After the room cleared, I set up in the dining room and started on the housing layout for Onteora based on what Polina had described as well as the arrival sequence and ground-team handoff. Each piece fed the next. I was in my element, doing the kind of work I loved. Fieldwork would always come first for me, but this was a close second.
Beacon was in the study, with the door closed. I could hear her voice through the wall. She spoke in French, then English, then French again. Each conversation was with a person whose relationship had been built over years.
Eleanor had been feeding Vasiliev information for a long time. Some of what she gave him may have come from Beacon’s sources, which meant some of those people didn’t know they might be burned. Beacon was the only one who could warn them to go to ground before whatever was coming reached them first. The new location and new channels were practical. The warning was an obligation.
Nobody else in the house could make those calls. Her contacts would hang up on anyone who wasn’t her.
Which meant the secure channels needed to be ready when she finished. The encrypted system her contacts would use to reach the Genesis Consortium at Onteora would need layered access and structured databases. If those weren’t built before the calls were done, she’d be making promises with a delay in being able to keep them.
I could build it faster than anyone else in the house. So I did.
I had the channel architecture mapped and the access layers designed when I no longer heard her voice in the study. Moments later, she came into the dining room for water and stopped behind my chair.
“Is that the communication system for my European network?” she asked.
“The channels needed to be ready before you finished the calls.”
“I didn’t ask you to build them.”
“I know. I?—”
She set the glass down with more force than necessary. “Next time,find me first.”
She poured her water, picked up the glass, and returned to the study.
Beacon appeared in the doorway.She’d changed into a sweater, and her hair was down.
She crossed the room, and when she leaned over my shoulder to look at my laptop screen, her hair fell forward and brushed my arm.
She didn’t retreat. She stayed where she was, with her face close enough that I could feel her breath.
“Beacon.”
“Don’t talk,” she said, barely above a whisper.
She straightened and turned my chair so I faced her, then pulled me to my feet by the front of my shirt.
I grabbed her nape as her mouth hit mine.
She kissed me like she’d already decided how this was going to go, and it was up to me to catch up. Her fist twisted tighter in my shirt, and I stopped thinking about what this meant or what came after it.
She made a sound against my lips, low, almost pissed off, like she was angry it felt this good. I tightened my hand on her neck, put the other on her waist,and pulled her in, then caught myself, remembering her bruises.
She felt me ease up and yanked me closer.
I kissed her harder and moved us until she hit the table. She bit my bottom lip, and when I growled in response and did it to her, I felt her smile against my mouth.
She broke the kiss but pulled away too fast, and her knee buckled. I reached for her, but she grabbed the table and waved me off.
My hands were still out like an idiot’s, and I dropped them to my sides. My shirt was wrecked, and my pulse was somewhere north of a cardiac event. She pressed her palm flat against the table, the same hand that had been fisted in my shirt five seconds ago, and I watched her pull herself together piece by piece. Her spine straightened first, then her chin came up, and then every bit of vulnerability I’d seen ten seconds ago disappeared behind a look so composed I might have imagined the whole thing.
Except my hands were still shaking, so no, I didn’t imagine a goddamn thing.
She grabbed her crutch. “I’ll take the communication channels. The architecture is solid, and I’ll adapt it for my contacts.”
“Okay.”
“The housing layout needs my input before morning.”
