She turns, reaches up, and takes my face in her hands for the briefest second. There’s tenderness in the way she touches me — not romantic, not yet, but enough to shatter my walls in a world of calculated detachment. “You always come in with an apology folded into the pockets of your shirts,” she says. “And then you make things worse.”
“You make me better,” I say, because the lie tastes like truth in my mouth. “And worse. Both.”
There’s a beat where the room hums; the world out there bleeds black. In the downstairs server room, my proxies are already alive. I’m sending out whispers through the underground — disinformation that Hale can chase while I tackle the real problem. I don’t want collateral; I want the man who thought he could touch her to vanish the way a bad cohort does when you
