, pulling something from his gym bag.
A syringe.
I spun in my chair, already seeing the needle in his hand, the cold calculation in his eyes.
"Nathan?"
"I'm sorry, Savi. You weren't supposed to find that." He moved toward me.
"You're Prometheus." Not a question.
The pieces clicked together—his interest in my decryption work, the way he steered me away from certain blockchain addresses, how he always knew which cases to prioritize.
"It's bigger than you understand. America needs to change, and we're going to change it." He reached for me with the syringe. "This is painless. You'll just go to sleep."
I'd taken Ambien an hour earlier, desperate for sleep after three nights of insomnia over the weird patterns in our case. Butit hadn't worked—never does when my mind's racing. So I was foggy but awake, and he thought I was deeper under than I was.
I let my body go limp, eyes fluttering closed. He relaxed slightly, moving closer, and that's when I rolled hard left, off the chair. The needle hit the leather where I'd been sitting.
"Savi!" He grabbed for me, but I was already moving, six years of aikido taking over. I used his momentum against him, a hip throw that sent him into the desk. The lamp shattered, papers flying everywhere.
"Three years," I gasped, scrambling for the door. "Three years of being my partner, six months in my bed, and you were using me the whole time?"
"I love you," he said, getting to his feet, syringe still in hand. "But this is bigger than us. The water supply, the infrastructure collapse, the rebirth—you'd understand if you'd let me explain."
"You're going to kill tens of thousands of people."
"To save millions." He moved to block the door. "The system is broken. We're going to fix it. I wanted you with us, but you're too rigid, too bound by rules."
I grabbed my laptop—instinct more than planning—and my go-bag that I keep by the door. "You don't know me at all."
"I know everything about you. Your coffee order, your favorite movie, how you cry every year on your parents' death anniversary, how you sound when you?—"
I threw the coffee mug at his head—my FBI academy mug, ironic—and bolted while he ducked.
Out the door, down the stairs, into the night. Behind me, I heard him calling my name, but it wasn't the loving way he'd said it that morning.
