Mate Under NDA

Chapter 7: Engagement Protocol

The sling screams down like a guillotine, the forklift lunges, and the dock shudders under us as if the river just remembered it has teeth.

Cole’s arm finds my sleeve, not my skin.

Permission is a rope thrown across a flood.

“May I move you?” he asks, already calculating angles.

“Yes,” I say, and the world edits.

Midnight at Pier 19 tastes like diesel and old pennies.

The envelope’s key opened a lockbox full of routes and threats; the phone in Cole’s pocket buzzed like a dare; Ronan’s shadow played ringmaster with my nerves.

My scent lock sits in my jacket, moss and tea ready to drown pond water and iron.

Bone-conduction hums against my skull, a private line through chaos.

We built a rule between us because the night cheats: see, signal, ask, act.

It sounds clinical until metal starts falling, and then it’s the only bridge over the noise.

Consent isn’t a romance flourish tonight.

It’s a way to stay human while we hunt.

Cole drags me a clean two steps while the sling kisses concrete where my skull planned to be.

Sparks spit.

The forklift bucks, driverless and mean, prongs scraping the drum pallet until the whole stack complains.

“Luca, cut the hook,” Cole snaps.

“Copy,” Luca answers, somewhere to our left, voice steady like rain.

A shape moves behind the forklift-wrong height, wrong patience.

Ronan doesn’t hurry.

He watches.

“Aria,” Cole says.

“May I lift you to the rail?”

“Yes,” I say, breath small and sharp.

His hands close on the back of my jacket, not my body, and I’m light for a heartbeat, boots catching on the raised lip of the dock.

The sling swings back and kisses air.

I spray the lock once toward the open drum, tea and rain threading through algae until the green brags less.

Ronan tilts his head, tasting.

“New trick,” he says, amused.

“Better one,” I say.

He smiles like a knife that’s been waiting its whole life.

“Ask him to show you what he is.”

“Some of us already did,” I say, and Cole’s shoulder touches my knee in a way that says I’m not alone on this line.

The men with cameras try to flank, lenses hungry.

Luca ghosts into one’s blind spot and turns curiosity into a nap.

The second glances up just in time to see a quiet man take his camera and his footing.

“Evan,” Cole calls, voice flat.

“Behind Luca.

Now.”

Evan obeys with the graceless speed of a man who’s finally realized gravity works on him too.

The forklift gnaws at the pallet stop and leaps a little.

A drum slides, teeters, thinks about learning to swim.

Cole looks up at me, a question in his eyes before it has words.

“May I pull you down?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

I take his wrist, and heat moves through me in a circuit I didn’t wire.

We pivot together, two bodies making math out of panic.

He kicks the drum at the angle physics likes and buys the dock a few seconds of dignity.

Ronan’s voice floats, almost fond.

“Still the clever one.”

“Still the liar,” Cole says.

I reach for the evidence like it’s oxygen.

“Lid,” I say.

“Smear at ten o’clock.”

“May I cover you?” Cole asks.

“Yes,” I say.

His body becomes a wall that breathes while I swab the brown-red where fingers and something less human disagreed about shape.

Iron climbs my throat, and the lock’s bergamot steadies my hands.

“Aria,” Luca says in my ear.

“North gate.

Two more.”

“Copy,” I whisper.

“Cole-”

“I hear it,” he says, wolf-close without losing grammar.

Ronan steps closer, easy as a story you shouldn’t believe.

Pond water rides his wake.

“He took my daughter’s name,” Evan blurts from behind us, voice shaking.

“He said he’d send me her breath, piece by piece.”

Ronan doesn’t deny it.

He doesn’t need to.

He already wrote the fear on Evan’s face.

I turn to Evan, steady because one of us has to be.

“Look at me,” I say.

He does, miserable.

“You’re going to walk out of this.

Your daughter is going to wake up with you in the kitchen making pancakes badly.

You believe me?”

He nods like a man who needs a direction more than oxygen.

“Good,” I say.

“Then hold the bag and don’t run.”

“Aria,” Ronan croons.

“You smell like storms.

Tidy, though.

He’ll hate breaking you.”

“I don’t break,” I say.

“I reclassify.”

He laughs.

Cole’s jaw ticks once.

I watch his hands because I remember the cut he got in the elevator and the way it closed like time bent around it.

“Ask me,” I say, low, for him alone.

“Before you let him write your next move.”

His lashes dip, wolf and man agreeing on a principle nobody taught them.

“Aria,” he says.

“May I call retreat?”

“Yes,” I say, even though every tendon in me wants to finish the chapter here and now.

“Luca,” Cole says, louder.

“Package.

Exit west.

I’ll take point with Aria.”

“Copy,” Luca says.

He throws a pellet that blooms into white mean smoke with no poison and a lot of opinion.

Ronan curses once, not because he can’t see, but because he hates not being watched worshipfully.

We move.

Cole takes my sleeve, not my wrist.

I hold a sample, a drive, a phone, and the promise of a trail that won’t wriggle away.

The smoke makes the sodium lamps into moons.

Footfalls try to separate us.

They don’t.

“Left,” I say, reading the eddies where pond and pennies want us to go.

“Right,” Cole counters, reading the architecture he built.

We split the difference and find the gap.

A van’s door slams somewhere to our rear.

A voice I don’t know swears very human.

“Almost,” Cole says.

“Twenty yards.”

“Consent protocol,” I say, because reminders keep the world from eating us.

He huffs once; the sound is almost a laugh and not quite.

“Always,” he says.

We burst into night that isn’t lit like theater.

Streetlight, honest and thin.

Luca’s SUV idles at the curb, back doors open like a mouth that wants us alive.

We dive.

Metal closes.

The river takes back its story.

“Status,” Cole says.

“Two down, one ran, Evan intact, drums intact enough to be worth the spine ache,” Luca says, driving like a man doing math with his hands.

“Ronan?” I ask.

“Faded into mud,” he says.

“Eyes on later.”

I breathe, once, twice, let my hands be hands again.

Cole glances at me, not touching.

“May I check your ear?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

He adjusts the earpiece with surgeon gentleness.

“Citrus?”

“Not yet,” I say, and the not yet is a thread that wraps around my own pulse and makes it behave.

“Next stop?” I ask.

“Home,” Luca says.

“Garage is the cleanest entry.”

My skin prickles before my brain is ready.

“Home,” Ronan liked to say on the footage, like a man pledging allegiance to nowhere.

I look at Cole.

He looks at me.

We don’t need words for the math.

“Engagement protocol?” he asks.

“See, signal, ask, act,” I say.

“Add exit,” he says.

“Always add exit,” I say, and the taste of pennies comes back like a promise and a plan.

We roll into the underground and the gate slides down behind us too fast, too smooth, while the sprinklers click awake in the dark and mist the air with pond water and pennies like someone just turned the whole garage into a trap that smells like my least favorite word: welcome.