Page 84 of Fractured Loyalties
I don’t sleep. Not yet. Not with everything moving the way it is.
Once I hear her breathing change—deep, slow, curled into the quiet like she’s trying to make herself small—I slip out.
The house hums with her scent. Soft cotton, tea leaves, something warm I haven’t named yet. It follows me down the hall, into the part of the house that almost no one ever sees—off-limits unless I decide otherwise.
The private office.
Everything in here is wired for function, not comfort. Dark concrete walls, steel desks, multiple screens blinking in intervals. It's the only place I can still pretend I have control.
The second I boot the terminal, Lydia’s voice buzzes through.
“You’re late.”
“I had a situation.”
“Five foot seven? Big eyes? Haunting silence?”
“You already knew.”
“I know everything you don’t say.”
I pull up the flagged entries she left for me. No name jumps out. No violent spike. Just movement.
She speaks again through the line, her voice steadier now. "Something else came in while you were offline. New job request. The client wants an answer on whether we’re taking it. Thought you’d want to glance it over first."
I pause. My fingers hover over the keyboard, then click once to bring up the file.
There’s no immediate red flag. No personal crossfire. Just another tightly wrapped contract passed through Lydia’s private channels.
The brief outlines a scan job. One target. Unlisted offshore accounts. Background monitoring. No mess. High payout.
"No flags on our end so far," Lydia says after a beat. "But I didn’t greenlight it. Didn’t feel right making that call alone."
She’s smart. That’s why she’s still on the line.
I skim the fine print again. Whatever this is, it’s a moneyed request. Clean language. No obvious strings. Still, something about the timing makes me slow.
"Put it on hold," I say. "I’ll let you know within the hour."
There’s a soft chuckle on her end. "Copy that. Try not to overthink it."
"Impossible."
I exhale and lean back in my chair. The walls around me are thick with silence, screens humming, waiting.
No Caleb for now. No ghosts.
Just a clean line of work.
Almost.
I close the feed and lean back, the dark hum of the office settling around me like armor.
The job stays up on the second monitor, a slow scroll of credentials and ghost-data, but I’m not really looking at it anymore.
I’m still in that kiss.
Still in the soft scrape of Mara’s breath against mine. The way she didn’t pull away like I thought she would. The way she pressed in like she knew what I was holding back.
