Page 298 of Operation: Defiance

Chapter Ninety-Six

Two Days Later

Asher

Raine’s hair fans out across my shoulder.

I don’t move, letting all the various injuries report in. My side aches, the wound healing but still filing complaints in triplicate every time I twist or bend or try to lift anything heavier than a coffee cup.

The stiffness in my arms and shoulders makes cement look soft. My wrists are still raw from the cuffs and the positions they forced me into that left the metal biting into skin and grinding against bone.

My hands are the worst. They don’t like cooperating in the mornings. Or afternoons. Or evenings. I like to think they work while I’m sleeping. Though, if I’m not asking anything of them, does that count as cooperation?

I’ve been interrogated before. Taken more than one beating at the hands of people who thought I’d break. I knew the physical cost going in. I didn’t anticipate how much of the damage would be invisible. Mental. Emotional.

Yesterday morning, a door in the building slammed, and I broke out in a cold sweat. The chairs in the kitchen are too hard, the table the wrong height, and my heart started pounding the moment we sat down for dinner. Raine noticed the second I tensed up, and carried the bowls of leftover pasta to the coffee table without a word.

But I’ll deal with it all, because Raine is curled against me, her palm resting over my heart. She told me in the quiet moments before we fell asleep last night that she needs to know I’m real. That counting my heartbeats is proof I’m alive. Proof she’s not still trapped inside Coherent Path, waiting to die.

I wanted to give her something of me in return, so I told her the mantra I repeated over and over again during the worst of the interrogation sessions.

My job is to give her time.

I couldn’t tell her anything else. Not yet. I’m not ready. She knows how GSD operates—operated. She knows the worst of it. The injection that rendered my vocal cords useless for eight hours almost broke me completely.

But the Global Security Directorate is finished. Or will be soon. Congressional hearings start next week. Ellen, Tessa, and four other women whose lives were permanently altered by Coherent Path are already set to testify. As is Brett Wallburn, the contractor who administered the electroshock and the fatal injections. Adams—the Commissioner—was led out of the building in handcuffs on the Ten O’clock News last night. Voss is dead, and two additional Coherent Path contractors have come forward with their own stories of how he “convinced” them erasing people was a good idea.

I force my thoughts back to the present. To Raine’s steady breathing. To the scent of her shampoo and the soft sheets and the feel of the two of us pressed together in a bed where we can see the sky through the floor-to-ceiling window and no one’s actively trying to kill us.

I’ll stay here—completely still—as long as I can. Because neither of us have gotten even a fraction of the sleep we need in the past few days. So I stare at the ceiling. At the overhead light we never turn on because it’s too bright and too loud for her after eight days of complete darkness and utter silence inside Coherent Path.

Raine wakes the way she does everything else. All at once. One moment her breathing is slow and even against my shoulder, the next, her hand presses flat over my heart. I count to ten—she admitted yesterday morning she picked that number because we had ten days together after I pulled her out of Coherent Path and before I let GSD take me.

“Morning,” I whisper against her hair. My voice is mostly mine again, though it stages a walk-out if I get chatty. Doc said that might happen for a few days. He’s guessing, but I appreciate his attempt to reassure me.

A laryngeal nerve block shouldn’t have been possible. But the Public Integrity Project confirmed that Julian Voss had a whole medical research division running off book, so who knows what awful shit they’ve perfected. No one’s found their facility yet, but it’s only a matter of time.

Raine doesn’t answer me right away. She’s listening to the rain beat against the windows.

“We’re almost out of coffee beans,” she says, tipping her head up so I can see the flecks of gold in her brown eyes. “This isn’t going to end well. Me…going to the grocery store?”

I chuckle, then hiss out a breath as the stitches launch a protest march against any sudden movement. “Delivery. Much safer. For both of us. I’ll make a list.”

“Much.” She presses a kiss to my chest, to one of the few spots without a fresh bruise. “Sourdough is about the only thing I’m actually good at.”

“Not true.” I pull her closer, ignoring the various aches that would prefer I be surrounded in layers of fluffy cotton and bubble wrap. “You are an expert at dismantling institutional evil.”

“Oh, so we’ve moved beyond the hobby phase now?” It’s her turn to laugh, and the sound is perfect and reassuring and everything I want for the rest of my life.

“You turned pro the day you decided to fight them, Raine.” I cup her cheek, guiding her closer so I can seal my lips to hers.

The kiss sends all the blood in my body rushing south. And though we can’t do more than this—not for at least a week, according to Doc—I’ll spend each one of those days proving that everything I wrote in that goodbye letter was true.

Her nipples pebble under the soft sleep shirt. I swallow her moan, and my fingers decide this is the perfect time to listen to me. I pinch one tight bud between them, and Raine arches her back into my hand.

“Asher…we…can’t,” she breathes.

“I like to keep my skills sharp. For when we can.”