The end of the second week. Night. The thin walls again.
Two weeks. I was a different man from the one who'd arrived. I'd re-cropped my hair that morning, the two-week cycle as automatic as it had been when I'd had a barber and a normal life. The clippers were becoming familiar. Weight returned. The shirts Declan had found for me from some Phoenix supplystrained across the shoulders, and the face in the mirror had stopped looking hunted and started looking like someone worth hunting for entirely different reasons.
I lay in bed and listened. Irish's voice, filtering through the drywall, soft and low, talking about a discrepancy in a transport manifest he'd been chasing all day. The words were indistinct but the cadence was familiar—his mind working through a problem out loud, using Declan as a sounding board the way some people used whiteboards or empty rooms.
Declan's response. A low sound. Two words, maybe three.
Then quiet. Quiet that had texture, that communicated what the words before it had only circled.
Then the sound of a kiss. Brief. Habitual. Lips meeting lips with the unconscious ease of ten thousand repetitions. Not passionate. Not performative. Just the nightly punctuation of two people who'd been ending their days this way for nearly eight years and would go on ending them this way for decades more.
And nothing else. The quiet settled in and stayed, and I lay there and understood something I hadn't articulated until now: they were holding back. The thin walls that let me hear their laughter and their murmured conversations would carry everything else just as clearly, and they knew it. Whatever their nights normally sounded like behind a closed door, they'd muted themselves for my sake. Constrained the full volume of their intimacy to whispers and careful silences and a single brief kiss.
The thought of what I wasn't hearing burned worse than the thought of what I was.
I closed my eyes. Pressed my palm flat against the wall.
Four and a half inches. Standard residential drywall. Negligible sound dampening at frequencies below two hundred hertz.
I could have calculated the transmission loss. Could have quantified the exact acoustic properties that allowed a kiss to travel from one room to another with enough fidelity to crack something open in a man who'd spent two years building walls considerably thicker than four and a half inches.
I didn't.
I kept my hand on the wall and let the warmth of it seep into my palm, and I lay there in the dark desert silence and did not count the seconds until sleep came because some numbers are better left unknown.
5
FAMILIAR SKIN
IRISH
The thing about Nolan Mercer's mind was that it made mine better.
Not better the way a tutor makes a student better, or a coach makes an athlete better. Better the way a second engine makes a car faster. Additive. Multiplicative. Two systems working in parallel, covering each other's blind spots, and the combined output was something neither of us could have produced alone.
We'd been at the safehouse for twelve days and in that time we'd mapped more of the weapons pipeline than the DOJ had managed in three years. Forty-seven matched signature pairs linking Raymond Holt to both the destruction orders and the receiving manifests. Four years of a Deputy Assistant Attorney General signing his own conviction because he'd been doing it so long he'd stopped being careful.
Tyler had called it the most important evidence against a federal official since Watergate. Nolan had gone quiet when heheard that—the bone-deep, exhausted quiet of a man who'd been carrying a truth nobody believed and had finally set it down.
The case was nearly built. The evidence was damning. And I was losing my mind.
Not about the case. About everything else.
Twelve days in a cabin with two men. One I'd loved for nearly eight years. One I was developing feelings for that I couldn't name and couldn't stop and couldn't tell a soul about, because telling Dec meant risking the only certainty I'd ever had, and telling Nolan meant risking a man who'd already lost everything and didn't need the additional complication of his protector catching feelings.
And underneath all of it, humming through my body like a low current: two weeks without sex.
Two weeks. Dec and I hadn't gone two weeks without touching each other since the time he'd deployed to the Persian Gulf in 2019 and I'd been a walking disaster for fourteen days. We'd shared a bed every night at the safehouse, and every night we'd lain there in the dark, hyper-aware of the thin walls, hyper-aware of the man sleeping four and a half inches away, and we'd kept our hands to ourselves like monks in a monastery built for sinners.
It was killing me. Not figuratively. My body was running hot, restless, my skin prickling with a need that had nowhere to go. Two weeks of proximity to Dec’s body—his hands, his chest, the way he moved through a room—and now, on top of that, twelve days of watching Nolan Mercer push his glasses up with one finger and map numbers in the air with hands that made me forget how to breathe.
I was a man on fire pretending he couldn't smell the smoke.
That afternoon, the data session wrapped early because Nolan had hit a wall on the Hawthorne depot records and needed to step away from the numbers, which for him was like needing to step away from oxygen. He'd gone to the gym.
I heard the heavy bag first. The muffled rhythm of leather absorbing force, steady, controlled, filtering through the cabin walls from the detached garage. I went to the kitchen window.
The garage door was open. From this angle I could see about half the interior, the heavy bag swinging on its chain, and Nolan.
