HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME

Chapter 19

I woke before Raze.

That was new. In the years before, he was always up first, already somewhere in the compound before I surfaced, the space beside me cool and decided. This morning his chest was still warm beneath my cheek, and his hand was still in my hair, slower now, unconscious, the rhythm of a man deep in sleep who had not let go.

I lay still and listened to the compound.

It was early. The grey that came before light, before the perimeter guards changed and the kitchen started and the day acquired its weight. I had maybe forty minutes before the operational morning began and took everything with it.

I used them.

Not sleeping. Thinking. The kind my father had called "honest accounting"—when you add up what you have, what you owe, and what you cannot afford to lose, and you do not flinch at any of the numbers.

What I had: Ada's intelligence. My father's network, dormant and waiting. A compound that was structurally sound and operationally compromised in at least three places, one confirmed and two probable. Raze. Silas. The faction's timeline, which was shorter than they had let Maren imply.

What I owed: nothing that I was willing to give them.

The thought I couldn't afford to lose: I pushed it aside and got on with my life.

Fen was the immediate problem. Not because she was the most dangerous — she wasn't, not operationally — but because she was the one with eyes on our internal calendar. Every meeting I scheduled, every movement inside the compound that ran through communications, she saw. Which meant that the faction had met with it too. The emissary visit. When Silas was being debriefed. The period of time when Marcus was in his most vulnerable position.

I had let her stay active because controlled intelligence was better than silence. That was still true. But the window for that was narrowing, and I needed to decide what to give her before I closed it.

Raze's chest rose and fell beneath my cheek. I felt the moment he came awake—no dramatic shift, just a change in the quality of his stillness, the particular alertness that settled over a man whose mind turned on before his body.

His hand moved once in my hair. Deliberate now.

“You've been up for quite a while,” he said.

"Thinking."

"About Fen."

Not a question. I took myself off his chest and sat myself up. The lamp had burned out sometime in the night, and the room was grey and quiet, and the correspondence chain was still on the table where I had left it. He sat up close, beside me, and looked at the window.

"I need to give her something," I said. "Before we move on to her. Something that leads them in the wrong direction."

"What direction?"

"Marcus." I looked at the table. “They're already attempting to lay a trail to him, and I want them to think they do.”

Raze was silent for a moment. Running it. I watched the particular quality of his stillness while he worked through the contingencies, the jaw, and the eyes that moved slightly without moving at all.

"You're going to feed them a location," he said.

"A timeline. Not a location. I want them mobilizing, not arriving." I looked at him. "If they're moving assets toward a false extraction, they're not watching the perimeter. They're not watching the east wall."

"Ada's door."

"I need to move something through it," I said. "Before they figure out it exists."

He gazed at me much longer. Then, "When?"

"Tonight."

He nodded once. No argument. That was the nature of Raze—that when logic was in play, he didn't need convincing. He just took him on to the next question, and nevertheless to the next one—invariably the pragmatic one, the one that counts.

"I'll need two hours with Silas this morning," he said. "And Fen needs to overhear the right conversation."

I will take care of that aspect.

He glanced at me with a sidelong glance. There was something crawling over his face. Not quite amusement. Something more subdued and less cold and more deliberate.

"Your father used to do that," he said. "Stage conversations for the wrong ears."

"I know," I said. "He taught me."

The light that was coming in was just like it ought to be, bright and flat, across the floor. The compound was preparing for the morning with the crowd downstairs—a chopper door, footsteps, and a conversation between a pair of men at a post change. The day was getting together, regardless of our efforts.

I stood. Found my shirt. Pulled it on.

"There's something else," I said without turning around.

"I know."

I turned. He was standing at the edge of the cot, leaning on the edge with his elbows on his knees and his face in the increasing brightness of the light, with the expression that appeared on every face as it stepped onto it that night—an expression that was open, contained, and fully present.

"The second mole," I said. "You have a suspicion."

"I've got a shape," he said. "Not a name."

"Tell me the shape."

Someone who doesn't have direct access but has proximity to someone with direct access. He paused. "The information they've been feeding is always one step removed. Accurate, but delayed. Like it passed through a hand before it went out."

I thought about the compound's inner structure. The people who moved through it daily without ever being in the operational rooms. The hands that prepared things, carried things, cleaned things, and were so consistently present they had stopped being noticed.

“That'll be okay; I'll watch,” I replied.

"Carefully," he said. “If they know that we're looking—"

"I know."

He stood. We were close in the small room, the morning between us and the day ahead between us, and everything that had passed in the night was still present in the air in the particular way it was present between two people who had said things they could not unsay and done things they could not undo and had both, somewhere in the dark, decided they did not want to.

He put his hand briefly at the side of my face. One thumb at my jaw. Not a question. Just contact.

I left it there for a moment.

Then I picked up the correspondence chain from the table, folded it, and put it in my pocket.

"One hour," I said.

He agreed, "One hour.

I went out into the corridor and the compound's morning came up around me, and I walked through it with Ada's intelligence in my head and my father's lesson in my chest and the particular cold focus of a woman who had finished her honest accounting and did not flinch at the numbers.