"I asked Chloe once what it felt like," she said. "Knowing. With Tyler. She said it felt like recognizing something she didn't know she'd been looking for."
"Yeah."
"That's it," she said. "Exactly that."
He pressed his lips to the top of her head.
"Go to sleep," he said.
"I'm not tired."
"Emily."
"I'm genuinely not?—"
"Baby girl." The quiet of it. The specific frequency. "Sleep."
She went still.
"Yes, Daddy," she said.
He held her. He stayed awake a little longer, not out of habit, not out of vigilance, not the old military watchfulness that had kept him up for years.
Just because he wanted to feel it a little while longer.
This specific thing. This woman. This life he hadn't planned and wasn't going to waste a single second of.
He kept his hand in her hair.
The compound settled around them and somewhere in the distance he heard Clover whining.
He slept.
CHAPTER 23
EMILY
Three weeks later, Dozer called.
She was at her desk when she heard Rampage's voice change in the kitchen, a subtle shift to operational, the frequency she'd learned to recognize. She saved her work and waited.
He appeared in the doorway.
"Dozer," he said.
"The east?"
"Ghost picked up a new thread. Different network, connected to the same group. They're moving on it next week." He leaned against the doorframe. "He's asking if I want in."
She looked at him steadily. Read everything in his face. He was a former special forces operator, the kind of man who'd been built for exactly this, the decade and a half of being pointed at a problem and trusted to solve it with whatever force necessary.
"Do you want in?" she asked.
"I want to know what you think."
"That's not what I asked."
He paused. "Yes," he said. "I want in."
