If Nox had opened her door without looking down, her foot or the door itself would have shifted the package. She'd be in surgery right now instead of standing in a parking lot in a silk robe, insulting the response time of everyone who showed up to help her.
This is a message, not a murder attempt.
I render it safe in minutes. I disconnect the detonator leads, remove the battery, and separate the charge from the initiator. Each step is deliberate and certain, and I photograph everything before I move anything because the chain of custody starts the moment I touch the first wire.
"Device rendered safe," I tell Rowe over the radio. "Pressure-release trigger, small charge, commercial explosive, electronic det. Get Rivera on the phone. NCIS is going to want this."
When I come down the stairs carrying the components in evidence containers, Nox is exactly where I left her, arms still crossed, jaw still tight. She watches me walk toward her, and her gaze drops to the containers and then back to my face, searching for whatever the surface isn't giving up.
"Pressure-release trigger," I tell her. "Small charge, commercial explosive, electronic detonator. It's a military training configuration. You'd have lost the door and caught shrapnel if you'd stepped on it, but you wouldn't have died."
"How comforting."
"It's meant to be. That's the point." I set the containers on the tailgate of the truck and face her. "Whoever built this knows exactly how much explosive it takes to scare someone without killing them. That's not a random threat. That's a calculated message from someone with ordnance training, and the craftsmanship says they wanted you to know it."
Her rings glint as her grip tightens on her own arms. Behind us, Davis is on her radio coordinating with Tidewater's security office, and the first gray light of pre-dawn is starting to soften the sky over the harbor. Nox looks smaller out here than she does behind her monitors, standing on cold asphalt in a robe meant for a heated room and a short walk to the car, not a crime scene early in the morning. Someone just left a bomb on her doorstep like a calling card.
"I need to call Hartwell," I say.
"Obviously."
"And Rivera's already being notified. NCIS will take custody of the device components."
"Fine."
"And you're not staying here tonight."
Her chin comes up, and the look she gives me could strip paint off a bulkhead. "Excuse me?"
"This building has four exterior doors, a wraparound porch with lattice skirting that provides concealment on three sides, and no security system beyond a deadbolt that a determined teenager could defeat with a credit card. Whoever planted that device walked onto the property, climbed an exterior staircase, placed an IED outside your door, and left without a singleperson in this building noticing. It's a soft target, Nox. Too many access points, too many blind spots and whoever did this knows exactly where you sleep."
"I have a secure terminal in that room. Encrypted VPN, hardware firewall, endpoint protection I built myself. My equipment is upstairs."
"Your equipment can be moved. You can't be rebuilt if the bomb maker decides to get serious about hurting or killing you."
"I'm not running because someone left a firecracker on my doorstep." Her voice is sharp and steady, but the white knuckles on her arms tell a different story. "I have work to do, and I can't do it from some safe house where I'm cut off from my systems."
"Nobody's cutting you off from anything. But this isn't just about you." I let that land before I continue. "The Kellaway has other guests. The innkeepers sleep on the first floor. This device was small and targeted, but whoever built it has access to bigger charges and better placement, and they've already proven they can walk onto this property without being seen. You stay here, and the next device might not be calibrated for a warning. And it might not be outside your door. It might be under the porch where an elderly couple sleeps ten feet from the foundation."
The fight is right there behind her eyes, coiling. She wants to tell me to go to hell. She wants to tell me that she's survived worse than a pressure switch and a training-manual charge, that she didn't cross an ocean and claw her way through a career in defense contracting by letting men in uniforms make her decisions. All of it is loading behind that green stare like rounds in a magazine.
But the innkeepers got her. I can see the exact moment it lands, the shift from defiance to calculation, because Nox Bradshaw will fight for herself all day long but she won't put civilians in the crossfire.
"Where?" she asks.
"My place. It's a converted warehouse loft on the waterfront with a single controlled entry, concrete construction, and clear sightlines from every window. I have a second bedroom that I use for gear storage, but I can have it cleared in an hour." I hold her gaze and keep my voice level, tactical, stripped of anything that could be interpreted as personal. "The B&B is indefensible. My loft is a concrete box with one easy access point through the door and a more difficult one—via what passes for the balcony. That's the math."
That's what I tell her. The math. Because if I phrase it any other way, if I let even a fraction of what went through me when I heard her name and the word explosive in the same sentence leak into this conversation, she'll use it as a reason to refuse.
Her safety matters more than whatever boundaries I'm about to obliterate by putting her in my space.
Hartwell's call confirms what I expected. He orders protective custody. Nox, listening from a few feet away because she refuses to be discussed in absentia, counters that protective custody removes her from the investigation.
The compromise takes longer than it should, negotiated over speakerphone in a parking lot while Nox stands on cold asphalt and I stand between her and the building where someone left a bomb. She stays on the investigation. She moves to my loft. Hartwell assigns a security escort for her commute to the comm building. Rivera will coordinate the NCIS forensic analysis of the device.
Nox packs in twenty minutes. She fills two duffel bags with clothes and personal items, stacks four cases of equipment by the door, adds a pile of external hard drives, and grabs the half-eaten sleeve of shortbread from the plate the innkeepers leave outside her door every evening. She loads it all into my truck with the efficiency of someone who has moved too many timesto be sentimental about the process, and she doesn't look back at the Kellaway as we pull away from the curb.
My loft in the early hours looks exactly the way it always looks, all exposed brick and bare walls with the floor-to-ceiling windows framing dark water. The kitchen island is clean because I cleaned it yesterday. The couch faces the flat-screen. The bedroom door is open, and beyond it the bed is made with military corners because some habits survive everything.
