Her eyes lit up. “Binary’s lair?”
“It’s not a lair. It’s a workspace with adequate security protocols.”
“So…a lair. Yes, I do want to see it.”
He led her down the hallway toward the east wing, toward the room he’d never shown anyone who wasn’t family. The door was reinforced steel disguised as wood, the lock keyed to his biometrics. He pressed his thumb to the scanner and felt the familiar click of the mechanism releasing.
The command center—yeah, okay, it could definitely be called alair—opened before them.
Six monitors arranged in an ergonomic arc. Server racks humming against the far wall. Cable management that had taken him three weeks to perfect. The soft blue glow of systems running in perfect synchronization.
Morgan stepped inside and went still.
Lincoln tried to see it through her eyes. For him, this room was functional—a workspace optimized for his particular needs. But for someone seeing it for the first time, someone who’d only known him as text on a screen…
She moved toward the central workstation slowly, almost reverently, her eyes tracking across the monitors. He watched her read the data streams, the code windows, the securityprotocols he’d left open. Her fingers had started that rhythm again, tapping against her thigh, but she didn’t seem to notice.
“This is where you were,” she said quietly. “Every night at nine. When I was typing to you from my little apartment with my secondhand laptop and my slow internet connection.” She touched the edge of his desk, just barely. “You were here.”
“Usually, yes.”
“I complained to you once about my router. Made a joke about it being held together with hope and duct tape.” She turned to face him. “You could have hacked into my ISP and fixed it remotely.”
“That would have required knowing who you were.”
“And you never looked.”
“I never looked. You trusted me not to.” He paused. “Though your latency issues were genuinely painful.”
“Oh my God.” She pressed a hand to her mouth, but he could see she was laughing. “I’ve been sending poetry toBinary. The actual Binary. There was a whole thread on the Cipher Forum about whether you were a government operation or a collective because no one believed one person could do what you do.”
“The government theory was particularly insulting.” He almost rolled his eyes. He’d seen that thread. The idea that his work—clean, efficient, unencumbered by committee approval or budget meetings—could be mistaken for something produced by bureaucracy had bothered him for days.
“Lincoln.” She was fully laughing now, bright and slightly unhinged. “I told you about myrouter. I complained about the library’s outdated firewall. And you’re—you’rethis.”
“You’re a human being who can recall every piece of information she’s ever encountered with perfect accuracy,”he shot back. “I build machines trying to replicate what you do naturally. I think we’re even.”
The laughter faded, but something warm remained in her expression. “You really are jealous. Of my memory.”
Hell yes, he was. Who wouldn’t be? “I spent three years developing a database architecture that could handle the kind of cross-referencing your brain does in seconds. Sold it for forty-seven million dollars. And it still can’t do what you do.”
She was quiet for a moment, studying him with an intensity that made him want to look away. He didn’t.
“Ms. Delacroix used to say my memory was a gift, but not every gift needs to be unwrapped in public,” she said finally. “She taught me when to stay silent. When to pretend I didn’t remember something so people wouldn’t feel like I was surveilling them.”
“She taught you your own inside voice.”
Morgan’s eyebrows rose. “What?”
“Bear and Derek—my cousins. They created a system when we were children. A code phrase to tell me when I’d crossed a social line I couldn’t see.” Lincoln leaned against his desk. “Inside voice, Linc. It meant I was being too blunt, too strange, too much. They taught me to recognize boundaries my brain couldn’t naturally detect.”
“And Ms. Delacroix taught me to hide what my brain naturally does because people sometimes feel threatened by it.” Morgan’s voice had gone soft. “We’ve both been learning to translate ourselves into something more acceptable.”
“You haven’t needed to translate for me.”
“No.” She held his gaze. “I haven’t.”
The moment stretched. Lincoln wasn’t good at reading these things—the silent communications that other peopleseemed to navigate instinctively—but even he could feel the weight of what wasn’t being said.
