Page 14 of Duty Compromised
The elevator suddenly felt ten degrees warmer. I fixed my gaze on the floor numbers, willing them to change. “That’s not what I… Molecular bonds are covalent or ionic interactions between atoms, not?—”
“I thought our interactions so far have been pretty iconic.”
“Ionic,” I corrected automatically, heat crawling up my neck. “I said ionic.”
“Sure,” he said lightly. “But you can’t deny we’re already iconic.”
“No, ionic.” I sounded out the syllables more slowly, only to realize he was teasing me. Oh. I’d missed that. Big surprise. I cleared my throat. “Right now, I need to figure out how to build a countermeasure for technology that should never have existed outside a locked facility.”
“And I need to figure out how to make sure this building stays secure while you do it.” His tone softened at the edges, and when the doors opened, he moved first, scanning the hall before letting me pass. “Looks like we both have our work cut out for us.”
The lab stretched before us—sterile surfaces, the hum of equipment, my team already glancing up. Relief: something I could control.
“Everyone, conference room in five,” I called. My voice was steadier than my heartbeat.
As the team began to gather, Ty brushed my elbow. Barely a touch, but it set off a ridiculous spark under my skin. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about the receptionist thing earlier. That was?—”
“Water under the bridge.” I pulled away too quickly, the warmth of his touch clinging longer than it should. “Let’s just focus on our respective jobs. You keep us breathing, I’ll keep the world’s phones from exploding. No need for…unnecessary interaction.”
He gave me a mock salute. “All business, no small talk. Got it.”
“Exactly.”
I pivoted toward the conference room—and immediately caught my hip on the corner of a workstation, hard enough to rattle the equipment. Pain shot up my side. Perfect. Just perfect.
Of course he saw. Of course he was still watching, that half smile hovering like he’d been waiting for the punch line.
“Shut up,” I muttered, even though he hadn’t said anything.
His voice dropped, low and amused. “Didn’t say a word.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking a lot of things.”
I did not want to know what those things were. Could not afford to. I had a countermeasure to build and a global catastrophe to prevent. Ty Hughes was just another variable to work around.
But as I stepped into the glass-walled conference room, I caught his reflection in the pane—those damned eyes still on me. And the equation in my head refused to balance.
Chapter 5
Ty
The Vertex lab hummed with the same white noise it had been making since I’d arrived—ventilation systems, computer fans, equipment I still couldn’t identify after three days of staring at it.
I reminded myself I’d wanted to be here. That anything had been better than rotting away in Rocheport with my family smothering me.
But at this point, I think I’d take another gunshot wound over watching Charlotte ignore me for one more hour. At least getting shot had been interesting. This was like watching extremely expensive paint dry while someone pretended you didn’t exist.
I sat at what Alex generously called a security station—really just an old desk he’d had dragged in from storage. He’d positioned it where I could see through the glass walls into the main lab, apologizing for the wobble in the table leg and promising to find me a better chair “soon.”
The desk shook every time I breathed wrong. The chair had probably last been comfortable during the Clinton administration, its padding compressed to nothing and one armrest held on with duct tape. At least the sight lines were decent, giving me a clear view of the millions in quantum computing equipment and the team working on the Cascade Protocol countermeasure.
There’d been nothing so far to suggest that the FBI’s data breach might involve this lab or the Cascade Protocol. Nothing suspicious. Nobody tried to sneak in. No subterfuge at all.
Charlotte hunched over her workstation like she had been since she’d received her task to create the stabilizer code three days ago. Four monitors surrounded her in a semicircle, two keyboards positioned at different angles, papers scattered across every available surface in what looked like chaos but probably made sense to her. Sticky notes in various colors—pink, yellow, green, blue—climbed up the monitor edges like some kind of administrative ivy.
She worked both keyboards at once, left hand firing off strings of code, while her right navigated a completely different screen. Like she was playing dueling pianos, except the music was numbers and symbols I couldn’t begin to follow. I’d seen Rangers juggle comms under fire, but this? This was sorcery. Probably illegal in at least three states.
