The proximity sharpened everything—the warmth of his breath, the tension in the muscles under my palm, the memory of the way his mouth had tasted earlier when he closed the distance between us without hesitation.
“Careful,” I said quietly.
“Yeah,” he muttered, though he hadn’t pulled away yet either.
There was a crackling and rustling of something in the undergrowth to our left.
My knife was in my hand before the sound stopped.
I stepped forward, positioning myself between Caleb and the direction of the noise. The narrow gap between two trees formed the most likely approach from the trail, and I filled that space without thinking.
The bushes rustled, and I bent my knees, ready to kill.
Then a raccoon burst across the trail and disappeared into the darkness beyond the trees.
Behind me, Caleb released a breath that sounded suspiciously like suppressed laughter. “Good to know you’re on top of the raccoon threat.”
I didn’t turn around immediately. My pulse had already settled back into its normal rhythm, and the knife remained steady in my grip, ready in case the animal had only been masking something larger.
After another few seconds of silence, I slid the blade back into its sheath.
“Next camera,” I said.
Work first.
Everything else later.
By the timewe returned to the cabin, it was an hour before dawn, and the temperature had dropped enough that the spring air carried the clean, sharp smell of pine and damp earth.
Caleb went straight to the table, dropping his bag beside the laptop before opening the machine and powering it up. The screen flickered to life, pale light spilling across the room as he began connecting to the cameras we had placed along the ridge.
One by one, the feeds appeared: four cameras, then five.
Each window displayed grainy night-vision images of the compound—perimeter fence, approach road, and the yard between the buildings, where two guards were still talking under the floodlights.
“We’ve got coverage,” Caleb said, leaning closer to the screen as he adjusted the zoom on one of the feeds.
I stayed near the counter and watched him work.
When he was inside a system, his posture changed, shoulders angled forward, his attention narrowing until the world around him seemed to fall away. He pulled up additional overlays—heat signatures, a slow scan of wireless traffic bleeding out from the compound buildings.
It made it easier for me to study him.
He rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, unaware that I was watching him from across the room.
The memory of him stumbling into me replayed with annoying persistence. My hands remembered the exact shape of the moment—where his arm had been, the pressure of his chest, the quick shift of his balance—and some quiet, analytical part of my mind classified it the same way it did terrain or exits, as if confirming where Caleb was safest when things moved too fast. The weight of him against my hands. The warmth of his chest under my palm.
And the kiss earlier, the way he had closed that final inch between us as if hesitation had never occurred to him. Attraction usually came down to three simple things: proximity, opportunity, and timing. Right now, we have all three, which meant I needed to be careful.
My gaze drifted to the camera feed showing the perimeter trail where the guard had smoked earlier.
Anyone who came through those woods would appear on our screens long before they reached the cabin, their route pickedup by at least two of the cameras Caleb had positioned along the ridge.
And if they didn’t…
Then they would meet me first, and the encounter would be brief.
Behind me, Caleb’s chair scraped softly across the wooden floor and I turned enough to see him in my peripheral vision as he leaned back from the laptop and rolled the tension from his shoulders. He had been hunched over the keyboard for nearly twenty minutes, eyes on the shifting grids of data and camera feeds, but now he stood and stretched, one hand braced against the edge of the table, his shirt tight across his back before he pushed his fingers through his hair and exhaled slowly.
