Page 11 of Shadow Burn

Jasper pushed back from the desk, stood, and stretched the long muscles in his back, then walked to the small window on the far side of the tech room and looked out at the road that wound out toward the highway.

He thought about Katherine’s wrist when she’d reached for her coffee and the way her finger had stopped on the gap in her own timeline. The second Vance letter bugged him, and the date of it sat in his chest. Katherine may have worked for the CIA, but she had no idea what she was getting herself into.

He was going to take the assignment. He had to. He’d been going to take it from the moment she’d turned the black notebook to face him, and everything since had been him stalling against his own decision.

But it was going to cost him. What, he wasn’t sure. Most of the unknowns in his life had been about keeping himself or his fellow SEAL brothers from getting killed. Since leaving the Navy, the unknowns had become how a piece of code behaved when the parameters changed. This unknown was about what kind of man he was going to be by the end of it, and there were no test cases for that.

He turned away from the window and walked back to Vivi’s office.

She glanced up when he stepped into the doorway. Her expression didn’t change.

“I’m taking it,” he said.

She nodded once, as if she’d known he would. “I’ll let her know.”

“I’ll call her tomorrow.”

She gave him that look. “Today, Jasper. She’s knee deep in dangerous territory. Call her now, before she makes a wrong turn.”

He understood what that meant—Katherine could inadvertently get herself into quicksand and then none of them would be able to pull her out.

He stood in the doorway for a long second, and Vivi looked back at him with the mild, stubborn expression he recognized.

He nodded, stepped back into the hall, and leaned on the wall for a moment. What should he say to a woman who was going to know the moment she heard his voice that the theory she was afraid of had just become real?

And he was about to agree to stand close enough to it that it could burn them both.

CHAPTER THREE

He said yes.

The next morning, Katherine read the same page of Walter Vance’s correspondence three times without retaining any of it. It was Jasper’s fault, specifically the fault of the phone call he’d made to her last night.

He’d said yes to her case in roughly four sentences and then left her holding her phone in surprise. She’d spent the entire evening telling herself she was relieved. She was, but not only because now she had help. She was relieved that she would see him again. Just the thought of it made her cheeks heat. And then, she hadn’t stopped reorganizing her notebooks and making more notes in them until well after midnight she was so flustered.

Since it was Sunday, the library was only open for a few hours in the afternoon. Katherine had the whole place to herself for a while longer, at least until Jasper showed up. If he showed up. She’s told him he could officially start on Monday. She normally worked weekends at home if she wasn’t babysitting or at one of the girls’ piano recitals or soccer games, and had been doing the same here. But she didn’t expect him to do the same.

“Ugh.” She set down the paper in her hands and wished for a fresh cup of coffee. The eleventh page of Vance’s 2001 personal correspondence file was a string of words she could neither absorb nor quite see past. She tugged the cotton gloves higher on her wrists and tried again from the top of the page.

Agency paper told its own story if you knew how to read it. Certain offices used specific stocks, fibers, and watermarks—not for aesthetics, but for provenance. A memo could be copied, misfiled, or stripped of context. Paper stock was harder to lie about.

Jasper appeared in the meeting room doorway a moment later. Hoodie, leather bag over his shoulder, two paper cups balanced in his free hand. He set one of the cups on the table within her reach without asking.

He looked…good. Less hostile and more open. Her cheeks warmed just like they had the previous night. She glanced from him to the cup and back. “You brought me coffee?”

“Cream, no sugar, right?”

She took a careful sip. He’d remembered from yesterday morning.

He seemed to be waiting for her reaction. “It’s good,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Good?” He snorted. “Sanctuary Coffee is the best coffee in town. The place is a mile from here. The owner, Holly, makes sandwiches at lunch, and the cookies are worth the calories.”

She wished he’d brought some of those cookies, but calories were the last thing her hips needed. She filed the cookie information for later and chose not to acknowledge it. “Have a seat, Mr. Perault.”

“Jasper.”

“Jasper.”