"No." The denial is maddening and exactly right. Griff doesn't rush and the deliberate pace is its own form of devastation, each stroke building on the last, stacking sensation until every point of contact between us, his chest against my breasts, his weight pressing me into the mattress, is too much and not enough at the same time.
I drag my nails down his back and his composure cracks. His hips drive harder, the controlled rhythm fracturing into rawer territory, and I match him, rising to meet every thrust because this was always going to be a contest and surrender is the thing neither of us knows how to offer.
His mouth finds mine and I bite his lower lip and he groans into my mouth and his hand slides between us, his thumbfinding my clit with the same devastating accuracy his tongue had, circling in tight, focused strokes while he moves inside me, and the dual sensation builds toward controlled demolition, every nerve igniting in sequence.
"There." My voice barely exists. "Right there, don't stop."
"I know." Just two words, but certain. The pressure with his thumb holds steady and the depth of his hips holds steady while the orgasm builds from my core in a slow tightening spiral that I can feel in my teeth, my fingertips, the backs of my knees.
It crests and breaks and rips through me harder than the first, pulling tight from somewhere deep and radiating outward until my entire body arches under him, my thighs locking around his waist, his name tearing from my throat in a sound I will deny making if asked. He follows within seconds, his rhythm breaking, his forehead dropping to the curve of my neck, hips driving deep one final time as a sound escapes him that is quiet and raw and unguarded in a way I have never heard from him during daylight hours.
We lie there for a few breaths. Moonlight moves on the ceiling. The bay makes its quiet sounds beyond the glass.
His weight on me is warm and solid and feels like comfort I could get used to, which is the thought that propels me out from under him and onto my feet.
"Water?" I ask, already pulling his t-shirt off the floor. It's the closest thing to hand, and finding my own clothes would require acknowledging that they came off with intent.
"Nox."
"It's a yes-or-no question, Holland."
He lies back against the pillow, watching me with an expression I can't categorize. It carries neither regret nor victory nor any of the post-coital defaults I've come to expect. He just looks at me, steady and open, like a man who knows what just happened and is choosing not to perform confusion about it.
"Stress relief," I say from the doorway, naming it so I can keep it manageable. "Accumulated tension, confined quarters. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that."
He props himself on one elbow and looks at me. He doesn't argue, doesn't agree.
His hands rest loose against the sheets, completely still, and the steadiness of them catches somewhere behind my ribs. Earlier tonight those same hands were white-knuckled on the balcony railing after a workplace near-miss that wouldn't let him go. Now they carry the calm they have when he's finished rendering a device safe, as though what happened between us settled whatever the training accident wound tight.
"Goodnight, Nox," he says. Nothing else.
I walk to the kitchen and pour a glass of water that I don't drink. My monitors are dark on the island, screensavers casting slow patterns across the granite. I open my laptop, enter my credentials, and pull up the relay device analysis. Work is the thing I know how to do when everything else becomes complicated.
The code refuses to cooperate. My eyes track the lines, but my brain keeps circling back to the weight of his hand on my hip, the angle he found that made my vision blur, the sound he made against my neck. I scroll through screens of analysis and retain nothing.
His warmth is still in the cotton of the t-shirt where it hangs past my thighs, and the longer I sit here the less the words "stress relief" hold the shape I need them to.
I force myself through the analysis again, slower, and the pattern recognition catches on what's real.
Buried in the malware's compilation metadata, in a section I'd dismissed as standard build artifacts, there's a developer signature. It's not a name but a fingerprint, a specific combination of compiler flags, library versions, and build-pathfragments that constitute a digital signature as unique and identifiable as a thumbprint. The kind of artifact that gets left behind when someone compiles code on a machine configured for military network operations, and the build-path fragments reference a directory structure consistent with DoD cyber warfare development environments.
This can be cross-referenced against military cyber personnel databases, the kind of records that track who trained on which platforms and which development environments they had access to. It won't give me a name tonight, and I can't pull DoD personnel files as a civilian contractor, but Rivera can. One request through NCIS with the right search parameters, and the pool narrows from anyone with offensive cyber training to a specific subset who used a specific configuration on a specific system.
I'm close. Whoever built this already knows someone is looking. The relay device fired a burst the moment Griff opened that junction panel, an automated alert that told the handler their hardware had been found. They'll have watched it stay active in the days since, still transmitting, still connected, which any competent operator would read for exactly what it is: someone left it live on purpose. Someone is watching.
The loft is quiet. Griff's bedroom door stays closed.
The bay outside the windows is black glass with the pier lights scattered across it like dropped coins, and I sit at the kitchen island in his t-shirt and nothing else, a digital fingerprint glowing on my center monitor that's going to lead me to the person who's been inside Tidewater's walls for months. My fingers find the hem of the cotton, running the fabric between thumb and forefinger, and the scent that rises from it is soap and warmth that my brain files alongside the taste of bourbon and the sound of a man saying my name like it meant more than he'd planned on.
I close the laptop. I open it again. I close it.
The fingerprint will be there in the morning. The rest of it, I'm less sure about.
7
GRIFF
The name arrives early, delivered by Rivera in Hartwell's office with the flat precision of someone laying down a card she's been waiting to play.
