Sometimes—most of the time, actually—it was hard to think of us as having had any kind of separate lives before they converged. Our lives were so closely knit together that it was a compulsion to tell him everything, to hear his thoughts on it all, to see if they matched mine. I’d held back from him before, about what I was, what I had done to my parents, but somehow...it wasn’t that it felt worse, exactly, more like there was just this nagging, this unflinching sense that something wasn’t clicking the way it had before. I’d interrupted some natural pattern in our lives. I bit my lip, watching his brows draw together the same way Cole’s had as he concentrated.
“That’s why you panicked, isn’t it? You’d just found out about it...” Liam rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead. “Damn. So what’s the plan now?”
“We’ll all meet for dinner to talk through a plan for freeing some of the camps.”
“Maybe not dinner, if this is all we have...” he started. “But I’ll figure something out. Everything will be all right.”
Liam draped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me in. I pressed my face against his shoulder and let out a shuddering breath. My arms locked around his waist.
This was right. Being close to him like this was right. For the first time all day my mind wasn’t racing. Here in the dark, my pulse fluttering at his closeness, everything else seemed far away. He kissed my hair, my cheek, and I thought, Can’t lose this, can’t lose this, too—I couldn’t tell him everything, not if I wanted him to benefit from what we were trying to do, not if I wanted to protect him. But we could have this, couldn’t we?
“Do you trust me to keep you safe?” I asked. I knew it must have seemed like I pulled the question out of nowhere, but all of a sudden it felt vitally important. I could see that he’d been hurt by my not telling him about the agents.
“Darlin’, if it were a choice between you and a hundred of Gray’s finest, I’d pick you every time.”
I caught him by surprise, rolling up onto my toes and kissing him full on the mouth.
My fingers were still gripping his shirt when I pulled back. My voice sounded low, rough to my ears. I had to fight for the words, and I was so self-conscious I wasn’t sure I was ever going to pick the right ones. “I want to—”
The dazed look faded from his face as he watched me, waiting.
I want to...I felt my face flush, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of embarrassment or because of the images flashing through my mind. I’d never felt so awkward and tense. I’d kissed him before, really kissed him, but every time before had felt like it had been prompted by stress or urgency or anger, and each had been cut off by the demands of the world around us. This was really the first chance I’d had to think about him, all of him, slowly; to make a thorough study of him. The feel of his hands. The rasp of his stubble. The small, breathless sounds he made at the back of his throat.
We were in a pantry and there were kids working outside in the kitchen. The rational part of me knew the limits of this moment, but next time, if we were somewhere else, and if we had another moment to ourselves alone—what then? I felt a small tremor work through me, powered by equal parts panic and longing. I wouldn’t know what to do. How not to mess it up.
Liam’s hands covered mine as he leaned back against the shelves. Relief broke over me when I saw his smile. He understood. Of course he did. From the moment I’d met him, he’d known me better than I’d known myself.
When he spoke, his voice was sweet, but his expression was anything but. There was mischief in his eyes, a hungry look. There was a jolt low in my gut as I realized it was because of me. “Now, darlin’, I just had myself a little thought.”
“Did you?” I murmured, distracted by the way he reached up to run his thumb over my bottom lip.
“I did indeed. It being that you are seventeen and I’m eighteen, and we have every damn right to make out like teenagers. Like normal, happy, crazy kids.” He hooked two fingers over the waistband of my jeans and tugged me closer. I loved his voice when he lowered it like that. His accent broadened, warmed like summer air in the minutes before a thunderstorm. It was the full-on Stewart charm assault, and I was totally helpless against it. “You want to hear the rules?”
My heart jackhammered as I nodded. That same hand slid around my hip, up under my shirt, and felt warm and perfect against my lower back. I closed my eyes as his lips just barely brushed mine. His touch made me feel brave. It pushed the uncertainty back until it couldn’t reach me.
“The first one is you can’t think too hard about it. The second is you say when you want to stop. The third is you do whatever feels good to you. The fourth is—”
“—you stop talking,” I said, blindly reaching back to pull the door shut, “and kiss me?”
He was still chuckling as he complied, and then I was laughing, too, because of the bubbling nerves, because his happiness was infectious, and because that dumb first rule didn’t matter at all. Liam was the only thought inside my head. He was the hundreds of wild feelings exploding inside my chest. He deepened the kiss and coaxed my lips open to his; I mimicked the stroke of his tongue and was rewarded with a small growl of approval.
