I took the bedroom on the right.
The room was simple—a bed, a dresser, and a view out toward the front of the cabin. Functional. Temporary. Good sight of the driveway.
We’d be sharing the bathroom at the end of the hall.
I set my bag on the bed and stared at the closed door for a moment, thinking about the line of Caleb’s throat, the steady pulse under his skin, the way he hadn’t moved when I stepped into his space.
At some point, he would take a shower.
I wanted to see him naked.
ELEVEN
Caleb
I stood there longerthan I should have after Novak stepped back.
My body hadn’t gotten the message that the moment was over. My pulse was still hammering, breath shallow, skin tight like it expected him to close the distance again. For a few seconds, I just stared at the space where he’d been standing, my brain trying to catch up with the rest of me.
Jesus Christ.
I dragged a hand down my face. My cock was hard, pressing uncomfortably against my jeans, and the worst part was that some traitorous piece of my brain was still waiting for the feel of Novak’s hand on my jaw, the brush of his fingers on my throat. Waiting for him to step back into my space as if he had every right to be there.
I swore under my breath and forced myself to move.
The front door was still open. I shut it harder than necessary and slid the lock across, theclicksharp in the quiet hallway. The house settled around me again, familiar sounds, familiar air, and I pushed the whole moment aside the way I did with everything else that didn’t make sense.
I forced myself to focus.
Downstairs, the comms room wrapped around me like armor. Banks of monitors glowed in the dim light while processors hummed steadily, and cables and servers lined the walls. Screens waited for input, calm and predictable in a way the rest of the world never was. This was my space—logical, contained, and built on systems that behaved the way they were supposed to.
I dropped into the chair and woke the system with a few quick keystrokes. Files opened. Databases populated the screens. Search strings built themselves in my head, and my fingers followed automatically, muscle memory taking over while my brain settled back into the clean lines of data and patterns.
Novak didn’t fit into patterns.
Most people had tells. Motivations that made sense if you tugged at the threads long enough. Novak was different. Efficient violence, zero hesitation, and an unnerving calm that suggested he’d already worked out the outcome before anyone else in the room had realized there was a problem.
And then there was whatever the hell had just happened upstairs.
I ran deeper searches, digging through reports, chatter, and anything connected to the network we were tracking. The world out there was ugly. Trafficking routes, burner accounts, encrypted drops. The kind of things you only examined if you were prepared to see how bad people could get when no one was watching.
Hours could disappear in this room if I let them.
Sometimes that was the point.
The soft knock against the door jamb yanked me out of the data spiral.
I glanced up.
Novak was there, with his familiar, steady stare and unreadable expression. He held a mug in one hand, and the aroma of much-needed coffee reached me. He crossed the room without hurry and set it beside my keyboard, along with a bar of Hershey’s chocolate.
“Closest I could find to chocolate donuts,” he said.
I frowned at the bar. Of course, he’d noticed the whole donut thing; it had probably been recorded through his robot eyes.
Or maybe he’s just caring and observant?
Yeah, right.
