FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

8

Chapter 8

I ran.

Not away from the building. Toward it. My feet hit the path at full speed the moment Kane said someone had been in my room and I did not stop until I was through the front door and up the stairs and standing in my own doorway staring at what they had left behind.

Axel was already inside.

He was standing in the center of my room with his arms crossed and his jaw set and his eyes doing that sweep they always did, measuring, cataloguing, looking for what did not belong. He turned when I came in and something moved across his face when he saw me, relief and anger at the same time, the two of them sitting uneasily together.

You should not have run here alone, he said.

What did they leave, I said.

He stepped aside.

On my desk, positioned precisely in the center where I would not miss it, was a photograph. Me and Kane on the campus path this morning, his forehead against mine, his arms around me. Taken from close range. Close enough that whoever held the camera had been standing less than twenty feet away while I cried into his chest.

Written across the bottom of the photograph in red marker: You are running out of time to choose a side.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my thighs.

They were watching us, I said.

They have been watching for a while, Axel said. His voice was controlled but his eyes were not. They were storm dark and fixed on my face and carrying something beneath the professional surface that he was not quite managing to keep down. I should have had someone on your door. I failed that.

You could not have known they would come back.

It is my job to know, he said. Simple as that.

I looked at the photograph again. Then I looked at him.

Axel. The photograph is of me and Kane. They want me to see that they were watching us. But they put it in my room. Not his office. Not the security building. Mine.

He was already nodding. They want you scared, he said. And they want you isolated. If you pull back from Kane because you feel watched, you pull back from the information he has. You become easier to manage.

So the move is to not pull back.

The move, he said, is to stop being alone.

He said it like a professional assessment. Like a security directive. But he was standing three feet from me in my small room and his eyes had not left my face since I walked in and there was nothing professional about the way the air between us felt.

I stepped toward him.

He went very still the way he always did, that absolute economy of movement, but his chest rose on a breath that was not quite steady.

You have been outside my door, I said. You have walked me home and memorised my schedule and shown up before I knew I needed you. That is not just a job.

He said nothing.

Axel.

His name in my mouth seemed to cost him something. His jaw worked once.

No, he said finally. It is not just a job.

I closed the remaining distance between us and put my hand flat against his chest and felt his heart hitting his ribs harder than a man his size should ever admit to.

He looked down at my hand. Then up at my face. Then he said: I have been trying not to do this since the first hallway.

The first hallway was day one, I said.

I know, he said.

He kissed me.

Or more precisely he cupped my face in both his enormous hands like I was something he had been terrified of breaking and brought his mouth down to mine with a gentleness that was completely at odds with every physical thing about him. It lasted one breath. Then two. Then his hands slid from my face to my waist and the gentleness gave way to something deeper and the kiss became the truest thing that had happened in my room all week.

He walked me backward to the wall without breaking contact and pressed into me and I felt the full contained force of him, all that size and strength held in deliberate check, given over to careful and attentive and completely focused on me.

I pulled at his shirt. He let me.

What followed was slow in the way that only happens when someone has thought about something long enough to know exactly what they want to do with it. He was thorough and quiet, communicating through touch rather than words, reading every response I gave him with the same total attention he brought to everything. When I made a sound he catalogued it and came back to whatever had caused it. When I pulled him closer he gave more without being asked.

Afterward he held me against his chest with one arm and his heartbeat gradually slowed beneath my palm and neither of us spoke for a long time.

He said: I should not have let that happen here. In a compromised room.

I said: If you apologise for that I will never forgive you.

A pause. Then something that might have been a quiet laugh, the first I had ever heard from him. Low and brief and real.

Not apologising, he said. Noting the poor tactical decision.

I turned my face up to look at him. He looked back down and his expression was open in a way I had not seen before, all the professional distance gone, just him underneath it.

I said: What happens now. With all of this.

He said: Now I move you somewhere I can actually secure. And we find out what they left the photograph to distract us from.

I went still.

What do you mean, I said.

He reached past me to the desk and turned the photograph over.

On the back, small and neat and easy to miss if you were focused on the image and the message on the front, was a sequence of numbers.

I stared at them.

That is not a threat, I said.

No, Axel said. That is a code. And whoever left it wanted us to find it on the back after we spent time being frightened of the front.

He pulled out his phone and photographed it. His face had gone back to that still professional surface but his free hand found the small of my back as he worked and stayed there.

Someone is feeding us information from the inside, I said slowly.

Someone on the inside wants out, he said. And they chose you to send it through.

He texted the image to Kane. The reply came in under a minute.

I read it over Axel's arm.

Kane had written four words.

Get her out now.

Axel was already moving before I had processed it, one hand gathering my jacket from the chair, the other at my back steering me toward the door with a calm urgency that told me whatever Kane had recognised in that number sequence was serious enough to stop being tactical and start being fast.

What is it, I said. What did Kane see.

Axel opened the door and scanned the hallway before he answered.

Those numbers, he said. They are a room code. For a location on this campus. And according to Kane the last person who used that room was found there three years ago.

He looked at me and his eyes were carrying something I had not seen in them before.

It was fear.

Not for himself.