Fated in New Orleans

8

By the time River and Miles pushed open the control room door, the air inside was thick with coffee and chaos.

Monitors glowed across the darkened space, casting pale light over half-eaten takeout, empty mugs, and a blur of movement behind the main desk.

Salem.

She was hunched over the console, hair pulled up in a messy knot, muttering under her breath as her fingers flew across the keyboard. The faint hiccup in her words made her sound somewhere between drunk on caffeine and delirious from exhaustion.

Rhea and Beau stood off to the side — Rhea trying and failing to stifle her laughter, Beau just shaking his head like he’d already given up trying to intervene.

“—m’fine, jus’ need… one more patch in the—hic!—firewall,” Salem mumbled, squinting at the screen. “You hush, I’m workin’ here. If you touch my code again, Rhea, I swear I’ll feed you to the router.”

Rhea snorted. “You mean the server, caffeine gremlin.”

Salem blinked, hiccuped again, and pointed vaguely at her. “You’re the gremlin. I’m the—hic!—architect. Big difference.”

Beau chuckled under his breath, muttering to Rhea, “She’s been like this for ten minutes straight. Think she hit her limit about two Red Bulls ago.”

Salem spun her chair around too fast, nearly toppling out of it as she squinted at him. “Don’t judge me. You got no idea how many—hic!—lines of code I had to—hic!—bury to patch your mess.”

Rhea leaned over the desk, laughing outright now. “Oh, she’s gone.”

River and Miles just stood in the doorway for a moment, taking it all in — the ridiculousness of it, the way the tension in their chests eased just slightly before reality came clawing back.

Miles finally cleared his throat. “You all havin’ a party in here or…?”

Salem’s head whipped toward them, eyes bright and glassy. “Oh, look—hic!—it’s my two favorite trouble magnets. Come t’help or just stare?”

Rhea grinned. “She’s been talkin’ in Cajun half the time, by the way. I think she cursed me out? Or flirted? Not sure which.”

Salem blinked slowly at her. “Both. Probably both.”

Beau’s shoulders shook with quiet laughter. “She almost flipped Rhea earlier when she tried to take her coffee away.”

Rhea groaned. “I was tryin’ to help! She growled at me!”

“I warned you,” Salem said through another hiccup. “Never separate me and my caffeine in crisis mode. It’s self-defense.”

Miles rubbed a hand over his face, torn between amusement and exasperation. “God help whoever actually tries to kidnap her. She’ll short-circuit their brain before they even get the chance.”

That earned a smirk from River — brief, but real — before he stepped forward, tone low but steady. “Salem.”

She blinked up at him, still hiccuping softly. “Yeah?”

“We need to talk,” he said, and the quiet seriousness in his voice cut through the room like a blade.

The laughter from Rhea and Beau faded instantly.

Salem’s smile slipped, her posture straightening as she caught the edge in River’s tone. “What happened?”

Miles exchanged a look with his brother, then set the laptop they’d brought down on the desk. “We found your leak.”

Rhea’s brows shot up. “Wait—what?”

River nodded once, gaze still fixed on Salem. “It was Dax. He had cameras on the compound — on you.”

Salem’s fingers froze on the keyboard. “…What?”

Miles’s jaw tightened. “He wasn’t just spying. He was watchin’ how we looked at you. Tracking it. Wrote reports sayin’ we were ‘compromised.’”

Rhea’s face twisted in disbelief. “That’s sick.”

Beau swore quietly.

River opened the laptop, turning it toward Salem. The monitor lit her face — the grainy grayscale images, the unsent message still sitting open.

She went still, her expression flattening into something unreadable.

The hiccups stopped.

For a long moment, she said nothing. Just stared at the photos — her own face frozen mid-laugh, caught by someone who’d turned her life into a surveillance feed.

When she finally spoke, her voice was quiet. “He sent this to someone?”

“Almost,” River said. “Draft was ready. He ran before he could finish.”

Salem exhaled through her nose, leaning back slowly in her chair. “So someone wanted me gone.”

Miles’s voice was low. “Not gone. Contained. Used, maybe.”

That drew the faintest bitter smirk from her lips. “Guess I’m flatterin’ the wrong people, huh?”

River’s expression didn’t change, but his tone carried a weight that made even Beau straighten. “You’re not flatterin’ anyone, Boudreaux. You’re rattlin’ the ones who should be scared.”

The air in the control room tightened — caffeine, heat, and a new undercurrent of danger humming through it all.

Rhea finally broke the silence with a whisper. “So what now?”

Salem’s eyes sharpened again, a hint of her usual fire returning. “Now,” she said, pushing back from the desk, “we hunt our little rat before he starts Phase Two.”

And for the first time that night, no one laughed.