"What the hell are you doing here?" Her voice came out low and flat and exactly the way she'd trained it to come out when she wanted a man to leave a room. "Get out."
His mouth curved into a wry smile, his eyes glinting with…tenderness. "It's good to see you, too, babe."
The endearment cut her like a blade she'd already taken once.
"Don't even try to charm me." Her voice rose, and she let it. "You can't be here."
He just looked at her, those gray eyes holding her without any of the easy slide she remembered from Venezuela, without the practiced softness he'd used on her when she'd been bruised, silent and trying not to need anyone. He looked at her like a man who had decided, somewhere between then and now, to stop pretending. The eagle's shadow tilted faintly with him.
"We're looking for you," he said, "and we're not leaving until you hear us out." The corner of his mouth pulled, but nothing in his eyes followed it. "If you don't want to see the end of the world, you better brace yourself."
She had stood at the tower window and begged him to stay away.
She wasn't proud of it. Begging wasn't in her vocabulary, not in this life, and the part of her that had whispered his name to the glass was the same part she'd been trying to forget sinceVenezuela. It didn't matter what she begged for. It only mattered that she'd done it.
Now prayers and begging weren’t going to do a damn thing.
She didn't want to be alone with him. She didn't want to vent in front of his men either, and the second option lost.
"You." She jabbed a finger at him. Her eyes cut to the four behind him. "Come with me. The rest of you. Stay here. Don't move a muscle. Don't get comfortable."
She turned on her heel. She didn't check whether he followed. The march to the tower was a hundred and forty paces across packed dirt and cracked asphalt, past the husk of a Bell 47 she'd left rotting on its skids for the look of it, past the chain link she'd let rust on purpose, and she counted every step because counting was something to do with her mind that wasn't looking at him. She heard his boots behind her, that quiet, even stride, the one that said he could keep up with her all night and would. She prayed for willpower. She prayed to a god she'd half stopped believing in and the ancestors she'd never stopped, and she asked them, all of them, for whatever it would take to put this man on a plane back to Virginia.
The tower door took her shoulder hard. She slammed inside. "Lights."
The downstairs woke in stages, the soft amber she'd programmed for night hours sliding up the walls and across the worn leather of the couch, the bookshelves she'd built herself out of reclaimed pine, the rug her grandmother had woven before her hands had given out. Her sanctuary, the only room in the world where she'd let herself be soft, and she'd just brought him into it.
She walked into the living room. She turned to set the line of her body against him.
He hit her all over again.
He was standing where the lamp light caught him at the edge, half in shadow, the gray of his eyes nearly black in it, the eagle's outline still riding the air above his shoulders, faded now, a suggestion she wasn't sure she was meant to see. He looked tired, his jaw tight, and his hands at his sides, fingers half curled. Before she could speak, he beat her to it.
His own anger flared, clean and hot, and she felt it land before the words did.
"You told me to watch the skies." His voice was low and rough at the edges. "I've been watching for too damn long. What do you think you're doing? Do you think for one minute I'm going to stay in Virginia Beach while you're being hunted for something you didn't do?"
Oh, God.
The breath she'd been holding cracked apart in her chest.
How did he do that? Six months of running, six months of files and forensics and the slow, careful work of building a case for a name she might never get back, six months of looking at her own face in every mirror and trying to remember she was still the woman she'd taken her oath as, and he stood in her living room and dismissed every word of the charges against her in a single sentence. He didn't believe she'd done it. He'd never even considered believing she'd done it. He had watched the skies for her and decided what was true about her without needing to be told.
Her hands shook.
She closed them into fists at her sides, and the shaking moved up into her arms.
She wanted to touch him. She wanted it with the full-body wanting she'd refused herself for so long that the refusal had become its own muscle, and the muscle was giving out. She wanted her palms on his face. She wanted to feel his rough jaw and the warmth of his skin and the place under his ear where hispulse would be, to drag her hands down his throat and across the planes of his chest and over the ridges of his stomach and lower to map him with her mouth, all of him, every scar and every plane and the soft skin she remembered along the inside of his wrist where she'd pressed her thumb once in Venezuela for no reason except that he'd let her. She wanted to ruin herself on him. She wanted to be allowed to.
The wanting was unbearable, and it was going to flatten everything she'd built if she let it stand for one more second.
She made herself breathe again and find her voice.
"This fight doesn't belong to you, Flash." Her voice came out steady, and she hated it for the lie it was telling. "It's mine to deal with. I won't allow you to risk your life, your career, or your honor to help me. Leave. Please be kind and leave. I don't want you here."
Other words crowded behind them, and she had to set her teeth against the ones that wanted to spill instead.I missed you. I want you. I haven't stopped thinking about you from the moment you opened that door in Herrera's prison. I'll never forget the warmth of you or the way your body carried me like I was a part of you.She clamped down on every one. The ocher lamp light pooled on the rug between them, and her grandmother's weave caught the gold. He folded his arms across his chest.
"No."
