As he spoke, the tension slowly bled out of her. The line of her clenched jaw relaxed, and her hand closed around his. And it wasn’t a desperate bid to ground herself but a point of contact, of communion.
Eventually, her eyes fluttered open. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.” It sounded like a deflection, a casual, meaningless platitude, so he tried again. “Whenever you need anything, I’m here, okay?”
Her lips quirked. “Watch out. I might take you up on that, and then you’ll have to tell me stories until I fall asleep every night.”
She said it as if it were a ridiculous request, but if it gave her good things to hear as she drifted off, a way to stave off the nightmares, he’d do it. “Deal.”
That won him a real smile before she rested her head against his shoulder, her hand still clutching his. “Is Mace okay?”
The easy answer, the calming one, was right there on his tongue, But what tripped out instead was, “He stabbed Knox. Dani had to hop a table and sedate him for everyone’s safety, including his.” Gray sighed. “I don’t know what Richter did to him, but no. He’s not okay. Not yet.”
“Dani probably has an idea what Richter did to him.” Maya’s voice dropped to a whisper. “So do I.”
It explained a lot. “He’s the reason this happens to you?”
She leaned into him, as if grounding herself against him. “There’s a thing about data couriers. We know all these secrets, right? Corporate espionage–level experimental tech, and all the skeletons in the Board’s closet. We’d be a massive liability if you could strap us to a chair and torture it all out of us.”
“How do they keep that from happening?”
“Too much sensory overload and I just…” She flicked the fingers of her free hand. “My brain goes offline. Full system reboot. It has to be pretty extreme to trigger a complete shutdown, but getting tortured is pretty extreme.”
He managed to suppress a wince, but nothing could stop his shiver of revulsion. “They did it to you on purpose. Altered your brain so it’s harder for you to deal with stress.”
“They did a lot of bad things to a lot of people on purpose. Including you.” She sighed and closed her eyes. “I know all of the horrible things they did. That’s one of the reasons Richter needed to break me. So many people were working with Birgitte. Passing her all the dirty secrets, undermining leadership from the inside. He had to make me talk.”
“He would have done it anyway.” Even if Maya had known nothing about Birgitte’s rebellion, Tobias Richter would have broken her down into pieces so small and so scattered that putting them back together was a question of if, not when. It was what he did. “How?”
Maya didn’t answer for a long time. When she did, her voice was a sad whisper. “His name was Simon. He was too young to be in Executive Security, but his dad was loyal to Birgitte, so she trusted him. And she was a VP. Nobody could tell her no when it came to staffing her own office.”
She swallowed hard. “My only friend was another data courier a few years older than me. Cara. But she was Richter’s courier, and Birgitte hated that. She encouraged me to spend time with Simon instead. It was just the three of us most of the time, and Birgitte was so much older than us. And Simon was…” She sighed. “Young. Like me.”
The truth, the part she wasn’t saying, trembled between her words. “You loved him.”
“Maybe?” Her tiny laugh broke his heart. “I was nineteen. Maybe everything feels like love when you’re nineteen and it’s the first time. But he mattered. And I mattered to him. After Richter shot Birgitte, he pointed a gun at my head. Simon went with him without a fight. And spent the next three weeks getting tortured in my place.”
Cold fury prickled over Gray. “What a dumbass move.”
Maya went still against him. “What?”
“You heard me.” Gray eased her away just enough to peer down into her confused eyes. “He blew it. If Richter needed intel that he couldn’t torture out of you, and he’d already killed Birgitte, then Simon was all he had left. That situation was only headed in one direction, and it wasn’t a good one. The kid should have taken a stand. At least he would’ve gone down fighting.”
“But—”
“And you wouldn’t have these memories.” He traced his thumb over her lower lip, stilling its fine tremor. “He was always going to die. But he could have saved you from this.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I could have stopped it. I could have just told Richter what he wanted to know.”
“You know better. It wouldn’t have saved him, just doomed dozens of other people, too.” Gray cupped her jaw, his fingers sliding under her ear, under the warm fall of her braids. “I will never let myself be used as a weapon against you, Maya. I swear it.”
“I can’t think about it like that. I can’t—” The tears spilled over. She squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face into his hand. “How can I be mad at them when they’re dead and I’m fine?”
“Being angry doesn’t mean you’re not sad or that you don’t love them anymore. Your feelings don’t have to be fair.” He pulled her closer again. “Hell, I’m mad at Mace right now. How fucked up is that? But I still love him, and I’m glad he’s here, and I’m going to do everything I fucking can to help him. If I can hold all that inside me, you’ve got room for a little resentment.”
Maya buried her face against his chest, her arms going around him. Her shoulders trembled. “I hate being helpless when people are hurting.”
He couldn’t do a damn thing about her past except comfort her when the memories grew claws and teeth and threatened to rip her apart. But the future was a different story, a clean slate yet to have any tragedy scribbled on it.
“Okay.” He put on his most commanding voice, the one that made Knox roll his eyes and Rafe chuckle and everyone else in the world jump to follow his orders. “So we won’t let you be helpless, then.”
She pulled back, wiping her eyes with shaking fingers. “Do I get to shoot things again?”
“Even better.” He pointed at his face. “You get to punch me.”
KNOX
Knox couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t the fact that he’d been stabbed. The wound in his shoulder was inconsequential, all things considered. Instinct and experience had helped him there—Knox knew all the least harmful places to take a blade or a bullet, and Mace hadn’t exactly been aiming for maximum damage.
Regeneration tech had already taken care of the issue. His shoulder itched, but Knox had long ago learned how to block out the singular discomfort of artificially healed wounds.
Nina wasn’t keeping him awake, either. She was a warmth at his side, her chin pillowed on his uninjured arm, one of her long legs tossed absently over his. He liked the reassuring weight of her, the tickle of her hair over his skin when she shifted, her slow, even breaths.
He’d never imagined that sharing a bed with someone could be peaceful, not after a lifetime of light sleep and combat awareness. But it was hard not to feel safe snuggled up next to a woman who could fight anyone into the ground. Including him.