I stared at the dark camera for a moment. Then I turned to Sera.
She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t catalogue. Not pity. Not amusement. Something in between that was neither and both, and under all of it was a warmth that I wasn’t equipped to receive.
“They love you,” she said.
“They tolerate me. There’s a difference.”
“There really isn’t.” She paused. “Maude ratted you out about the eggs.”
“Maude has a death wish.”
“I have a self-preservation instinct,” Maude said. “They’re easily confused.”
This time Sera outright laughed. Not the polite sound she’d been offering since she arrived. A real laugh, short and startled. It changed her whole face. Her eyes creased and her shoulders dropped, and for about two seconds she was someone I’d never seen before. Someone unguarded.
I looked away.
We went back to the data. But the room had shifted. She’d seen me with my people. She’d watched me deflect and perform and hold them at arm’s length, and she’d seen through all of it to the thing underneath, which was that the men from Warrior Security were my family and I wouldn’t let them in.
And instead of judging it, she’d sat in the warmth of it like it was something she understood.
The afternoon passed through the work. The exchange between us stayed easy, the earlier guardedness smoothed away by hours of shared effort. She’d make an observation, and I’d build on it. I’d hit a wall, and she’d find the door.
At some point she’d taken off her shoes and was sitting cross-legged in the chair, which should have bothered me because feet on furniture was the kind of deviation from protocol that made my skin itch.
Except…it didn’t bother me. I noticed that it didn’t bother me, and that bothered me more.
Late in the afternoon, Sera sat forward. She’d been running a deeper analysis on the corridor data, cross-referencing route timing against utility consumption patterns that Maude had pulled from county databases.
“Travis. Look at this.”
I rolled my chair toward her screen at the same time she turned to show me her data.
Her face wasright there.
Close enough to see the pale line of a scar near her hairline I’d never noticed before. That I could see every golden speck in her brown eyes. That I could feel her breath warm against my jaw.
We both froze.
I could have kept moving forward, let our lips touch. Some part of me wanted to. The same part that had always wanted to, even before…
The part I’d gotten very good at shutting down.
So I straightened. Pulled my chair back to my station. The distance reestablished itself, clean and neat.
“What did you find?” I asked. “Show me.”
She turned back to her screen. Took a breath. “There’s a timing anomaly in the northern corridor. Three courier runs in the past month that deviate from the established pattern by almost identical intervals.” Her voice was steady, but she was talking slightly faster than normal. “If we cross-reference against Kindt’s known scheduling rhythms, it might indicate a new pickup location.”
“Pull them up. Let’s see what matches.”
We kept working. Neither of us mentioned the almost that had happened. But the room was different now, and I knew it, and the silence between our keyboards held something it hadn’t held that morning.
