Page 164 of The ARC Unit: Breach

“I meant what I said.”

Wolf looked at me.

“Nobody hears about tonight from me.”

For a moment he simply watched me through the mask, the security light catching the brown of his eyes again.

“Goodnight,” he said gently.

I opened the door and went inside.

His room felt warmer after the balcony. I climbed back into his bed and pulled the blanket over my legs, still acutely aware of what I was not wearing beneath his shirt when the fabric shifted over my thighs.

Wolf came in several minutes later. The lighter landed softly on the desk and I heard him settle onto the floor, but this time the mask stayed on. He turned his head toward the bed.

“Mercer.”

“What?”

“Sleep.”

I smiled into his pillow where he could not see it.

“I’m trying.”

“Try quieter.”

“I wasn’t talking.”

“Loud thoughts.”

I almost laughed but managed to keep it inside.

The room went still.

By morning the compound would wake up, Bear would start opening the wall in my room and Raven would drag us both back into the Strasbourg account. Wolf would become Wolf again in all the ways that mattered publicly, mask in place and every private edge hidden behind it.

Nobody downstairs would know what his uncovered voice sounded like in the dark, or how fast he had reached for the mask once he realized I was awake.

I already knew I wasn’t going to tell them.

Chapter Fifteen

MIA

I woke to the smell of coffee and the uncomfortable realization that I had no idea where my underwear was.

For a few seconds I stayed beneath Wolf’s blanket with my eyes closed, trying to reconstruct the previous night from the evidence immediately available. His pillow smelled like clean cotton and cigarettes. His black shirt was twisted around my waist, leaving one bare thigh outside the blanket, and the floor beside the bed was empty except for the folded gray blanket he had slept on.

Wolf was already gone.

The memory returned in pieces after that. Water in my room. His mask coming off in the dark. His hand closing around my wrist when the nightmare pulled him awake. The balcony. The snake tattoo. The way he had looked at me when I used his own words about choice against him.

Nobody.

I had promised him nobody would hear about it, and daylight did not make the promise feel any less serious. I sat up and checked the clock on his desk. 6:18. Sleeping on concrete clearly had not prevented Wolf from returning to his usual schedule, which felt unnecessarily committed to being difficult.

My wet clothes were gone from the locker door. In their place sat a folded pair of my black cargo pants, a bra, underwear and one of my own charcoal long sleeve shirts inside a clear plastic bag on the desk.