Page 78 of Thorne
"I still hate you." I fix my belt, the metallic click of the buckle the only thing that sounds sane in here. I stop with my hand on the handle. "What were you scratching at back there? You were on fire."
She hesitates, pulling the shirt down to cover the marks I just left on her chest. She looks away, her fingers trembling as they touch the fabric. "It's just an idea. Nothing solid. Just … Just a thought."
I study her. The secret she's holding onto is a variable I can't account for, but the way she looks right now, broken and beautiful against the stone, is a distraction I can't afford. I'm getting addicted to her, and that makes her dangerous.
"Fix yourself," I rasp, my voice sounding foreign even to me. "I'll bring you dinner when we're done with our briefings."
She doesn't flinch. She just leans her head back against the cold cinder block, her eyes meeting mine with a steady, terrifying clarity that cuts straight through the adrenaline.
"The debt doesn't sleep." Her voice is a low, wrecked vibration that seems to hum in the small space. "I'll be ready. Bring dinner. Or bring the rage. It's all the same to me."
I stare at her for a heartbeat longer than I should, acknowledging the jagged truth in her words. I don't offer a platitude or a threat. I just give her a sharp, single nod—receipt confirmed. She knows where we stand.
She knows exactly what she is and what she owes.
I turn on my heel and step out, the transition back to the hallway feeling like a plunge into freezing water. I pull the heavy steel door shut and slide the bolt home. The mechanical clack echoes through the narrow corridor like a gunshot, marking the boundary between the monster inside that room and the soldier I have to be outside of it.
I stand there for a second, my back pressed against the cold metal, my lungs burning as I try to force the internal chaos back into a manageable shape. I smooth my shirt, steady my hands, and prepare to face Forest and the rest of the team.
21
Strategic Wall
THORNE
I walk backinto the common room, the heavy, metallic clack of the safe room's bolt still vibrating in my teeth. I force my features into a mask of cold, operational detachment, but the skin of my hands feels electric. My palms are still slick with the sweat of her, and the scent of cedar and her desperation is a ghost in my lungs that I can't quite exhale.
Forest leans against the kitchen island, his massive arms crossed. Ghost is at the head of the long oak table, surrounded by the glow of three different tablets.
"Sit." Ghost gestures to the chair I just vacated.
The next hour is a slow, methodical descent into the wreckage Stratton left behind. The digital tablets are spread out like a graveyard of Phoenix's secrets. We go through the data line by line—encrypted logs, security footage, and the final pings of devices belonging to the brightest minds in the Meridian project.
I sit there, my movements stiff, my mind still stuck in the dark of that room while Ghost methodically deconstructs a massacre. We map the timelines. We cross-reference the "accidents." By the time the sun has shifted across the kitchen floor, the tally is complete. Twelve. Twelve specialists, the veryarchitects of the project, wiped off the board by Phoenix in a clean, clinical scrub to delete the witnesses.
A cold, hard knot tightens in my chest.
When the briefing is over, I go back.
The lock turns with a heavy, final sound. I find Stratton exactly where I left her, hunched over the tablet on the mattress, her hair a wild, dark halo. She doesn't look up when I enter, but her shoulders curl inward. She knows the weight of my step. She knows I've just come from the room where her sins were tallied.
"Twelve." The word is a stone dropped into a deep well.
Stratton looks up, the stylus still clutched in her hand. Her eyes are rimmed with red, her face pale.
"Twelve, what?"
"Scientists. Researchers. People who had lives and families before your architecture deemed them liabilities. Zurich. Singapore. London. All dead in the last seventy-two hours. Phoenix is scrubbing the board. It's deleting the witnesses."
She flinches as if I'd struck her. She sets the tablet down, her fingers rattling against the plastic. "I didn't… I never intended for a kill-switch."
"Intention doesn't buffer the casket," I snap, moving into her space. I look down at her, the mark I bit into her shoulder earlier a dark, angry brand against her pale skin. "I've just spent an hour listening to the names of the dead. Twelve people. Twelve families who just lost their center of gravity because of the work you did for Phoenix."
I reach for my waist, my fingers finding the heavy leather of my belt. I pull it through the loops, the slow, rhythmic rasp of the material sounding like a serrated edge in the quiet of the room. I look at the belt, then back at her, the conflict in my chest a jagged, warring mess.
"I'm looking for a currency that accounts for the gravity of what you've done," I growl, my voice dropping to a low, lethalvibration. "It isn't the sex. Don't think for a second that balances a damn thing. I'll still take that from you—often and frequently—because I can't seem to stop myself, but that's for me. This? This has to be for them. A mark for each life. Something physical to bridge the gap between yourintentionsand their reality."
I wrap the end of the leather around my palm, testing the weight. "I'm going to count them. A strike for every name. And I need you to understand something before we start. There is no mercy here. I will not hold a strike to spare you. I will not pull back because you're tired or because you're crying. It is going to hurt."
