Something broke loose in him. His rhythm turned ragged, almost desperate—deep, hard thrusts that hit something inside her that made stars explode behind her eyes. She was making sounds she’d never heard herself make, half sobs and gasps and his name over and over.
The data in her head went quiet.
There was only this—the coiling heat in her belly, the slick slide of their bodies, the way he filled her so completely there wasn’t room for anything else. She wasn’t Mercury. Wasn’t Randall’s asset. Wasn’t even Morgan-with-the-perfect-memory.
She was just a woman, in this moment, with this man who had come for her when no one else would.
Her climax built like a storm gathering—pressure and heat spiraling tighter with every thrust. Lincoln seemed to sense it. He shifted his angle, grinding against her with each stroke, his thumb finding her clit above where they joined.
“Let go,” he murmured against her throat. “I’ve got you.”
She shattered.
The orgasm tore through her in waves, her inner walls clenching around him as she arched off the bed. She heard herself cry out—his name, maybe, or just sound without meaning—and felt him follow her over the edge. He buried himself deep and went rigid, pulsing inside her, groaning her name like it was the only word he knew.
Afterward, she lay with her head on his chest, listening to the rapid drum of his heartbeat slowly returning to normal. He curved his arm around her, his hand tracing absent patterns on her shoulder that sent small aftershocks through her sensitized skin.
The fear hadn’t disappeared. She could feel it there,waiting at the edges of her consciousness—the gaps in her memory, the fuzzy details, the horror of summoning Ms. Delacroix’s face and finding it blurred. It would still be there in the morning. It would demand to be addressed.
But right now, in the dark, with Lincoln’s warmth seeping into her bones, she could breathe.
She should tell him. About the memory problems, about the way she was losing pieces of herself to make room for Randall’s data. She would. Soon.
But tonight, she let herself have this.
His hand kept moving across her shoulders and back—slow circles, unconscious patterns, the rhythm of someone who wasn’t used to this kind of closeness but was trying anyway. She felt his breathing even out, felt the tension drain from his muscles as his body relaxed into the mattress.
Morgan closed her eyes.
She was asleep before she could stop herself.
Chapter 16
Six months ago:
Mercury: We’re digitizing the historical collection at the library. Some patrons are upset.
Binary: Why? Digital preservation is more reliable than paper.
Mercury: They say the originals have meaning the scans don’t. A letter handwritten in 1892 isn’t the same as a PDF of that letter.
Binary: The information content is identical.
Mercury: But the experience isn’t. The paper someone touched. The ink that faded a certain way. Some things matter because of how they exist, not just what they say.
Binary: That’s inefficient sentiment.
Mercury: That’s human, Binary. We’re inefficient by design.
Lincoln had been staring at the same line of code for seventeen minutes.
He knew it was seventeen because his system clock occupied the upper right corner of his primary monitor, and he’d been tracking the minutes since he’d woken atdawn, watched Morgan sleep for longer than he’d admit, and finally made himself leave the guest room.
The command center hummed around him—six monitors cycling through their usual displays, servers running their quiet protocols, everything functioning exactly as designed. Normal. Routine.
Nothing felt normal.
His mind kept sliding away from the data streams on his monitors, away from the cross-referencing algorithms his systems were still churning through. Instead, it circled back to the same set of images, replaying them with a precision that rivaled Morgan’s own memory.
