The only way she’d ever know if Gray was hurting was if he let her know.
“No dice,” he told her. “They don’t know where the hell he went.” The corner of Gray’s mouth tipped up. “They did tell me about some new clinic someone’s putting together in Five Points, but they warned me to be careful. No one knows what to make of it yet.”
Unsurprising. Knox’s clinic would seem too good to be true to the people who scraped by on the edges of survival. It would take time to build trust.
Well, it would take most of them time. “How did you do that?” she asked as they turned back toward Five Points. “I thought Rafe was the team’s resident grifter.”
“What, that?” Gray shrugged. “That’s not grift, that’s just—”
The peaceful quiet of the street exploded into the unmistakable cacophony of a firefight—rapid gunfire, shouts, bullets ricocheting off buildings and pavement. Training kicked in, her hand going for her holster before the first crack echoed through the alley.
In the same moment, Gray slammed into her.
Her back hit solid brick. Her head snapped back, smacking into the hand he’d slid behind her neck to protect her. He was everywhere, holding her against the wall, his body curved to shield hers. Her face ended up pressed to his throat, her shocked inhalation filling her lungs with the scent of him—gun oil and coffee and soap and sawdust.
Adrenaline surged through her, making everything worse. The press of his body. His scent. The sound he made, some sort of subvocal rumble that was probably supposed to soothe her, but his chest rumbled against hers and her brain blanked.
If she parted her lips, she’d be able to taste him.
Sweet merciful fuck, if he didn’t get the hell off her, she might actually do it.
Frantic, running footsteps echoed down the street, followed by the safety of silence. But Gray didn’t move.
Maya braced a hand against his chest, even though the contact burned. “Hey. It’s okay.” She pushed a little. It was like shoving granite. Or Nina. “I’m okay.”
He finally stepped back but left one hand flat against the brick. It left him leaning over her, a posture more oddly intimate than his body pinning hers to the wall. Something electric shivered through her, and she spread her fingers wide, intending to give him another gentle push.
His eyes met hers. Held. His chest tensed under her fingertips. She parted her lips, but no sound came out. For once in her life, she couldn’t remember a single damn word.
Then his gaze dropped to her mouth. His fingers pressed into the wall next to her head. He wasn’t touching her anywhere except where her hands were splayed against his chest, but she felt him from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, which were doing their best to curl inside her boots.
The hand next to her head shifted. His thumb stroked one of her braids. Her scalp tingled, and a whimper lodged in her throat then emerged as his name. “Gray?”
His gaze snapped back to hers. The wild look faded, and he pushed abruptly away from the wall, leaving her slapping her palms against the brick to keep from swaying after him.
“Sorry about that,” he rasped.
She hadn’t realized the sheer heat of him until he was gone. Even in the muggy morning air, she felt suddenly chilled. Her fingers tingled as she flexed them. “It’s fine,” she managed, forcing herself to speak lightly. “Dani tends to jump on me when guns go off, too. But I can take care of myself, I promise.”
“I know you can. It’s just…” Gray dragged a hand through his hair. “Never mind. You want to get out of here?”
Her heart stuttered. She couldn’t tear her gaze from his disheveled hair. It was just long enough for pieces to stand up, little spikes she wanted to smooth down. Because that was what she should be thinking about, standing in the midst of broken glass in a gutted-out alley thirty seconds after a shoot-out. Touching his hair.
Fuck, he’d broken her brain.
“Yeah.” She forced herself to straighten and fell in beside him as he started to walk. Totally casual. Very normal. Nothing weird or awkward at all. If she avoided him for the next fifty years, maybe she could convince herself it was true.
Hard on the heels of the thought came guilt. It twisted through her, a sick reminder.
Gray didn’t have fifty years. Gray likely didn’t have one.
For a heartbeat, it hurt. It hurt as badly as knowing the quack doctor had fled to do more harm. It hurt like knowing Nina was out there, tracking down bad guys who would probably slip through their fingers and keep on hurting children. One more thing she couldn’t do a damn thing to fix, and if she let herself feel all of them at once, she’d sink under the weight of them and never resurface.
So she didn’t. With her rigid TechCorps dissociation training, she enforced discipline on her unruly thoughts. She just … stopped feeling. She’d pay for it later, like she always did, but she’d made an art form of it by now. She crushed every hurt and distraction into a tiny ball and shoved them into the box deep in her mind. They settled, a tangible weight across her shoulders, a tension in her body that never entirely left.
But her mind was blissfully, beautifully blank.
As she and Gray walked back to Five Points, Maya filled that blank space with a list of things she could control, each one spawning a list of things she could do. She whispered each task to herself, locking it into memory.
When she got home, she’d work until she collapsed. She’d check off every damn thing on that list and make new ones if she had to.
Maybe, this time, it would be enough.
August 4th, 2072
DC-025 has enrolled in the same assembly language class as Marjorie. I’m sure Tobias Richter’s data courier already knows such basic material.
I can’t see this as a harmless coincidence.
The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard
SIX
Maya was avoiding him.
As soon as they’d made it back home, she’d murmured an excuse about being busy and ducked into the work area of the ladies’ warehouse.
Oh, who was he kidding? She’d fled, and he honestly didn’t even blame her. Not only had he talked her into going on what amounted to a wild-goose chase, but he’d shoved her against a wall and drooled on her.
Smooth, Gray. Real fucking smooth.
He snagged a couple of beers and went across the street in search of Sam. The old man was bound to get tired of seeing his face sooner or later, so Gray planned to make the most of his taciturn acquaintance while he could.
Sam was out, but his neighbor, a pretty, young widow who’d been flirting with Rafe nonstop, flagged him down. Gray spent nearly twenty precious minutes trying to extricate himself from her interrogation—what was Rafe’s favorite food, did he like redheads, was he dating anyone?
The poor woman didn’t stand a chance, so Gray handed her the beers and bluntly told her that the butcher who lived downstairs was a better bet.
His potential distractions exhausted, he headed back to the warehouse where Maya was, undoubtedly, still hiding. He punched in the code for the back door this time, and stopped short when Maya spared him a single distracted glance before returning her attention to the massive 3D scanner in front of her.