Page 15 of Shadow Secrets
Sutton picked up the toast, mostly because she needed something to do. She caught Sebastian watching her and glared at him until he looked away.
The quiet stretched. The fight had burned itself out, leaving the discomfort of two people who’d said too much and not enough at the same time.
“I could show you the compound, if you want,” Sebastian said. He was staring at the coffee machine. “We can walk the interior. See the layout. It’s better than sitting in that room.”
How long would she have to stay here? She wanted to ask, but figured she wouldn’t like the answer. Every instinct she had said, don’t accept anything from him, don’t let him be kind because kind is harder to fight than anger.
But sitting alone in that sterile room was impossible. The inside of her own head was a carousel of Ginger’s face on the sidewalk, and Penn’s face the last time she’d seen him alive—three weeks before the shooting, standing in the doorway of his apartment in Adams Morgan, telling her he’d call her later.
He hadn’t called. She’d been annoyed about it and texted him a rude gesture. And then he was dead. The annoyance had curdled into the kind of guilt that lived in her chest like a stone she couldn’t cough up.
Sebastian was right—she needed to move. Motion was the only thing that kept the carousel from spinning.
“All right,” she said. “We can walk. But no talking about feelings, okay?”
Sebastian picked up the plates, rinsed and slid them into the dishwasher. “Bring your coffee if you want.” He grabbed his own.
October in Montana made everything look like a photograph someone had adjusted for maximum drama—the sky too blue, the mountains too sharp, the aspens along the tree line burning gold against the dark mass of the pines.
The compound sprawled across a cleared hillside—the main building flanked by two smaller structures, a motor pool, and a gravel lot where four trucks and an SUV were parked. Beyond the perimeter fence, the land rolled out toward the mountains in waves of brown grass and dark timber.
Sebastian walked beside her down the corridors at a respectful distance. “The main building is operations, residential quarters, kitchen, and the briefing room,” he said. “The west wing is Vivi’s domain—her office, which she calls the decompression suite, and our medical wing.”
“Decompression suite. Fancy.”
“The couch is from Costco. The sound machine plays four options, all of which sound like static. But she’ll fight you for that room.”
It was the most he’d said at once that wasn’t operational, and the normalcy of it caught her off guard. She’d built him into a fixed shape in her mind—the man from the news, the man from the parlor, the man with the gun—and that shape didn’t have room for dry humor about Costco furniture.
“Why don’t you live here?” she asked. “There are clearly rooms.”
Sebastian was quiet for a few steps. “I like being alone.”
She felt that in her bones. “You? Mr. Most Eligible Bachelor in D.C.? I thought you’d be married, divorced, and have three kids by now.”
He paused. “Living on-site means being on all the time. Accessible. Part of the organism. The farmhouse gives me a boundary. Twenty minutes of road between here and there. It’s enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to pretend I’m a person and not just an operator. I prefer to work as much as possible, but sometimes, I do need my space.”
The honesty startled her. She’d expected deflection, or a polished non-answer. Instead, he’d handed her something real.
They walked in silence for a stretch, passing the weight room, the conference room where she’d given her statement last night. Stopping at a lounge area, Sebastian stared out the patio doors. A hawk circled over the tree line, riding a thermal.
“Why a lynx?” she asked.
He glanced at her with a raised brow.
“The tattoo. The sketch you left on my counter. Why a lynx?”
“It’s my callsign.”
“Your—” She blinked. “You have callsigns? Like fighter pilots? Is that why Jasper said to call him Bobcat?”
The corner of his mouth moved in the ghost of a smile. “Like the military. Garrett is Wolf. Mack is Hawk. CB is Grizzly. And yes, Jasper is?—”
“Bobcat.”
