HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 33

Raze came back through Ada's door eleven minutes later.

Alone.

I read that before he reached me. The particular set of his shoulders, not failure, not frustration. The specific quality of a man who had run something to its logical end and arrived at a conclusion he hadn't preferred but could work with.

"Gone," he said.

"How far?"

"Perimeter fence, east side. Cut clean. Someone waiting on the other side." He looked at the maintenance corridor behind me, at Cord still against the wall with Fen's weapon at his back. "They had a contingency."

"Voss builds contingencies."

"Yes."

I filed it. The outside contact was gone but not operational, they'd come to pass intelligence to Cord, not to act, and the intelligence they'd carried was already dead. Cord's channel was transmitting into silence. Fen's archive was authenticated. Whatever the runner carried back to Voss tonight was forty minutes out of date and closing fast on useless.

The leak was closed.

What mattered now was what Voss did when the intelligence stopped making sense.

"He'll know before morning," I said.

Raze looked at me. "Before dawn."

"Then we have two hours."

He nodded once. Not agreement, confirmation. The way he nodded when a timeline had already been running in his head and the spoken version had just caught up to it.

I turned to Fen.

She was watching me the way she'd been watching me since the terminal room, with the specific attention of someone who had sat alone with the truth for fourteen months and was still recalibrating to what it felt like when the truth had somewhere to go. Her weapon was steady at Cord's back. Her face was steady around everything else.

"The archive," I said.

"Formatting is done. Authentication ran clean." She didn't look away from Cord. "It's ready."

"Can you push it from here?"

"Not from this terminal. I need the primary room upstairs. Twenty minutes."

"Go."

She lowered the weapon and looked at me once, directly, the look of a woman who had questions and had decided they could wait and that waiting was its own kind of answer.

Then she went.

Ada's door was still open behind us. The cold that came through it was sharp and total, the last hour before dawn doing what it always did to temperature and to the particular quality of dark outside. The compound was quiet in the pre-operational way, not sleeping, not quite awake, holding its breath in the specific register of a structure that had sensed something shifting and hadn't yet been told what.

I looked at Cord.

He was still against the wall. His hands were still up. The resignation that had been sitting in his face since Fen opened the terminal door had settled into something quieter, the expression of a man who had finished all his calculations and found the same answer every time.

"The handler above you," I said. "Not Voss. The relay between you and Voss."

He looked at the floor.

"Cord."

He looked up.

"The relay," I said again. Same tone. Same pace. Not a threat. I had learned from my father that the quietest register was the one that left a man no surface to push against.

His jaw worked. "She goes by Lena. Operates from a commercial address on the east side of the city. Logistics front." He swallowed. "That's all I have. I never met her in person. Everything went through a drop."

"The drop location."

He gave it.

I filed it. Looked at Raze.

He was already running it, the address, the logistics front, whether Renard's network had a thread close enough to pull on before Voss understood the channel was dead. His jaw held that particular tension. Working. Not ready yet.

"Hold him," I said. "Separate room from Marcus."

One of Raze's men appeared from the corridor without being called. I didn't track how. Raze's people had the quality of the well-run compound they'd trained inside, present when needed, invisible when not.

Cord went without fighting. He walked with the resigned cooperating of a man who had chosen the only option left that cost him anything less than everything.

The maintenance corridor emptied.

I stood in it alone with Raze for the first time since before Renard, before the tree line, before forty-eight hours had compressed themselves into something I could almost hold the shape of.

The cold from Ada's door was on my back. The blue-white light from the terminal room was gone now, Fen upstairs and the underground dark settling back into itself.

Raze turned and looked at me.

Not the operational look. The other one. Low, patient, certain of exactly what it was looking at. His eyes moved over my face the way they moved over a problem he had already solved and was simply confirming.

"Two hours," he said.

"I know."

"Before Voss moves and the compound goes to alert."

"I know, Raze."

"So." He stepped close. One hand came to my jaw. Thumb along the line of it, the gesture I'd stopped pretending I didn't wait for. "What do you want to do with two hours?"

My body answered before my mouth did. That had always been the problem with him.

I put my hand flat on his chest and walked him backward until his shoulders met the maintenance corridor wall. He let me. That was the thing about Raze, he let me move him because he had already decided where this ended and the direction didn't matter to a man who knew his destination.

I reached for his collar. Pulled it open, one button, two, watching his face while I did it. His jaw tightened. His eyes darkened in the specific way they darkened when he was exerting restraint and wanted me to know exactly how much.

I spread my palm flat against his bare sternum. Warm skin. The slow, heavy beat of him under my hand.

"The promise from the tree line," I said.

"Yes," he said. His voice had dropped an entire register.

I pulled him down by the collar and kissed him, and the cold from Ada's door didn't reach us anymore, and the compound was quiet above us, and the two hours were ours.

He walked me toward the stairwell with his mouth at my throat and his hands at my waist, and we went up through the dark compound together, and the morning was still two hours away.

Two hours was enough.