The feed ended, and I sat there for a second longer than necessary, staring at the screen as it went dark. Killian was right—we needed to stay put and keep gathering intel—but Noah in a freaking kill collar, and God knows what was happening to Eden, who we still hadn’t even laid eyes on, were two of too many unknowns. We had to sit tight. A few more days. Gather intel. Build a picture that didn’t get anyone killed.
I dragged a hand down my face, then leaned forward, pulling the data Lyric had sent across my screens, breaking it apart, filtering it, setting up algorithms to scrape what mattered and discard the noise. Patterns. Signals. Routes. Anything that gave us an edge.
Beside me, everything was quiet.
No conversation. No distraction. Just work.
And when the systems were running, when the data was flowing the way I needed it to, there was nothing left to do but wait.
SIXTEEN
Novak
I watchedCaleb work without announcing my presence. He didn’t react, which meant either he hadn’t registered me at all, or he had and had dismissed me as irrelevant. Both were possible. He was bent over the screens, the glow from the monitors illuminating his face, sharpening his focus and turning everything else in the room into shadow.
He got like this when he worked—locked in, unreachable, consumed entirely by what was in front of him. It should have made him untouchable.
It didn’t.
I wanted to understand the way he moved through data was as if it were physical terrain and his mouth pressed into a line when something didn’t fit.
But not from the outside.
I wantedinsidehis head.
The thought was as clear as any operational plan. Not violence. Not damage. I didn’t want to hurt him. I wanted to see how he worked—how his mind connected things, how he chose, what made him hesitate, what made him push forward.
What could make him want me in return?
I shifted slightly where I stood, forcing control back before the thought could develop into something else. The line was thinner around him. It always had been.
He dragged a hand through his hair, exhaled, and leaned closer to the screen, and I tracked him automatically—the angle of his neck, the steady pulse there, the play of muscle under his shirt as his shoulders moved. I didn’t need to touch him to map it; I could already predict how he’d react if I did.
Observation without interference should have been enough, but it wasn’t. The want came too fast, slipping past the part of me that usually filtered and assessed, settling low and sharp before I could assign it a function or push it aside. My breath caught, and I held it there without meaning to, focus narrowing on him. I wanted him. I wanted to take him apart without breaking him and learn how he reacted, how he breathed, and where his control slipped enough to show something real.
I wanted to taste him, and that hit harder, dragging heat through me, my pulse jumping out of rhythm for a beat before I forced it to steady again. It wasn’t just sex, not just friction and release. I wanted to know him through it, every inch, every reaction, every moment where he stopped thinking and started feeling.
Caleb was my choice. Mine to protect.
Not mine to break.
My chest hurts.
He frowned at the screen, unaware of how tightly my focus had narrowed on him or how close I was to stepping forward and testing every line I’d drawn.
I stayed where I was, holding position, forcing the control back into place.
I was in control.
And then he stretched, leaning back in his chair with a slow stretch, and his shirt lifted enough to expose a strip of skin athis waist—warm, alive, unmarked—and my focus snapped to it, tracking the line of muscle, the subtle shift of breath, the way he shifted without thinking, unaware of how completely the move held my attention.
“It’s just a waiting game now,” Caleb murmured and swung his chair to face me.
I didn’t like that, and the restlessness sat under my skin, pushing at me to go out there, grab Noah and Eden, and end this instead of standing still. I knew we couldn’t—we needed to wait for darkness, but I neededsomething.Caleb stretched again, slow and unguarded, and whatever control I had left thinned to nothing.
“I want you to fuck me,” I told him.
Caleb blinked at me, his mouth dropping open a little. “You want me to what now?”
