“We’re safe here,” she whispers. “For now. You can turn it off.”
“Turn what off?”
She looks at me like she already knows the answer. Like she’s been watching me fight myself all day.
“The sentry mode,” she says. “The Ghost.”
I lift my head.
She’s inches away. I smell her soap. Feel the warmth rolling off her. Every breath she takes lands inside me like a provocation.
“If I turn it off,” I say, low, tight, “I don’t know what happens next.”
Her eyes drop to my mouth. Stay there. When they lift again, the challenge is gone—replaced by heat and something dangerously close to trust.
“I think you do.”
Last night flashes through me—pillows stacked between us like a ceasefire, her back inches from mine, my body locked down so hard it hurt. Hours of listening to her breathe, every exhale grinding me closer to the edge.
Now the pillows are gone.
She shifts closer. Her knee brushes mine. Deliberate.
Her hand slides up my arm, slow, claiming territory, settling on my shoulder. Her thumb traces my collarbone through the T-shirt like she’s testing how much pressure I can take.
Stop her.
The order forms. Clean. Professional. Exactly what I should do.
But I don’t move.
Her touch burns through the cotton, searing into muscle, into bone. Every stroke of her thumb rewrites something in my chest—erases protocol, smears through training, turns fourteen years of discipline into smoke.
This is a job. She is a principal. You are her protective detail.
The words feel like reading a language I used to know.
She inches closer. The heat of her radiates through the narrow gap between us, and my hands clench against my thighs so hard my knuckles ache. I’m holding onto something—control, sanity, the last fraying thread of who I’m supposed to be in this room.
“Diego,” she breathes.
The name hits like a snapped line.
My real name. The one I buried under callsigns and clearances and years of making myself into a weapon instead of a man.
She says it like she knows exactly what she’s pulling out of me.
My jaw locks. Molars grinding. Every muscle in my body coils so tight I’m shaking with it—this war between what I want and what I’m allowed to want. Between the oath I swore and the woman two inches from my hands.
Walk away.
I should. I know I should. Stand. Create distance. Reset the parameters. Remind her—remind myself—that I’m here because someone wants her dead, not because?—
Her fingers curl into my shoulder. Tighter. Claiming.
The breath I’m holding fractures in my chest.
You cross this line, there’s no coming back.
