The silence that followed was heavy, but it wasn't empty. It was filled with the things we couldn't say because we didn't have the contracts for them yet.
Nobody had an honest answer that wouldn't break the fragile peace we’d built. To sayme toowas to admit that this was temporary. To sayI love youwas to admit that the stakes were fatal.
So nobody said anything.
Stephen’s hand moved on the rug, sliding inches until his pinky finger brushed against my ankle. He didn't grab. He just rested there. Contact.
Mateo closed his eyes, his head tipping back against the wall, trusting the room enough to sleep.
Juno shifted in the chair, dropping a hand down until it dangled near my shoulder.
We fell asleep like that. A pile of people who had spent their lives building fortresses, finally realizing that the only walls that mattered were the ones made of bone and breath.
Tomorrow, we would go to war. But tonight, the floor was hard, the room was dark, and I was exactly where I belonged.
TWENTY-ONE
Rowan
The bathroom mirror in the safehouse was backlit by a halo of unforgiving LEDs, designed to make you look flawless or show every single crack in the foundation. Right now, it was showing the cracks.
I gripped the edge of the marble sink until my knuckles turned the color of old bone. The face staring back at me didn't look like a manager. It didn't look like an architect of industry change. It looked like a deer in the headlights of a semi-truck calledThe Mitchell King Show.
I was vibrating.
It wasn't a tremble. It wasn't the cold. It was a high-frequency dissonance running through my marrow, a structural failure warning light blinking red on the dashboard of my nervous system. My breath was coming in short, erratic hitches that fogged the glass.
Breathe, Quill. Logistics. It’s eighteen minutes. Eleven hundred seconds. You can endure anything for eleven hundred seconds.
"You're going to be brilliant." The voice came from the doorway, low and heavy, vibrating through the tiled floor.
I didn't turn around. I couldn't. If I let go of the sink, I was reasonably certain I would slide to the floor and refuse to get up until the fiscal quarter ended.
"You don't know that," I whispered at the mirror. My reflection looked pale, the lipstick I’d applied three times sitting like a wound on my mouth.
Mateo stepped into the room. The air displacement alone told me where he was. He moved up behind me, a wall of heat and cedar in a perfectly tailored charcoal suit. He didn't touch me, but he stood close enough that I could feel the radiation of his body heat soaking into the back of my silk blouse.
"I know you and you know the data and your talking points," Mateo rumbled, his dark eyes meeting mine in the glass. He wasn't looking at the makeup or the hair. He was looking at the pupil dilation. "You prepared. You have the pivots. You have the receipts."
"I have a script," I snapped, the panic making me sharp. "But Mitchell King doesn't follow scripts. He hunts. And I am... I am prey, Mateo. Look at me."
I held up a hand. It was shaking so badly the ring on my finger created a blur of light.
"I’m falling apart," I confessed, the words tasting like ash. "I can’t do this. I’m going to get out there and my voice is going to shake and Vance is going to win because I look like exactly what he says I am. Fragile. Unstable."
Mateo’s jaw tightened. He reached out, placing one massive hand on the small of my back. It was heavy, a physical anchor trying to hold a ship in a hurricane.
"You are not fragile," he said.
"I am right now," I choked out, turning to face him. I grabbed the lapels of his suit, twisting the expensive wool in my fists. "I need... I need you to stop the noise. I need you to put me backin my body because right now I am floating somewhere in the stratosphere and I can't breathe."
Mateo looked down at me. He read the frantic desperation in my scent, the sharp, acrid spike of adrenaline that was eating me alive.
He didn't ask "how." He didn't ask "are you sure." He just acted.
He grabbed my waist, lifted me effortlessly, and slammed me backward against the marble counter.
The impact jarred the breath out of me, knocking the spreadsheet of worries out of my head. Before I could inhale, his mouth was on mine, hot, demanding, and absolutely unyielding.
