Page 25

She was looking forward to it.

That was new.

Chapter 8

Ryder stood at the window of his quarters and scrubbed a hand down over his face.

Five thirty in the morning. He’d been up all night and his body knew it, but sleep wasn’t on the schedule.

But the Diehls operated after dark. Their world ran on late meetings and midnight handshakes and the kind of business that happened when the rest of the city was asleep. If Ryder walked in there tomorrow night with a body clock set on a nine-to-five schedule, he’d feel wrong to them before he even opened his mouth.

So he was shifting his rhythm. Awake through the night, crash in the afternoon. Let his body adjust before his life depended on it.

And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything to do.

After Cassandra left the café a few hours ago, he’d gone back to his quarters and drilled the sequences until his fingers could run through them without his brain getting in the way. Three more runs. Five more. Ten. Until the commands stopped being characters he had to remember and started being movements his hands just made.

Cassandra had caught the error that would have killed him. He kept coming back to that.

She hadn’t come into that café to talk to him. She could have left. Instead, she’d sat down across from him and walked him through the errors until he got it right.

And called him princess.

Fuck if her saying that to him hadn’t made his whole damned night. Hadn’t reset him and loosened him up in a way that had allowed his brain to relax enough to move through those sequences better.

A moment of connection had evidently been all he needed. Or at least a moment of connection with Cassie.

He scrubbed his face again. He had to get out of here. Obviously, sitting in this room with his own thoughts was making him crazy. There was no connection between him and Cassandra. Just a job.

He pulled on a shirt and shorts and headed for the training center.

He wasn’t expecting company, but Nolan was on the mats, working through a combat warm-up that was too fluid to be standard military. He glanced up when Ryder walked in.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

“Shifting my clock since bad guys tend to be night people.”

“Smart.” Nolan stood and rolled his shoulders. “You want to hit things or get hit?”

Ryder raised an eyebrow. “Bold of you to assume you can hit me, pretty boy.”

“At five thirty in the morning when you look like you haven’t slept? Yeah, I’ll take those odds.” Nolan blew him a kiss.

They stretched for a few minutes then squared up. Nolan moved first, a testing jab that Ryder slipped without thinking. They’d sparred enough at Zodiac to know each other’s basics, but not enough for Ryder to anticipate Nolan’s next move. Nolan was faster than Ryder remembered. His footwork was quicker laterally, harder to pin down.

The next few exchanges were clean. Ryder matched Nolan’s rhythm, read his feints, kept his hands where they needed to be. The physical work felt good. Simple. His body settling into something familiar.

Which was the problem, because the second the sparring became automatic, his brain wandered. Nolan threw a jab, and instead of reading it, Ryder was thinking about Cassandra sitting across from him at that café table, calling him princess.

Nolan’s counter landed clean against his ribs before he saw it coming.

They reset. Nolan came forward, and Ryder blocked the jab but missed the hook behind it. It caught him on the shoulder, hard enough to sting.

Then Nolan dropped his hands. “Dude, I know I said you looked tired, but I was just kidding. You’re somewhere else. What the hell is going on?”

“Nothing. The case.”

“Yeah? Well, the case is getting your ass kicked. So either get your head in here or I’m going to keep teeing off on you and feeling great about myself.”