She blinks. The blunt honesty catches her off guard. A faint trace of pink touches her cheeks. She looks away, staring at the dead server racks. "Well. Try to focus. I'm not going anywhere."
"No." I confirm the statement. The absolute finality of it echoing in the quiet vault. "You are not."
The temperature in the vault is dropping. Without the massive servers generating heat, the ambient temperature of the surrounding earth is bleeding through the concrete walls. It is a steady, creeping chill.
I do not feel the cold. My core temperature runs high. The adrenaline of the lockdown keeps my blood moving. But I watch a fine tremor run through her shoulders.
The protective instinct surges. Violent and demanding.
I shrug out of my tactical rig, placing the Kevlar vest onto the table. I pull off the dark flannel shirt worn open over my black t-shirt. The fabric is thick. Woven for winter operations.
Three strides across the room. No permission asked. No intention announced.
I hold the flannel out to her. ‘Put this on.’
Her eyes flare. A challenge. Then the cold wins. She takes it and pulls it over her sweater, the dark fabric settling around her shoulders. My scent wraps around her. Ozone. Clean linen. Copper.
She looks up. Her eyes wide. The proximity is intense. I am standing directly in front of her. My shadow envelops her.
"Put your arms through the sleeves." The command is low. Rough.
She hesitates. The defiance wars with the cold. The cold wins. She slips her arms into the sleeves. The cuffs hang past her fingertips. The fabric swallows her.
The visual impact is devastating. My scent is on her now. My fabric at her shoulders. Mine. The word is no longer a calculation. It is a blood oath.
She pulls the collar tighter around her neck. Inhaling deeply. I watch her process the scent. I watch her realize the intimacy of the action.
"Thank you." The words are quiet. Stripped of the weaponized sarcasm. Genuine.
"Keep it on."
I step back. Putting distance between us before the urge to touch her overrides my discipline. I return to my post near the dead door.
I lean back against the unyielding steel. I cross my arms over my chest. The bold black cross tattooed over my sternum seems to beat with a new rhythm.
She is warm. She is real. And she is never leaving this room without me.
3
Imani
The flannel settlesover my sweater, shutting the cold out and sealing a wave of raw heat in. The fabric smells like clean linen, sharp ozone, and the faint, metallic tang of copper. Blood. My brain supplies the word, but panic refuses to engage. I pull the lapels tighter across my chest.
He just cut the main power conduit.
The shower of sparks that lit the concrete floor a minute ago has faded into suffocating darkness, broken only by the sickly pale-yellow glare of the emergency backup lights. The oppressive hum of the Bellanti servers is gone. What's left is a dead, ringing emptiness. We are buried deep beneath the South Side of Chicago, sealed inside an abandoned Federal Reserve outpost. Four feet of reinforced steel stands between me and the surface.
I stare at the severed conduit hanging off the far wall where he cut it. My $60,000 contract is officially dead. The data migration is ruined. The money I desperately needed to fix my wrecked life is gone.
I turn to look at him.
He stands in the center of the vault. The pale-yellow emergency lights cast long, jagged shadows across the concrete,illuminating the hard, ruthless lines of his face. Without the flannel overshirt, he wears a fitted black t-shirt that does nothing to hide the lean, cut mass of his chest and arms.
Dense ink covers his skin, intricate sleeves of blackwork disappearing under the short sleeves of his shirt. The collar of his fitted tee dips low enough to show the top of a bold black cross inked over his sternum. A gold chain rests against his throat, catching the light.
He doesn't move. Most men fidget after they do something drastic. They shift their weight. They check their phones. They clear their throats.
He just exists. He occupies the room the way a frequency occupies the air—everywhere, impossible to tune out. You can't ignore him. You can't move him. You learn to route around him. His dark grey-green eyes are locked on my face. They are unreadable. There is no triumph in his expression. No malice. No anger. He looks like static before a signal drops. Cold, calculated, still.
