Her eyebrows go up. "A cat."
"Seventeen-pound Maine Coon named Ambassador. The diplomat was convinced someone was trying to catnap him."
"Was someone?"
"No. Ambassador was escaping on his own. Figured out how to open the screen door. Took me three days to solve a case the cat solved in ten seconds."
The laugh is quiet and real. She drops her forehead against her knees, shoulders shaking.
Something cracks in my chest. A hairline fracture in the wall I've been maintaining since the first morning I woke up with her hair against my jaw. It doesn't shatter. It gives. The way old plaster gives when the house shifts underneath it.
"Come on," I say. "It's late."
No pillow wall. That fiction dissolved days ago. The bed is too small for two people to share without touching, which is a problem I've stopped pretending is a problem.
Kari falls asleep the way she does everything — all at once. One minute she's adjusting her pillow, the next her breathing evens out and her body curves toward the center. Toward me.
Her head settles against my shoulder. Her hair fans across my arm, carrying the coconut scent that's become the most dangerous thing in this house. More dangerous than the gaps in my camera coverage. More dangerous than a mid-level project manager who's crossed the line from harassment into something that could put him in a cell.
I’m staring up and I know this ceiling now — the water stain shaped like a boot, the crack from the light fixture to the corner. I've mapped this room the way I map every room. What I haven't mapped is the exact moment it stopped being a post.
Kari's hand rests on my chest, fingers loosely curled, like she reached for something in her sleep and found me.
Vance asked if I was compromised. I said no. I lied.
Her breath catches once — a small sound — and my arm tightens around her before I can run the calculation about professional distance, about what happens when the man tasked with keeping her safe is the same man who can't breathe right when she's this close.
Tomorrow I'll be the operative again. Tomorrow I'll track Novak's movements, find the place he watches from.
But right now, with her breathing against my shoulder and her hand on my chest like a question I don't know how to answer — right now I'm just a man holding the most important thing he's ever been asked to protect. Knowing he'd burn the entire perimeter to keep her safe. Knowing that's exactly the kind of thinking that gets people killed.
Chapter 11
Kari
Something wakes me that isn't a sound.
The room smells like old wood and the lavender soap I found under the bathroom sink last week. The ceiling fan clicks its quiet rhythm. Outside, crickets argue about something that's probably none of their business.
Liam's arm is across my waist.
Not the loose, accidental drape of sleep. This is deliberate. His palm flat against my stomach, his breathing slow against the back of my neck, his body curved around mine like he's been doing this for hours. Maybe he has.
My heart does something complicated.
The pillow wall is gone. Has been gone. That particular fiction died so quietly neither of us held a funeral for it. Just like "this is temporary" died, and "I don't think about him like that" died somewhere around the time I watched him burn chicken and fight the smoke detector like it owed him money.
His thumb shifts. A small stroke across the fabric of my shirt, and I don't know if he's awake or if his subconscious is doing something his conscious mind would never allow.
I press my teeth against my thumbnail. Think about lying still. Think about pretending I'm asleep so we can both keep pretending this is proximity and not a choice.
Then his thumb moves again. Deliberate this time.
"You're awake," I say to the dark.
A pause. His breathing changes. "Yeah."
"How long?"
