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“But it needs to be someone we can trust. Considering the possible leak.”

“Agreed.”

She licks her lips, and my cock hardens at the sight. For a second, I forget about Ramsey and war. All I can think of is tasting her again.

“You think it should be us,” she says, gaze steady on mine.

“What do you think?” I ask.

Coward. I can’t even bring myself to admit that’s what I desperately want. Her and me. Alone in the woods. For days. Nothing else to do but⁠—

Echo shifts between us on the couch. His eyes flash open, right at me in a pointed glare as if to say, “Not on my watch,” and I wonder if the little shit can read minds.

Mia reaches out absently and scratches behind his ears. He leans into it with his eyes half closed again. She softens with affection, and I doubt she even realizes she’s done it. Or notices the fact that she’s stopped thinking about what happened tonight for just a moment.

I notice.

I notice everything about her, the problem being that the more I see, the less interested I am in keeping this professional, as she insisted.

“We'll talk to Grey about it tomorrow,” she says. But she doesn't reach for a reason to send me home either.

So, I stay a bit longer.

The wine gets finished. A pizza gets delivered. The conversation drifts off strategy, off Ramsey, off everything, heavy into the quieter territory of people who are getting to know each other without meaning to. I tell her about Crossvale and what it looked like when I inherited it and what it took to build the war college from an underfunded training ground into something real.

She tells me about the first time she ran a solo operation at seventeen to expose a carjacking ring and how badly it went and how she rebuilt the plan from scratch and ran it again three weeks later and got it right.

She laughs twice more before midnight. Real laughs, not the controlled social ones.

My wolf is insufferably smug about this.

At some point, Echo migrates from the couch to her lap, and she falls quiet, one hand resting on his back, looking out at the city. The night is deep now. The glittering lights of the city look like stars.

“Thank you,” she says. “For staying. For letting it just be this.”

I hold her gaze. “I'll always stay if you let me.”

I can’t promise I’ll just let it be this, though.

She studies me for a moment before looking back at the window. She doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t build a wall around my words. Just lets them sit there in the room with us, which, from Mia, is its own kind of answer.

I stand eventually. Find my jacket. Echo watches me from her lap with his dark eyes like a small judgmental god.

At the door, I pause. She’s still on the couch, legs tucked beneath her, looking at the city.

“Get some sleep,” I say.

“I'll try,” she says.

Which, from her, I'm learning, is as close to, I’ll do what you say as she gets.

9

MIA

Elena is waiting for me when I arrive at the mansion at just after eight in the morning. Okay, maybe not me personally, because I see her stop Donahue as I park and conduct what looks like an interrogation before letting him through. But then she’s still standing there as I get out and approach. And it feels like I’m about to be arrested for a crime I didn’t commit. Or maybe I did. With Elena, you never know; you just assume you’re guilty.

She stands in front of the door with her arms crossed and her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose like the weapon they are.