Nox sees me and her jaw tightens. "I told you not to come."
"I know." I pull up a chair beside her and sit. "You handled it."
"Obviously I handled it." The snap in her voice is aimed at herself, not me. "The probe was an early trigger, possibly an automated test, possibly someone checking whether the payload was still viable after Garrick went dark. I isolated it, traced the activation path, and killed it node by node. The infected systems are clean. The main payload hasn't fired." She stops. Her hands press flat to her thighs again. "I handled it."
"Your hands are shaking."
"I'm aware."
"Nox."
"If you say a single comforting thing right now, I will punch you in the face." Her voice fractures on the last word, just enough for the edge to splinter, and then she pulls it back together. "I just spent hours in a room alone fighting code that could have blacked out an entire military installation, and I won, and now my body is disagreeing with my brain about whether the crisis is over, and I don't need comfort. I need the shaking to stop."
"Who said anything about comfort?" I keep my voice level, the same tone I use with my team when a device is live and the room needs to stay calm. "You just disarmed a payload that could have crippled a joint military base. What you're feeling right now is your body catching up to what your hands already knew. It passes."
"Spoken like a man who's felt it."
"Spoken like a man who's learned to stop fighting it."
She looks at me, and for a beat the sarcasm drops and what's underneath is raw and exhausted and more honest than she'd allow herself if she weren't running on fumes and an adrenaline crash.
I reach for her hand. She pulls back, and I wait, and then she doesn't pull back the second time.
My fingers close around hers, both hands, and I press down on her knuckles until the tremor has something to push against. I do it the way I'd stabilize a wire under tension, a steady hold and nothing more. Her fingers are cold and the fine tremor transfers through her skin into mine, and I keep them still, firm enough to anchor, careful enough not to break what's underneath.
"You're annoyingly good at this," she says quietly.
"Steady hands. It's literally in my job description."
The corner of her mouth loosens. It isn't a smile, but I can see the fraction before one, the part she lets me see when she's too tired to lock it down. It costs me more than any full smile would, because this is the version she doesn't give anyone.
The containment protocol finishes its sweep. The last red node goes dark. The monitors level off into baseline, and the topology map shows a clean network, secured.
Nox's breathing slows by degrees. The shaking fades from her hands into her wrists, then her forearms, then dissipates somewhere between the chair and the desk. She doesn't look at me. Her gaze stays on the monitors, watching the clean network confirm itself, but her fingers curl around mine and hold.
"I want to go home," she says quietly, and the word escapes before she can catch it. She doesn't sayback to the loft.She says home.
The drive takes minutes. The loft is dark except for the standby lights on her monitors at the island, blue points glowing in the black like a constellation she built. I lock the door, set the deadbolt, and arm the system. It's all muscle memory now, the same controlled procedure I run before an operation, except the asset I'm securing isn't a building.
She's standing in the middle of the living space with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes on me when I turn around.
Outside, Garrick is somewhere in the wind. The handler is invisible. The joint operation is a lit fuse burning toward a detonation window, and the base is locked down and the network is clean but the threat is still out there, circling, patient, waiting for the opening.
All of that is true, and all of that can wait, because the woman standing in my living room just held a military installation together with her bare hands and now she's looking at me like I'm the one thing in this room she didn't build and can't reverse-engineer.
"Don't be gentle," she says.
"Too late."
She exhales through her nose, hard and frustrated, and the sound is so completely Nox that something in my chest unclenches. "I'm serious, Holland. I don't want careful right now. I want?—"
"I know what you want." I cross the distance between us and put my hands on her face, my thumbs along her jaw, and kiss her. It isn't what she asked for, because what she asked for is armor, and the armor is the thing that failed tonight. I trace the shape of her mouth with the focused attention I give to a circuit in the dark, methodical, unhurried, reading the response. She tastes like cold tea and adrenaline, and underneath both, the warmth that my body cataloged the first time and has been running diagnostics on ever since.
A frustrated sound vibrates against my lips, and her hands fist in my shirt. "Holland."
"I'm here."
"Faster."
