“Monday is the best plan we have.I told Ronan the same thing I’m about to tell you — that doesn’t make it a good one.We’re going into a building that’s been compromised from the inside, against people who’ve had three years to build their infrastructure, and we’re doing it with a forty-minute window and a civilian asset who refuses to stand down.”
“You mean me.”
“I mean you.”
“I’m not standing down, Graham.”
“I know you’re not.That’s not what I’m asking.”He leaned forward.“If you see something Monday — anything — you text me.You don’t follow it.You don’t confront anyone.You send me a message, and you stay on your floor.”
“Deal.”
“Maren.”
“I said deal.I’m a nurse, not a federal agent.I know what my job is on Monday and it isn’t walking into a basement after a man who has people on his payroll.”
He held her gaze a beat longer than he needed to.Then he nodded.
He made eggs.She kept working at the supply grid with the highlighter, glancing up when he set the plate beside her.He had brought a bag from Mae’s — two containers of soup, the kind she had said once she liked when she was tired — and he set them in her refrigerator without comment.
“Your mother still send you those articles?”she asked.
“Every Sunday.Last week’s was about the cardiovascular benefits of pets.”
“Mine used to hand me the phone number of someone’s nephew who was single and a lawyer.I called once.He spent forty-five minutes explaining his fantasy football strategy.I faked an emergency page and left.”
Graham laughed.A real one — short, low, surprised out of him.
They ate.His plate on a stack of printouts, hers beside the highlighter.
“Four days,” she said.
“Four days.”
“After Monday, one way or another, this part is over.”
“This part.”
She looked up.He held her gaze and let the silence carry what two weeks of operational language hadn’t.He wasn’t going to name it.Not tonight.Not with Creighton sitting in a dark car outside the building.But he wasn’t going to look away from it either.
Maren reached across the corner of the table and laid her palm flat against his cheek.Just that.Her fingers warm at the line of his jaw.She held it there for the count of three and lowered her hand.
“More coffee?”she asked.
“Please.”
She filled the mugs.He rolled the purchase orders and tucked them into the folder she kept by the refrigerator.They moved around each other in the small space without bumping, without speaking, without needing to.
Outside, Golden Acres Road was dark and still.Somewhere across town, Janet Creighton’s car sat in an empty lot beside an ambulance bay, and Monday was closing in.
Chapter 17
Mitch DeMario was already on the south side of the building when Graham pulled into the staff lot at 7:48 a.m.
He stood at the corner of the loading dock with a rolled schematic under one arm and a coffee cup in the other hand, watching the morning shift filter in through the main entrance.Five-eleven, broad through the shoulders, salt at the temples — a man who had spent twenty years in body armor and never quite stopped carrying the weight of it.
Graham crossed the asphalt to him.
“You’re early.”
