Page 42 of Shadow Secrets
He glanced back to see Vivi smiling. “My door’s always open,” she said, then winked, “and blank notebooks are always available.”
CHAPTER TEN
Sutton
After Vivi’s office, after the Coke and the Costco couch, Sutton had gone back to her room, intending to sketch. She needed to silence the carousel of awful memories circling in her head.
The sketchbook was on the nightstand. Her pens were lined up beside it. Sebastian settled at the desk with a borrowed laptop from Jaster, his face lit blue-white by the screen, scrolling through something he told her was research into covert networks and their historical structures.
“Secret societies?” she asked, kicking off her boots.
“Organizational patterns. How cells operate, how they recruit, how they communicate. There are parallels to groups I studied during my time in the Service. If Inkwell follows similar models?—”
“You’re reading about cults and spy rings on a Friday night.”
“It’s Monday.”
“Is it?” The days had blurred. She’d lost track somewhere between the parlor and the compound, between the blood on the sidewalk and the blood on his lip. Monday. She’d been at the compound for three days. It felt like three weeks. Three months.
She needed to sketch, but first she stretched out on the bed. Just to rest her eyes for a minute. The pillow was cool against her cheek. The sound of his quiet typing was rhythmic, steady. The safest sound in her current world—proof that he was there, three feet away, between her and anything that still might want to hurt her.
She fell asleep.
When she opened her eyes, the room was dim. The desk lamp was on, casting a warm circle across the laptop, which sat open, its screen darkened to sleep mode. The chair was empty.
Sebastian wasn’t there.
She sat up, pulse spiking before her brain caught up. She scanned the room. The blanket he’d been using on the floor was still folded. His jacket hung on the back of the chair. His sidearm was on the desk beside the laptop—he never left that unattended.
He was still here. Had to be.
Then she heard it—a sharp intake of breath from the bathroom. The door was cracked open a few inches, light spilling through the gap in a narrow stripe across the floor.
Her socks were silent on the cool tile as she crossed the room. Through the crack, she could see a sliver of the room—the edge of the sink, the mirror, the fluorescent light that gave everything a clinical cast.
Sebastian stood in front of the mirror with his shirt off.
His back was to her. Her eyes slid over him, the broad shoulders, the defined muscles along his spine, the lean architecture of a body maintained through discipline rather than vanity. He was probing his left side with careful fingers, pressing along the ribs. She saw him wince when he hit a spot. The bruising was already a bloom of purple-black spreading across his lower side where Axe Booker’s knee had connected during the fight.
Along with the bruising, she saw something else on his back. A circle of raised tissue, pale against his skin. It had healed into a permanent ridge just below his ribs on the left side.
Penn’s bullet.
The air left her lungs. She must have made a sound because Sebastian’s gaze snapped to her in the mirror. His body tensed, and he rotated to face her, one hand dropping to the counter in an instinctive reach for his shirt.
The entry wound was a starburst of scar tissue, smaller than the exit wound but more brutal in its precision. A tight, puckered circle where the bullet had torn through skin and muscle. Centimeters from organs. The surgeons had said as much on the news. Agent Whitaker is lucky to be alive. Another inch to the right…
Lucky. They’d called him lucky.
“Sutton.” His voice was low, controlled. The voice of a man caught unguarded, trying to reconstruct his armor in real time. He snagged at the shirt. It fell to the floor. He bent. “I was just checking the?—”
“Don’t.”
The word stopped him. His hand hovered over the shirt, fingers an inch from the fabric.
She stepped into the bathroom. The space was small—five feet between the door and the sink, barely room for two people. She was close enough to see the texture of the scar.
“Don’t cover it up,” she said, quieter now. “Please.”
