Page 64 of Forbidden Protector

"You volunteered."

"I volunteered into a hole he'd already dug for exactly one woman to fall into." Her hand comes down flat on the table. Not hard, more like she needs somewhere to put the weight of the sentence. "He approved me the same day I asked. I thought I'd finally won something. He was staffing a leash and calling it a posting."

I don't move toward her.

She found this number in Wade Calloway's paperwork at the hangar and went quiet, and the quiet told me everything before she said a word. I've been standing on the other side of it ever since, arms crossed over my own chest because it's the only thing keeping my hands where they are.

I want my mouth on her. All of her, throat to hip bone, every place she's had to be strong this morning instead of held. I don't move, because right now the only thing I can give her that's worth anything is not taking.

She told me once, with her grandfather's file in her hands, that deciding things for her without asking wasn't my call to make. I haven't earned the right to touch her through this yet. Not since yesterday. Not since I called her Tatum on purpose and watched it land like a slap I threw with my own hand.

She doesn't want comfort. She wants the trap.

"Room 6," she says, already moving, pen in hand, dragging a fresh legal pad toward her. "The flue. He knew the room number before the front desk logged me in. He set that up himself."

Her voice doesn't crack. It sharpens, which is worse to watch, a blade going back to the stone instead of being allowed to rust.

"Every report I ever submitted on this case went to him clean, and he handed every word of it north."

"So feed him something that isn't clean."

She looks up, and for the first time all morning the old spark comes back into her face. The one I first saw across my father's desk when she baited him into a half-second flinch he never meant to give her.

"Two days." She's already writing, the pen moving fast and sure. "One piece of false intel. Something he can't resist passing up the chain, timed so if it moves, I'll know exactly which door it walked out of."

"What intel?"

"A location. A time. Something that only exists because I put it in a report he's going to read." She taps the pen against her teeth, thinking. "I'm running a controlled leak. If the Bureau kept a file on bad ideas, I'd be the header."

"Didn't peg you for a woman who writes her own bad ideas down."

"I don't. I just execute them well enough nobody else gets to." She doesn't look up when she says it, but the corner of her mouth tips, just enough to tell me she knows exactly what she just did. I have to read the page again from the top.

I come around the table. Not far. Far enough to read the page upside down, close enough that she has to tip her head back to keep her eyes on mine instead of the pad, and neither of us moves to close the last of it.

"That's not a location Salt Lake's going to believe," I say, reading the line over her shoulder. "You've got him chasing something on the reservation side. Tom's never once approved travel out that way. He'll smell it."

"He'll believe it if I make it sound like a lead I didn't want to chase."

"Still a guess."

"Then help me make it a better one, Blackwater, instead of standing over my shoulder poking holes in it."

I don't move back. For one full second neither of us is thinking about Salt Lake at all. Then she picks the pen back up, and the case comes back into the room between us.

She builds the rest of it fast, no wasted motion, the same hands that took Calloway's ledger apart at his own workbench two hours ago.

This is the version of her I fell for in a truck from the airport before either of us called it that. Not the one who cries. The one who doesn't, because crying never closed a case. In eleven days of knowing her she has never once chosen the thing that only feels good over the thing that works.

"You're not going to tell me to stay out of running this?" she asks, not looking up.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you'd do it whether I told you to or not, and pretending I could stop you is a lie I don't have the stomach for this morning."

I set both hands flat on the table across from hers, close enough now that if either of us leaned the two inches it would take, we wouldn't be talking about routing numbers anymore. Neither of us leans.