I reach for my phone and pull up Griff's number, then stop. His bedroom door is just past the kitchen. It's been minutes. He can't be asleep yet.
I cross the loft and knock once.
5
GRIFF
Three nights ago, Nox knocked on my bedroom door at midnight with her laptop open and a look on her face that rearranged everything.
The probe was coming from inside Tidewater's subnet, not routed through a VPN, not bounced through external servers. It was coming from inside the wire. That meant either a person sitting at a terminal on base in the middle of the night or a device hardwired into the network infrastructure, something physical that someone had planted. I called Hartwell before she finished explaining, and by morning we had authorization for a full-base sweep of every network junction point with maintenance access.
The sweep took three days to plan. Nox needed time to map the anomalous traffic patterns, narrow the search grid, and set up the monitoring tools that would let her watch the network respond in real time while my team worked the physical side. Three days of her in my loft while we prepped, and three days is long enough to lose your mind.
I learn this the morning when I find her rings on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker, arranged in a precise row, smallest to largest. She takes them off before her shower every morning and leaves them here instead of in her own bathroom,and I stand there staring at them for longer than any grown man should stare at jewelry because the sight of her rings on my counter is doing something to my spatial reasoning that has nothing to do with kitchen organization.
There's a bottle of something French by the sink that I can't pronounce, a hair clip on the arm of my couch, and one of her sweaters draped over a barstool like it lives there. She has her own bathroom in the guest suite, but her presence doesn't respect the boundary. It leaks into every room she passes through.
The scent of her shampoo, bergamot and vanilla, clean and warm, lingers in the air after she walks past, clings to the couch cushions where she curls up to read, hangs in the kitchen long after she's gone back to her room. My brain drops it into the same category as the smell of coffee at dawn and gun oil after a long session: things that mean home.
That's a problem because Lennox Bradshaw is not home. She's a temporary security arrangement sleeping in my guest room, and my loft smells like her shampoo, and I haven't opened a window.
I'm not sleeping. She's not sleeping either. I can hear her through the wall, the faint tap of keys at two in the morning, the creak of the bed when she finally gives up on working and lies down, the long silence that follows when she's trying to quiet a brain that doesn't have an off switch. I lie in my own bed and listen to the silence on the other side of the drywall, and the single wall between our beds feels like the shortest distance I've ever failed to cross.
Within a short time, the loft is a minefield of her. She's left a mug with a lipstick print on the rim next to the coffee maker, stacked a pile of journals on the end of the couch, and parked a fresh sleeve of shortbread from Mrs. Kellaway next to my laptop like a territorial marker. Mrs. Kellaway had pressed itinto Rowe's hands when he swung by the B&B to collect Nox's remaining belongings, and Nox has been working through it at a pace that suggests shortbread is a food group. She takes up more space than anyone her size should be able to, and I can't put my hands on any surface in my own loft without finding her there.
The morning of the sweep, I'm up before dawn. She's already at the island, monitors glowing, tea in hand, the base infrastructure map spread between her keyboards with locations circled in red marker. Hartwell's secure comms kit sits on the counter beside her, the encrypted handheld and headset he'd sent over the day after she moved in so she could coordinate with base operations from the loft without broadcasting classified traffic on open channels.
"These are the network nodes showing anomalous traffic patterns," she says without looking up. "If someone planted a device to access the base subnet directly, it would need to be patched into a physical junction point with fiber connectivity. These six have the right combination of network access and low foot traffic."
"How low?"
"Maintenance-only access. Locked panels, restricted corridors, utility spaces. Places where someone would need a base badge and either a maintenance MOS or a work order to be there."
I study the map. Four locations cluster along the eastern infrastructure corridor near the comm building, and the other two sit adjacent to the server farm. "We start at the server farm. It's the highest-value target with the best connection."
"Agreed." She folds the map and hands it to me, her fingers brushing mine in the transfer, brief and accidental and neither of us acknowledge it. "I'll direct from here over comms. Channel seven."
"You're not coming on-site?"
"I'm more useful watching the network in real time and telling you where the probe originates while you're at each location. You sweep, I correlate. If the device is active, I'll see it respond when you get close."
She's right. She is my eyes in the digital space, and I am her hands in the physical one, and we've built an operational dynamic this seamless in under a week. Partnerships that click like this are rare and they are never, in my experience, just professional.
"Lock the door behind me. Chain, deadbolt, and security system."
"I know the protocol, Holland."
"Say it back to me."
"Chain. Deadbolt. Security system. Don't answer for strangers. Call you if anything feels wrong. Shall I also promise not to run with scissors?"
"That'd be great."
I grab my keys and head for the stairs, pulling the door shut behind me and wait until I hear the deadbolt turn, the chain slide home, and the two short beeps of the security system arming. The roads are still empty at this hour, the base waking up in slow stages around me as I drive to the EOD shop.
Rowe is waiting, dressed and caffeinated. I brief him in the parking lot with the map on the hood of the truck. "We're looking for an unauthorized network relay device hardwired into the base infrastructure. It'll be small, concealed inside a junction box or a cable conduit. Our cyber specialist is monitoring remotely and will direct us to probable locations."
"What kind of device?"
