Page 69 of Rogue Hope
He lingered, watching her chop vegetables. “I’ve been thinking about your lupus.”
Her knife paused mid-slice. “What about it?”
“The medications you’re taking. They’re not helping as much as they should.”
Something in his tone raised the hair on the back of her neck. How would he know the efficacy of her medications? She’d never discussed specifics with him.
“Standard treatment is tricky,” she said carefully. “Lots of trial and error.”
Finn leaned against the counter, too close. “I found something interesting in Harrison’s personal files. Did you know he kept detailed medical records on all his field operatives? Even after they left the Agency.”
The knife trembled in her hand. She set it down slowly. “He was thorough. That’s why he was a good handler.”
“Very thorough,” Finn agreed, his tone casual but his eyes sharp. “Your last bloodwork showed elevated inflammatory markers. Your rheumatologist has been considering more aggressive treatment options.”
Ice slipped through her veins. Those test results were barely two weeks old.
“You should be more careful with your network security,” Finn said softly. “Some things should stay private.”
He knew.
The message couldn’t have been clearer if he’d put a gun to her head. He was letting her know that he could access her most protected information. That nothing was beyond his reach.
That he was watching her every move.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she managed, resuming her chopping with hands she willed not to shake.
Finn smiled—the same warm, gentle smile that had begun to melt her defenses over these past weeks. “Good. We look out for each other, right?”
“Right,” she echoed.
He patted her shoulder and returned to the living room, leaving her alone with the terrifying certainty that the next twenty-four hours would be the longest of her life.
And she wasn’t entirely sure she would survive them.
37
The morning lightfiltered through the bamboo blinds, casting gold-tinted patterns across the scattered documents. Finn rubbed his eyes, fatigued after hours of methodical analysis. Three cups of coffee sat empty beside his laptop, testament to the night’s work. Across the table, Zara maintained her focused silence.
He allowed himself a moment to simply watch her—the slight furrow between her brows when she encountered something puzzling, the unconscious habit of tucking her hair behind her ear when deep in concentration. These small, familiar gestures stirred something profound within him that he’d been trying to suppress for weeks.
Hope.
Dangerous, vulnerable hope that perhaps they might find their way back—not to what they’d been before, but to something new. Something honest.
He’d made peace with the possibility that she might never trust him romantically again. That bridge had burned spectacularly in Paris. But these past days had shown him glimpses of a different future—one where they could at leastwork together, perhaps even rebuild a friendship from the ashes of what they’d lost.
It was more than he deserved, and yet he found himself wanting more.
“I think I found something,” he said, breaking the comfortable silence. “A recurring cipher key in the Winterfell Protocol references. It appears in transmissions from three different secure servers.”
Zara looked up, her expression attentive but guarded. “Show me.”
He turned his screen toward her, leaning closer as she studied the pattern he’d identified. The faint scent of her shampoo—something with lavender and mint—triggered a cascade of memories: laughing together during their first joint tail through the Sixth Arrondissement, her head resting against his shoulder during a long surveillance operation outside a crowded café, and the way she’d looked at him, truly seen him, before he’d destroyed everything.
“Good catch,” she acknowledged, her voice oddly flat. “This could give us a way to track the protocol’s implementation timeline.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” He smiled, feeling a small thrill at their synchronized analysis. “If we cross-reference these timestamps with known Cipher operations?—”
