Page 82 of Duty Compromised
“Ethan, we need you.” Jace’s voice crackled through the radio. “Got something interesting on the auction server.”
Ethan moved toward the door, then paused. “Ty says you haven’t taken a real break in twelve hours.”
“Ty says a lot of things.”
“He’s usually right.” Ethan disappeared before I could argue.
I turned back to my screen, trying to recapture the thread of logic I’d been following, but the code had become meaningless symbols. The function I’d been writing for the last hour suddenly looked wrong, like I was reading a foreign language I’d never learned.
I deleted a line. Rewrote it. Deleted it again. My brain kept chasing the same circular logic, like a corrupted loop with no exit condition. Every pathway led to the same dead end.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, but I couldn’t remember what I’d been trying to accomplish. The harder I tried to focus, the more the solution seemed to fragment and scatter.
Suddenly, Ty was there, his hand warm on my shoulder. The touch sent electricity through me, memory and present tangling together.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’re taking a break.”
“I can’t. The auction is?—”
“In twenty hours. I know. And you’re so fried you’ve been staring at the same screen for five minutes without typing anything. You need a break.”
“Okay. I’ll take ten minutes.”
“Two hours. Minimum.” He slid me back from my laptop before I could protest.
“Ty, people are going to die if I don’t?—”
“Nobody’s dying on my watch.” He pulled me to standing, steadying me when my legs protested. His hands lingered on my arms, and for a moment, we just stood there, the air between us charged with everything we hadn’t said since the motel. “You’re going to step away, let your brain process in the background, and come back fresh. Sometimes the solution comes when you stop strangling it.”
I wanted to argue, but my vision was doing interesting things at the edges, darkness creeping in like system failure warnings.
“Plus, my plan will be pretty entertaining.”
“What kind of entertainment?” I asked, too exhausted to fight.
His grin held mischief. “Family dinner.”
“That’s your idea of entertainment?”
“Trust me.”
Two hours later, I understood exactly what he meant.
The Hughes family dining room was chaos incarnate, but organized chaos, like a particle accelerator where every collision was calculated for maximum energy transfer. The massive oak table groaned under the weight of what appeared to be enough food for a small army, though there were only nine of us.
“Pass the potatoes,” Frank said, reaching across Bridget to snag the bowl before she could respond. He had the same brown eyes as Ty but carried himself with the careful precision of someone who spent his days handling priceless artifacts. The PhD in history made sense—he had that academic air I recognized from years in university halls.
“You have the manners of a barbarian,” Bridget informed him, snatching the bowl back and serving herself first. “Four years of law school and I still have to cite proper precedent for vegetable-passing protocols in this house.”
“Precedent would be whoever’s fastest gets fed first,” Leonard interjected, adjusting his glasses in a gesture so perfectly befitting a high school math teacher that I almost smiled. “It’s basic survival dynamics. Very mathematical.”
“Everything’s mathematical to you,” Annabel said, rolling her eyes. She had the same strong jaw as Ty, softened by laugh lines earned from what she’d told me were fifteen years of delivering babies. “Last week, you tried to explain labor contractions using sine waves.”
“They follow predictable patterns!”
“Tell that to the woman who’s been pushing for three hours.”
Donovan sat beside me, methodically working through his plate without engaging in the verbal sparring. But I caught the way his mouth twitched at certain comments, fighting not to smile. Whatever demons he’d brought back from deployment hadn’t killed his sense of humor, just buried it deep.