Normal. Happy. Crazy. For him.
It was a half hour later, after hearing him call for me repeatedly from down the hall, that Cole finally strolled into the kitchen and started banging around in the large, beat-up refrigerator. It gave me a second to disentangle myself from Liam and pull myself back together before going out to meet him.
“The animal needs to be fed,” Cole said, filling a paper cup with water. “Or did you forget about him?”
And just like that, the weightless, wonderful happiness evaporated under my feet and I crashed back down into reality.
“I never forget about Clancy.” My words were sharpened by irritation. “Was I not supposed to trust you to take care of it?”
“No, you weren’t,” Liam called from the pantry.
Cole grinned. “He’s going to have a bitch of a headache after the drugs we loaded him with. The kid was only starting to come around when I secured him in his little cage. Looked like he was mad enough to shit a brick.”
“All right. Let’s get it over with.”
Rather than taking us back upstairs, Cole led the way down the hallway of the lower level, passing several bunk rooms before reaching a door marked FILE STORAGE. He pulled out a small key ring and passed it to me. The lock gave me some resistance as I slid the key in. I took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching, and rattled the handle to make sure it would stay locked. We slipped inside. Cole reached up to tug on the string for the lone light bulb overhead.
There were those simple, utilitarian metal shelves, stuffed with random boxes and piles of paper—archived Ops files, supposedly, if you believed the lie that had been etched onto the door. It was convincing enough at first glance. My eyes roamed the library of folders and binders, all neatly lined up on the shelves, as Cole moved to the two shelves that were flush against the back wall.
“This one,” he said. “With the red storage box. Give it a tug.”
I reached over the top of the letter-size box. The dust on the lid had been recently disturbed by hands reaching to get to the hidden latch on the shelf’s back support bar. My fingers curled around it and yanked up. There was a loud, satisfying click as the entire bookshelf swung out toward me. The automatic lights in the hallway beyond it clicked on, flooding the small storage room with blinding, ultra-white light.
It was a short walk down the bare hall to yet another locked door. Here, I had to insert the key and punch in an access code—4-0-0-4-0-0-4—before the door sprang open with a hiss.
“I’ll be here,” he said quietly. “Signal if you need me.”
Another part of the deal—he wanted someone to watch my back from behind the door when I came to bring the little pest food. My choices were him, Cate, or Vida, but I’d added Chubs to the list since he had always been resistant to Clancy’s influence.
I stepped inside the second hall, letting Cole shut and lock the door behind me.
There were two holding cells in the hall, both of them about ten feet wide and four feet deep. Each had been outfitted with a cot, a plastic toilet, and a bucket of water for washing and brushing teeth. As cells went, these were certainly an upgrade from the damp, musty spaces that had been carved out for the interrogation block at HQ. Better lit, too—almost blinding with all the ultra-bright-white walls and the exposed fluorescent light bulbs overhead. Hardly up to Clancy Gray’s usual standard of living, though he seemed comfortable enough sprawled out on the cot, his arm thrown over his eyes. Cole must have hosed him down before bringing him inside, changed him into clean sweats. It was more than he deserved.
He didn’t stir as I moved toward the door. The metal flap built into it had another lock; I assumed my key would work on it, and was right. It squealed as it opened, but still, no response from our prisoner. I dropped the bag of food inside, set the glass of water on the small ledge on the other side, and took extra care in relocking it. Clancy waited until I had already turned to go to speak.
“Move-in going badly?” His voice was unsettlingly curious as he turned around to face me. “Your thoughts are so loud I can hear them through the glass.”
It was irrational, but for a moment I was worried he meant that literally. But I could feel him when he was trying to poke around inside of my head. There was always a tingling rush that raced down the back of my skull and neck.
Clancy dragged his food over to his cot with his foot. He made a face as he pulled his sandwich apart. “What, there’s no steak anywhere west of Texas? What is this meat?”
I started to roll my eyes, only to realize he was actually serious. “It’s bologna.”
He sniffed at it, his lip curled in disgust, then rewrapped it in the plastic it’d come in. “I think I’d rather starve.”
“Be my guest.”
“In any case,” Clancy said, ignoring this, “I’m disappointed by your lack of smugness. I would have thought you’d be in here first thing, gloating about being reunited with your little flash drive again. What’s got your mood so sour?”