"Setting up a command center on my kitchen island. She's fine."
"And you?"
"Working the evidence." I gesture to the bench. "The construction methodology is military. Not just military-adjacent, Thatch. This is someone who went through advanced EOD training or had direct access to the curriculum. The solder work alone would take years of practice to get this precise."
Thatcher steps closer and examines the components without touching them, his gaze sharp and systematic. MARSOC trains their Raiders in demolitions and explosive breaching, so he reads the bench the way I would, recognizing the elements that matter.
"This is consistent with what we saw during the hospital supply investigation," he says quietly. "The diversion operation used the same level of tactical sophistication. Whoever is behind this has access to military-trained personnel, not contractors or amateurs. People who understand operational security, counter-forensics, and how to send a calibrated message."
"That's what this was. Calibrated." I pick up the detonator housing with gloved fingers and turn it under the light."Pressure-release trigger, placement designed to wound, not kill. Someone wanted Nox to know they could reach her. Wanted her scared enough to back off the investigation without losing their asset."
"Asset?"
"She's the only person on this base who can trace the malware back to its source. You kill her, you create a martyr and NCIS brings in a replacement. You scare her, you might buy time. Might slow her down while she second-guesses whether every shadow is a threat."
"Will it? Slow her down?"
"Have you met her?"
Thatcher's mouth twitches. "Fair point."
I strip my gloves and lean back against the wall. The review room is quiet except for the ventilation system pushing recycled air through the ceiling vents. Through the window, the morning light catches the harbor, and I know Nox is sitting at my kitchen island surrounded by cables and monitors and shortbread, pulling threads in a network that someone just threatened to kill her for touching.
The drive back to the loft after my shift ends takes me along the waterfront, past the row of converted warehouses where the old naval storage facilities have been turned into apartments and studios. The bay is dark by the time I reach my building, the water catching fragments of light from the pier lamps along the shore. I climb the stairs and pause outside my own front door, listening. Through the steel I can hear the muffled sound of typing, steady and rhythmic and uninterrupted.
I unlock the door quietly and disarm the security system before it can announce me. The loft is dark except for the blue glow of her monitors, three screens casting cold light across the kitchen island and the exposed brick behind it. The floor-to-ceiling windows frame the water beyond the building, and thecombined light turns the open space into something that looks different than it did this morning, less like storage and more like a place where something is being built.
Nox is perched on the bar stool with her legs tucked underneath her and her laptop balanced on her knee because she's run out of counter space. Her sweater has slipped off one shoulder. A mug of what looks like forgotten tea sits abandoned next to the shortbread, which is down to a few biscuits from the full sleeve she arrived with. Her fingers move across the keyboard in steady, precise bursts, and the monitor closest to me shows lines of code scrolling in a pattern I can't read but that clearly means something to her because her focus is absolute.
The bay behind her is all dark water and distant lights, and the blue of the monitors and the blue of the night blend until the whole scene looks like something painted rather than lived in.
"Hey," I say from the doorway.
She doesn't look up. Her fingers keep moving, eyes tracking the code.
"Thank you," she says.
There is no sarcasm in it. No qualifier. No edge. Just two words, offered to the screen and meant for me, and they land harder than anything she's said since I met her.
I close the door behind me, set the deadbolt and the chain, and arm the security system. Her typing fills the quiet, and the silence in this loft finally has something in it.
4
NOX
The smell of bacon wakes me, which is disorienting on several levels.
First, because I don't remember falling asleep. The last thing I recall is the secondary payload analysis hitting a dead end around three in the morning and my vision going soft at the edges, and then apparently my body made the executive decision to relocate from the kitchen island to the guest room bed without consulting my brain.
Second, because nobody has ever cooked bacon in a space I'm sleeping in. Hotel rooms don't come with that service, and the B&B's continental breakfast ran to pastries and fruit and the shortbread that Mrs. Kellaway left outside my door every evening like an offering to a particularly difficult deity.
Third, and most problematically, because the bacon smells good. Not just edible, but properly, irritatingly good. It's the kind of good that means someone knows what they're doing with a pan and doesn't need to be supervised, and the only person with access to that kitchen is Griff Holland, and the idea of Griff doing anything domestic is information I did not ask for and do not want.
I lie in bed with my eyes closed for longer than I should, cataloging the sounds coming through the door: oil popping in a skillet, the clink of a mug being set on granite, and underneath all of it, barely audible but unmistakable, the tinny drawl of country music playing from a phone speaker.
Country music. Because of course he's from Texas and apparently that's a personality trait that extends to his culinary soundtrack, and I am lying in a strange bed in a strange man's warehouse listening to someone sing about trucks and heartbreak while my host fries breakfast meat like this is a Sunday morning and not the day after someone tried to blow my face off.
I get up. I brush my teeth. I put on leggings and a clean sweater that I pull from the duffel bag I barely remember packing, and I walk out into the main space with every intention of establishing that this arrangement is temporary, professional, and does not include a shared meal plan.
