Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60921 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 305(@200wpm)___ 244(@250wpm)___ 203(@300wpm)
She pokes again, harder.
“I like you because you taught me how to check for backdoors in my own life,” she continues. “Because you made sure our Wi-Fi at home was locked down after my ex got weird. Because you watched my socials for creeps even when I didn’t ask you to.”
I swallow.
Her voice drops. “I like you because you listened to me talk about some stupid indie game for two hours and pretended to care,” she says. “Because you made me grilled cheese when I failed my driver’s test. Because you never once told me I was too much, even when I knew I was.”
I feel like my ribcage is too small.
She takes a deep breath. “And now,” she says firmly, “I love you because you’re sitting in a murder cabin, teaching me how to break a grown man’s nose, trying to pretend you’re not scared for me. Because you’re willing to tell me the worst things you’ve done and let me stay anyway.”
My heart stutters.
She said love.
She said it like it’s just a fact, like the weather, like gravity.
“It’s not a pedestal,” she finishes. “It’s a chair. Sit in it or don’t, but I’m not writing you as some flawless hero in my head. I like you messy. I like you real. I like you exactly like this.”
I don’t have a script for this.
No quip.
No deflection.
Just a rising tide of something warm and thoroughly terrifying.
“You get one question,” I manage.
She smiles, small and sure.
“Do you believe me?” she asks.
I look at her.
At the girl who almost moved to Berlin and stayed instead.
At the woman who learned how to fight so she’d never feel small again.
At the chaotic girl who blackmailed her way into my missions and my heart.
I take a breath.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I think I do.”
Her shoulders loosen, like I just input the correct password.
“Good,” she says. “Because whether you think you deserve it or not doesn’t change the code, Hayes. You’re stuck with me.”
A knock on the digital door in my brain interrupts us—the mental alarm I set for our next check-in window.
I glance at the modem box.
“Time to see what the outside world’s done while we were emotionally compromising,” I say, grateful and annoyed for the distraction.
She grins. “See? Games are good for you.”
As I hook up the box and angle the antenna, my hands are steadier than they were this morning.
Dean might not have nailed ALFA07 yet.
Cathedral might still have our faces pinned to their wall.
But Lark knows more about me now than anyone aside from Gage and her dad ever has.
And she’s still here.
She’s still looking at me like I’m worth protecting, too.
That’s a patch note I don’t know how to process yet.
But I think—
I think I want to try.
TWELVE
BED, BUGS, AND OTHER TERRIFYING THINGS
LARK
I did not mean to say love.
It just… slipped.
One second I was ranting about patch notes and feelings and murder bounties, the next I dropped the L-word like I was casually commenting on the weather.
I love you because—
Nope. We are not rerunning that audio file. Delete. Alt+F4. Yeet it into the void.
Except I can’t, because it happened in the real world where there is no undo button and Knight Hayes looked at me like I’d just knocked a wall out of his chest.
And then he said he believed me.
Which is somehow even worse.
Hours later, my brain is still replaying it on loop as the sky outside the cabin goes from dusty pink to deep indigo. The trees become silhouettes. The forest noise grows louder. Crickets. Wind. The occasional distant crack of a branch.
We’ve done our night check-in with Arrow and the gang. No big updates. Dean’s team is still chewing on Cathedral. ALFA07/Helios is still a slippery bastard with too many proxies and not enough mistakes.
So we wait.
Again.
The worst.
Knight kills the light over the table, leaving just the small lamp by the couch. It throws a warm puddle across the worn rug, makes the tiny cabin feel almost cozy if I ignore the potential for armed intruders.
I hover in the hallway like a ghost that doesn’t know where to haunt.
Knight’s in the kitchen, rinsing our mugs. His shoulders look broader in the low light, his t-shirt clinging to the line of his back. He moves with this quiet economy now, a little more relaxed than this morning but still coiled underneath like he’s never entirely off.
My heart does a traitorous little flutter.
You told him you love him.
I press my palms against the doorframe and rest my forehead there, silently screaming into the wood.
I didn’t mean to.
That’s a lie.
I did.
I’ve meant to for years.
I just didn’t mean to actually say it.
“Lark?” Knight’s voice cuts through my spiral. “You dying over there?”
“Just doing some light existential panicking,” I call back. “It’s fine.”
He appears at the end of the hall, dish towel slung over one shoulder, eyes scanning my face like he’s assessing damage.