Librarian vanished. Boss is not happy.
Someone helped her. Looking for the connection.
Let them look. Let Randall stew in frustration while his investment stayed hidden behind firewalls and encryption and a man who’d decided to stop playing by the rules.
But Lincoln knew it couldn’t last. Eventually, someone would find a thread. Eventually, the noose would tighten.
They had to move faster.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway. Lincoln glanced up as Morgan appeared in the doorway, her hair still damp from a shower, wearing one of the soft sweaters he’d ordered. She looked pale. The skin beneath her eyes had darkened to bruises.
“Morning,” she said from the doorway.
Lincoln turned. She was hovering at the threshold like she wasn’t sure of her welcome, and something about that made his chest ache. After last night, after everything—she still wasn’t sure.
“Hi.” The word came out softer than he intended.
A small smile flickered across her face. Not much, but real. “Hi.”
For a moment, neither of them moved. The air felt different between them now—charged with the memory of skin against skin, of her breath against his neck, of falling asleep tangled together. Lincoln wanted to say something about it. Wanted to acknowledge that things had changed, that she’d changed them, that he was grateful. But the words wouldn’t organize themselves into anything coherent.
Morgan crossed to her workstation and sank into the chair. “I couldn’t sleep anymore. Figured I might as well be useful.”
The moment passed. Whatever needed to be said would have to wait; they both understood that without discussing it. There was too much work, too much danger, too many puzzle pieces still scattered across Lincoln’s servers. The personal would have to fit itself around the urgent.
They fell into their rhythm.
Lincoln kept his attention split between his own screens and Morgan in his peripheral vision. She recited coordinates in that flat, mechanical voice she’d developed—the one that stripped the emotion from the data so she could get through it. He cross-referenced, mapped, searched for patterns that refused to emerge.
But his gaze kept drifting back to her.
The way she rubbed her temples every few minutes, fingers pressing hard against skin. The moments when she went still and distant, her eyes fixed on nothing, her lips moving in silent words. Her fingers tapping that iambic rhythm against her thigh—da-DUM, da-DUM—faster than usual, almost frantic.
She was sad. He was fairly certain she was sad. But he was bad at reading emotions, and the usual indicators weren’t resolving into anything actionable.
Was she regretting last night? Regretting him?
The thought made his lungs feel too small. He wanted to ask, wanted to understand, but he didn’t know how to phrase the question without making things worse. His brain supplied seventeen possible approaches, and his experience rejected all of them.
So he stayed quiet. Kept working. Watched her and felt increasingly helpless.
By midafternoon, he’d stopped pretending to focus onhis own screens. He just watched her—the way she repeated a coordinate string twice without seeming to notice, the visible flinch when she caught herself, the trembling hands she kept pressing flat against her thighs. Whatever was happening inside her head, she wasn’t ready to tell him.
He couldn’t fix what he didn’t understand. But he could do something else.
“It’s Saturday,” he said.
Morgan looked up, startled by the break in their rhythm. “What?”
“Saturday. I go into town on Saturdays. The Eagle’s Nest—it’s Oak Creek’s local bar. My cousins, Theo, some other friends, sometimes. We meet there on Saturdays.” He turned his chair to face her fully. “I think we should go.”
She stiffened. “Lincoln, I can’t just?—”
“You met Bear and Derek and Theo already, although I don’t know if you remember them. They’ve been asking about you almost every day since the rescue.” He kept his voice matter-of-fact. Stating data, not making a plea. “They want to know how you’re doing. They want to meet you properly, when you’re not unconscious in the back of a vehicle.”
Something flickered in her expression. Surprise, maybe. That people she’d never really met had been thinking about her.
“Their partners will be there too,” he continued. “Joy is Bear’s fiancée. Eva is Theo’s wife. Derek is newly married to Becky for the second time.”
