This morning the sky is wrong.
Not sunrise — the light that's come up is flat and greenish, sitting low over the mountains like a lid. The timber to the east is moving.
The whole tree line shifts as if something large is breathing through it from the other side.
By the time Wyatt and Hawk finish the rotation and come inside, there's the faint, clean smell of ozone bleeding through the gaps in the boards. Rain coming.
Maybe more than rain.
He takes Hawk to the ground in a clean sweep, pins him, releases. Stands. Rolls his neck.
He doesn't come inside. He never comes inside while I'm at the window. Whether that's deliberate, or whether proximity genuinely costs him the way it costs me, I can't tell — the constant low-grade burn of wanting something I can't have in a building full of people who would absolutely notice.
In the cabin, we were alone. One long night of impossible sex. Something gave way between us that neither of us expected.
Now we're in a safe house with five operators between us and every exit. The heat between us is still right there, undimmed, indifferent to operational security or Frost's careful, watching silence.
I go back to my terminal.
The moment Wyatt shuts the door behind him,the air in the room shifts. It's not a subtle change. It's gravity, the way my body leans toward him.
Craves him. Without me asking. Without me even thinking about it.
The problem is that I know what that body feels like, and I want more.
That's the part I can't shut off.
I can catalogue it from here — the way he moves, weight balanced low, controlled and economic, nothing wasted — and my nervous system supplies the rest without permission.
The weight of him. The heat radiating off his chest when he pulled me against the table in the dark. The rough drag of his hands over my body. The way he went completely still for one suspended second before control snapped entirely and he stopped being careful.
Don't.I pick up my coffee.Do not turn around.
He doesn't come to me.
Not because he doesn't want to.
I know that.
Through repetition, through paying attention, through the small involuntary tells of a man who has spent his entire adult life trying to be unreadable. The half-second pause when he passes my chair. The way he angles himself in a room so I'm always in his sightline. The set of his jaw at night when Frost sayswe're doneand Wyatt takes his position on the floor in the front room instead of anywhere near me.
He sleeps on the floor in the front room with his sidearm within reach. I sleep on the cot in the back room. The twelve feet of hallway between us might as well be a mile of open ground.
Five other people in this building at all times. No privacy. None.
He knows it. So do I.
The Guardian team isn't oblivious — Frost clocks it every time Wyatt crosses the room and his trajectory adjusts toward me before he reroutes. Frost doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. The weight of his silence on the subject is its own full sentence.
As for the relationship between Wyatt and Frost, it's a live wire.
I've been stepping around it for three days. So has everyone else. But the charge between those two men doesn't dissipate. It gets denser the longer they're in the same building, a specific and loaded kind of silence that other people's voices can't fill.
On day two, I'm determined to find out why.
It's mid-morning.Frost is running comms in the back room, Riot is on the roof checking the antenna array, Kade and Hawk have gone out to sweep the road.
That leaves Flint at the kitchen table, field-stripping a sidearm with the unhurried attention of someone who does it the way other people do crosswords.
