“There are twenty armed men coming for us, Milo. I’m one person. I can probably pick a lot of them off before they make it to the house, but if they come in from the air, we’re fucked. I can’t cover all sides on my own.”
“I’ll help you! NOVA will help!” I protested, and finally, Jay’s cold mask cracked.
His face went white with a potent mix of fear and anger, and suddenly, he had me slammed against the wall. I gasped in surprise, shivering at the commanding feel of his fingers digging into the flesh of my shoulders.
“Youwill stay in the panic room until NOVA tells you it’s safe to come out.”
I narrowed my eyes on him.
“No.”
He growled and shook me.
“Milo.This is not a fucking game. You will stay in the panic room or so fucking help me?—”
“Or you’ll what?” I challenged, knowing full well he would never do anything to hurt me.
He couldn’t force me to stay there.
Jay let out a low, frustrated growl, but I just stared at him, letting him see that this was not something I was going to ever agree to.
“Listen, I get that you have all these big macho scary soldier memories in your head, but you’re forgetting that I’m actually pretty freaking smart.”
“I would never forget that,” he snapped, his grip loosening slightly on my shoulders.
“I may not be good with the guns and the hand-to-hand stuff, but I can still help.” I gestured to the table with all the artillery scattered across it.
“I bet we can find a way to set traps to take out anyone coming up to the house on foot. Then you’ll only have to worry about covering the roof.
“Also, if you wear your mask, NOVA and I can keep an eye on where the threats are and communicate with you the whole time to make sure you don’t get taken by surprise. I can watch the feeds on the monitors in the lab.”
“Milo…”
“Comeon,Jay. We’re wasting time arguing about this. I’m not going into the panic room. If we die tonight, so fucking be it, but I’m not letting you do this alone.”
He gave me a flat look before letting out a long-suffering sigh.
“You have a dirty mouth lately. I’ve been a bad influence.”
I beamed at him, shrugging.
“Sometimes the odd F-bomb adds just the right amount of emphasis… Speaking of bombs, how many do you have? Do you have the blueprints for this cabin? I can start planning traps while you finish doing whatever you were doing to that gun,” I quipped cheerfully, deliberately ignoring his dark scowl.
He shook his head and dropped a grumpy kiss on my forehead. Annoyance was radiating off of him in waves, despite the fact that he’d clearly accepted I wouldn’t be cooperating with his version of the plan.
“If you die tonight, I’ll fucking kill you,” Jay grumbled, and I laughed, standing on my tippy toes to brush a kiss across his stubbly jawbone.
“Such a drama queen.”
He let out an irritated huff before striding off toward the lab to get what I assumed were the schematics for the cabin, his jaw pulsing the entire way.
NOVA and I hovered in silence for a moment as I stared after him, wondering how on earth a little nerdy MIT graduate like me had somehow found himself plotting the deaths of an entire team of hired killers.
“Welp, if we survive this, I guess I can add‘Proficient at setting booby traps’to myresume,” I joked to NOVA.
“Milo, if you survive this, I don’t think you’ll ever need to worry about your resume again.”
And I realized she was right.
