“Three POM Security officers dead at RejuvaLife Pharmaceuticals, and you were nowhere to be found?”
“You telling me you left your little foursome to respond to that call?”
He didn’t answer. Just glared at me.
“I told you, this girl has you fucked up.”
“No woman has ever had me ‘fucked up.’ She’s just smart. and strong, and I let her get the jump on me.”
“Again,” Maddox added with no humor.
I shot him a look that only made my throbbing headache worse. “You wanna say something, or are you just here to repeat shit?”
“Yeah, I’ve got something to say.” He crossed his arms and scanned the holographic chaos on my terminal. “What the hell is going on with you, Cy?”
I ignored him. Three-dimensional movement patterns hovered in the air—Eon’s escape modeled frame by frame. The angle of her elbow when she hit me. The momentum behind the blow that broke my nose. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t trained.
I traced her escape path with my finger—right up until the footage cut out when she remembered to shield herself. The movement pulled at my left shoulder, the implant there flaring with a dull throb that radiated down to my fingertips. I ignored it.
Three hours. Three hours of meticulous analysis, and I was no closer to understanding what the fuck had happened.
“Tactical assessment complete,” POM’s corporate assistant chimed in my ear. “Subject E-11749 demonstrates no formal combat training. Movement patterns indicate instinctive self-preservation responses consistent with street survival tactics.”
I nodded, eyes locked on the simulation of Eon’s strike—the clumsy pivot, the unbalanced transfer of weight. Not the calculated precision of someone with training. It was desperation. The animal instinct of someone who’d been running her whole life and had finally been cornered.
“Expand psychological profile based on interaction patterns,” I said, my voice flat.
New matrices bloomed across the workspace.
“Subject exhibits trauma markers consistent with abandonment psychology,” the AI continued. “High probability of instinctive disengagement as a primary self-preservation tactic.”
“She was looking for an exit from the moment she woke up,” I muttered, more to myself than the AI.
Maddox still hadn’t said a word behind me. If he wasn’t gonna say anything, neither was I.
I touched the bridge of my nose, pressing lightly against the swollen flesh. The bone had been reset, but I’d told the medicalstaff to leave the bruising. Each throb synchronized perfectly with the ache in my shoulder, twin pulses of pain keeping me grounded.
My hand froze as a discrepancy flickered across the data stream. I expanded a section of biometric readings—Eon’s heart rate earlier that morning. It wasn’t the frenzied rhythm typical of Vector-enhanced arousal. It was something else. Slower. Deeper.
Maddox grunted behind me. “We’ve gotta get ready to meet with Tex at 1300 hours.”
“What’s it look like I’m doing?”
“Bullshit,” he snapped, waving at the holos. “This isn’t about the case. What the hell is going on with you, Cy? You’re off your game, letting a target—”
“She’s not a target.” The words came out sharper than I intended, and tension coiled between us.
Maddox blinked, and I realized too late I’d given myself away.
“Oh, I see how it is,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Not a target, huh? Then what is she? A contractor? Your girlfriend?”
“Drop it,” I warned, but he didn’t. Maddox was like everyone else at POM—trained to spot any weakness and exploit it. It was in the handbook. I couldn’t even blame him. A distracted partner was a liability.
“Because from where I’m standing, she’s a loose end that’s going to get you killed, Cy. And if you can’t handle her—”
“I can handle her,” I ground out, shoving back from my desk. Pain spiked through my shoulder, but I refused to let it show. “She was pissed about Tanaka, all right? She found out the wrong way, and things got heated.”
“Cy.” Maddox pulled the back of my chair, forcing me to look at him “You’ve got a fucking broken nose you refused to let them fix properly. If I hadn’t come by to check on you, that dampenerwould’ve fried your brain. And now you’re pouring over her data, dissecting her biometric data like it’s a case file. You’ve been at this since 7:00 a.m., reconstructing how she breathes in her sleep. This isn’t analysis. It’s obsession.”
