Page 60 of Forbidden Protector

"No."

"You say that like it's evidence."

"It's instinct. I've got more of that than paperwork."

"Then your instinct's going in the file as unsubstantiated." But the corner of her mouth moves before she shuts it down. I catch her eyes flick to my hand, still flat on the desk, and gone rigid enough that the printouts have started to crease under it. "Kathleen Sullivan knew my coffee order before I ordered it."

"That's hospitality, not intelligence."

"That's the same skill pointed two different directions, and you taught me that phrase yourself."

She pulls the laptop back, keys already moving, shoulders hunching forward over the screen like she's putting distance between her spine and me on purpose. I ease my hand off the paper. She notices that too and doesn't say so.

"I need financial access I don't have. Bureau can't move without more than a hunch and a bad feeling, and Tom already told me tonight isn't the night to ask him for anything."

"Then we don't ask the Bureau."

"Holt."

"Knox has had a name on the family side since before I ever saw that footage. Wouldn't say it out loud, even in his own study with the door shut. Made me watch it twice before he'd even circle around it."

My hand finds the desk again, closer to hers than it needs to be. Close enough that the old current between us does what it always does, which is run whether either of us throws the switch or not. She doesn't move her hand away. Doesn't move it toward mine either.

"He's scared of who it is."

"Scared how?"

"Scared like a man who already knows and doesn't want to be the one who says it out loud first."

She looks at me a long moment. It stopped being anger about five minutes ago, and neither of us is fool enough to name what replaced it. Not with a folder full of dead men between us and a door that isn't locked yet.

Her jaw unclenches by degrees I only clock because I've spent a week learning every stage of it, the way another man might learn wind.

"Give me whatever financial trail Knox pulled. Payment structures, shell accounts, whatever he's got."

I hand her the flash drive out of my coat pocket, the drive Knox built himself from the family's own books, separate from Jacob's footage entirely, and pressed into my hand with a look like he was handing me something that might go off on the drive home.

Our fingers don't touch on the pass. We're both careful about that. Both of us notice exactly how careful we're being, and neither says a word about it.

She plugs it in without asking permission this time, and I don't offer any. Some walls come down faster in the middle of a hunt than they ever do over an apology.

Files load. Payment structures. A shell account. A wire routing neither the Bureau's system nor Knox's private ledger flagged on its own, only visible once you lay one on top of the other, her patience against my instinct, the same name arrived at two different ways.

Her hand stops on the mouse.

Every other part of her stops with it. The same total stillness I trained into my own body a lifetime ago. Watching it land on her instead of me is worse than whatever's about to be on that screen.

"Holt."

I come around the desk. Close enough to feel her breath catch and hold, close enough that neither of us is thinking about the fight anymore.

One line. One name, sitting in a font too small for something this size.

Neither of us says it out loud.

We don't have to.

We're both already looking at somebody we've eaten dinner with.