In bed with Havoc

CHAPTER ELEVEN

RYDER

I told myself it was just a simple act to make her feel comfortable here.

Every person under my protection got the same treatment, monitored feeds, hourly check-ins, motion alerts, full surveillance of their quarters and that was just standard procedure and it had nothing to do with the fact that it was her room I kept pulling up on the center screen and not any of the twelve other feeds running on the wall in front of me.

Protocol.

What a f*****g joke. I was pretty sure if I stared into the mirror what I'd see was a f*****g clown.

The estate was quiet at this hour and the command center was empty except for me and on the center screen was Ava asleep on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek with the blanket pulled up to her shoulder while I watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing and told myself I was just confirming she was safe.

That was my job.

That was all this was.

I heard Gabe before I saw him, his footsteps were the same as always, unhurried and even as he came in without knocking because he never knocked then pulled up a chair beside the main console and sat down but didn't say anything for a long moment and I didn't look away from the screen.

Then he looked at which feed I had centered and he was quiet for another second and I could feel him choosing his words.

"You've been watching her for five years," he said, "and you're still not done."

I didn't answer him.

He leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms and waited because Gabe was good at waiting and he knew eventually I'd say something and he was right, I always did, which was the most annoying thing about him.

"I have a full file on her," I said finally and my voice came out flat as I kept my eyes on the screen. "Every city she moved to after college, every apartment, every story she published. I have her old Brooklyn address mapped down to the building exits and I know her daily routine from the past eight months better than she probably does."

Gabe said nothing.

"The day Tyler ran into her at college," I said. "Showed up outside her classes, cornered her outside the library." I paused. "I had a flight booked. I sat in the car outside the airport for forty minutes before I talked myself out of it."

"But you didn't go."

"No."

"Why not."

I didn't answer that one as I reached forward, adjusting the feed brightness instead because the room had become slightly darker and I needed to see her clearly, that was just protocol, Gabe watched me do it without saying a word.

He waited.

"Because showing up would have meant explaining why I was there," I said, "and I didn't have an explanation that didn't end with her knowing things I couldn't tell her."

Gabe turned that over for a moment. "So why did you push her away to begin with."

The question sat in the room and I let it sit there for a while because it deserved more than a fast answer because the fast answer wasn't the whole truth and Gabe would know the difference.

"Because when I was twenty seven I was already neck deep in something that would have gotten her killed," I said. "Vargas, the network, what I was building, what I was dismantling and the people who wanted me gone because of it. She was eighteen and she had her whole life in front of her and I was already bleeding from things she couldn't see." I paused. "I thought staying away was the only way to protect her."

Gabe looked at me. "Clearly that didn't work either."

"No," I said. "It didn't."

He was quiet for a moment and on the screen Ava shifted slightly, just a small movement, resettling against the pillow then going still again and my eyes tracked it before I could stop them and I felt Gabe notice that too.

"She's going to find out everything," he said. "Not just the surveillance. All of it. What you were involved in, why you really pushed her away, what you know about what happened to her after she left." He paused. "She's a journalist, Ryder. Finding things out is the only thing she knows how to do and she's already asking questions."

"I know."

"And."

"And she already knows enough to hate me," I said. "A little more won't change that."

Gabe looked at me for a long moment and I could tell he didn't believe that and thought I didn't believe it either but he didn't push it because that was the agreement between us, he said what needed saying and then he let it go. I was grateful for that tonight more than most nights.

He stood, pushing the chair back then picked up his radio from the console. "Get some sleep at some point."

"I will."

He left, closing the door behind him and I was alone again with the screens… and her.

I had the file memorized. I didn't need it open in front of me anymore but sometimes I pulled it up anyway, not for new information, just to look at the timeline of it, all the cities and the years laid out in order sp that I could trace exactly where she was and what she was doing at any given point and it was the closest thing I had allowed myself to contact for five years.

The only thing I didn't know was what happened at the hospital she had visited with Tyler that day.

There was a therapist somewhere who would have a lot to say about that.

I didn't care.

On the screen she rolled over in her sleep, reached out and pulled the pillow closer. My hand went completely still on the desk As I imagined being the one she pulled close if things had been different five years ago. But I shook that thought away.

I had given her that book tonight without thinking about it, or maybe I had thought about it too much and the result looked the same.

I didn't know what I expected her to do with it but I knew she would know what it meant and I knew she would lie awake with it for a while and I knew that because I knew her, still, after five years of distance, silence and deliberate forgetting I knew her better than she knew herself.

A blaring alarm jolted me out of my pity party.

A single ping from the outer perimeter system, the kind that meant something had tripped a sensor, I sat forward, pulled up the feed, my eyes moving fast across the screens and then I found it and my stomach went cold.

The northeast camera was looping.

Not glitching, not a technical fault, looping, the same eleven seconds of empty road playing over and over on a clean cycle and it was professional work because someone had done it from outside the system which meant they were good, close and they had been watching long enough to know which camera to hit first.

Vargas knew where she was.

I was already reaching for my radio before the second alert came.

He was already inside.