Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64044 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 320(@200wpm)___ 256(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
I run the system one more time. Not because it needs it. Because my hands need something to do and the alternative is sitting still with everything inside my head, and right now that landscape is one I don’t want to walk through alone.
Render’s at the table doing the same thing with the communication gear. Testing the channel for the fourth time. Checking the signal strength. Making sure all nine of us will stay connected during the breach. His movements are precise but there’s an edge to them that wasn’t there yesterday. A tightness in his shoulders. A way he holds his jaw that I’ve learned means his mind is running scenarios he doesn’t like the endings of.
“Stop testing the comms,” I say.
“Stop testing the system.”
We look at each other. The mutual recognition of two people doing the same useless thing for the same reason is so clear it’s almost funny. Almost. Nothing is actually funny right now. The air in the storage unit has the dense weight of a room where something is about to happen and both people in it know it and neither of them can say it because saying it makes it real and real is something that can be lost.
He sets down the gear. I close the laptop. The silence that fills the space between us is different from every silence that came before. This silence is clean. Stripped of every pretense. The silence of two people who have run out of things to hide behind.
“Are you afraid?” I ask.
“No.” He says it immediately. Then he stops, and reconsiders his answer. The version of him that answers on reflex is the operator. The one who just paused is someone else. “I’m not afraid of the facility. I’m not afraid of the guards or the stairwell or the breach. I’ve done this before. Not this exactly. But close enough that the mechanics don’t scare me.”
“But.”
“But I’ve never done it with someone outside the building who I can’t stop thinking about. The scenarios I keep running aren’t about what happens inside. They’re about the hours between now and when I walk through that fence and you’re standing at the mobile terminal two hundred yards away and I can’t see you. Can’t reach you. Can’t do anything except trust the plan and the channel and the two hundred yards of empty ground between us.”
The admission is so stripped of his usual control that it feels like seeing a room with all the furniture removed. Just walls and floor and the truth underneath everything he normally puts in it.
“I’ll be on the radio,” I say. “You’ll hear me the whole time.”
“Hearing isn’t the same.”
“No. It’s not.”
I stand up from the floor where I’ve been sitting with the laptop. My body protests. Every joint has an opinion about cold floors and metal chairs and eight days in spaces never meant for living. I stretch and the motion pulls his oversized hoodie up enough that cool air hits the strip of skin above my waistband.
He’s watching. He always watches. But the quality of his attention has changed in the last sixty seconds. It’s not the careful, peripheral observation he maintained for the first five days, the seeing-without-looking that let him watch my movements without ever being caught staring. It’s direct. Open. The attention of a man who’s decided that the pretense of not looking is a luxury he can no longer afford.
I feel the weight of his gaze on the exposed skin at my waist the way you feel sunlight. Warm. Present. Impossible to ignore.
“Render.”
“Yeah.”
“The conversation. The one we keep putting off. The one about everything we haven’t said.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to wait anymore.”
The words settle between us, sinking into the silence with a weight that steals the air from the room. They aren't loud, but they don't have to be. I feel them all the way down to my bones.
My heart stumbles, then pounds hard enough to make my chest ache as his gaze locks onto mine. There's no looking away. No escape from the truth hanging between us.
He rises.
Not in the fluid, instinctive way I've seen a hundred times before, when every movement is driven by training and survival. This is slower. More careful. Like every inch he gains is a choice. Like he's giving himself one last chance to stop... and deciding, over and over again, that he won't.
Only four feet separate us.
He closes the distance in two strides.
The same way he crossed the storage unit the night he kissed me for the first time. The same way he crossed that shipping container to cut the zip ties from my wrists. Render James has always moved with absolute purpose. No hesitation. No wasted motion. When he decides to reach you, nothing in the world feels capable of standing in his way.