The Devil You Know

by Kit Rocha

  Maya sorted through the tangle of words. “Is that he cares about you in Ava?”

  “Cares is an insufficient descriptor.” Ava eyed her over the edge of the tablet. “Matthew Gray loves you. You are his weakness, and he’s yours.”

  And that was why the tactical assessment of interpersonal relationships would never be the same as emotional intelligence. Ava saw the ways their relationship made them vulnerable. Maya imagined she knew how Zoey would have responded.

  Gray was her strength. And she could be his.

  If only he would let her.

  December 12th, 2080

  I’m starting to doubt my own instincts. I was so sure about Matthew Gray. But is he truly a danger or simply an echo? I’ve been so deep in this for so long, I see shadows everywhere.

  I see my failure in him. What have I missed while chasing a ghost?

  Probably too much. Possibly everything.

  The Recovered Journal of Birgitte Skovgaard

  THIRTY-ONE

  Mace found him in the training room.

  “I’m not doing anything not doctor-approved,” Gray assured him, never halting his steady strides on the treadmill. “Just a nice, leisurely jog. See?”

  “I could not give less of a shit about that.” Mace shut off the treadmill and pointed at him. “Get down from there. We’re going to have a chat.”

  Gray snagged a towel and his water bottle. “What’s going on?”

  “You’re fucking up.”

  “My exercise?” Gray asked.

  Mace slapped the water bottle out of his hand, startling Gray. “It’s not funny, smart-ass. You’re going to lose her.”

  An aching bolt of pain gripped Gray’s chest, and he turned away. “Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you haven’t spent the last week pushing Maya away? My mistake.”

  Sudden, fierce anger gripped Gray. He didn’t have to stand there and get lectured like this. It wasn’t like Mace had all his shit together, either. He was still running around, stabbing people by accident. “We’re not doing this right now.”

  “Yes,” Mace said firmly, “we are. Knox and Rafe and Conall can’t do it, because they’re still scared they’re going to lose you. So it’s my job—as your friend—to say this and make damn sure you hear it.”

  The rage bubbled over. “Oh, like when you told me I was going to die? That I had to accept it, really stare it in the face, and give up on everything? Like that? Because news flash, Mason—you were fucking wrong.”

  Mace frowned at him, his affronted expression almost comical. “No, I wasn’t.”

  Gray choked on a laugh. “Then what the fuck am I doing still standing here?”

  “From what I can tell? Shoving your head as far up your own ass as it’ll go.”

  Gray took a swing at him, but he still wasn’t quite steady on his feet. The punch went wide as Mace sidestepped it, and the momentum carried Gray to the mat beneath their feet.

  Mace held his hands up by his sides and sighed. “Fuck. Here—” He reached down to help Gray up.

  Instead, Gray jerked him off his feet. “Asshole.”

  Mace hit the mat with a thud and a disgusted groan. “Adolescent.”

  By unspoken agreement, they both lay there, staring up at the ceiling.

  Finally, Gray whispered, “I was ready to die.”

  “I know,” Mace murmured. “But you didn’t. Your girlfriend pulled a miracle out of her back pocket, and now you get to live. But you have to live, goddammit. You can’t keep punishing the world for thwarting your expectations.”

  “I don’t know if I know how.”

  Mace rolled to a sitting position. “To start, you can stop making Maya feel like you hate her for saving you.”

  “I don’t,” Gray protested. And it was true—he couldn’t blame her. If their positions had been switched, he would have pledged anything, given anything. No price would have been too high to pay for a chance to save her.

  Oh, but it hurt. It hurt so much, the back and forth. Wanting and needing and having and losing, until he could stand anything, even sheer desolation, over another dashed hope.

  “Prove it,” Mace challenged. “You’re running out of time. Again.”

  And wasn’t that what had scared him before? What had held him back? The fear that Maya would fall in love with him, and he would have to leave her. Now, he was doing it anyway, and she didn’t even have the luxury of telling herself he had no choice.

  He was fucking up.

  He sat up and nudged Mace. “Where’s Rafe?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I need to find some forks.”

  * * *

  It had taken a lot of practice, but Maya was starting to find the balance.

  The darkness behind her mask didn’t bother her. The basement room was as vivid behind her eyelids as the moment she’d tied the cloth over her eyes. There was a trick to focus, it turned out—an entire spectrum of nuance in between on and off. The brutal discipline she’d learned to exert over her mind could be … softened. Heightened.

  Controlled.

  It was like learning to flex individual muscles independently of one another. Messy at first, and frustrating. But as the targets Rafe had set up for her in their basement chimed one after another, Maya flowed through the room with perfect confidence, the laser pistol an extension of her body, each shot precise and effortless.

  Ten bull’s-eyes. She didn’t need to look to be sure. She’d learned the room in minutes, internalizing the way the walls and furniture impacted echoes, parsing the pitch and timbre, the duration and intensity. It had always been instinctive, but now she savored the active experience of it, the almost synesthetic euphoria. She could feel the sharpness of sounds as they swept past. She could taste the sizzle of them on her tongue. They had colors and weight, they told stories.

  Like the footsteps on the stairs. Steady and measured, but heavy with a lingering bone-deep exhaustion, like the effort to lift each foot was only surpassed by the struggle to put it down so precisely it looked effortless.

  It took extra energy to project an aura of strength when you were barely recovered from brain surgery.

  Maya didn’t remove the blindfold. She used the control clipped to her belt to reset the targets, setting aside a tiny slice of her attention to track Gray’s progress down the stairs. Nervousness at facing him after all the awkward silence tried to sizzle under her skin, but it couldn’t compete with adrenaline as the first target beeped its challenge.

  Counting constellations was nice, but she was learning to embrace the soothing potential of perfect bull’s-eyes, too.

  The targets beeped. One. Two.

  Gray hesitated on the bottom step.

  Three. Four. Five. Six.

  His boots touched the cement floor, still well outside her ring of targets.

  Seven.

  Softer steps. He’d hit the threadbare throw rug. Ava had threatened to replace it two days ago, claiming it neither offered protection from the hard floor nor retained color sufficiently vibrant to qualify as decorative. Maya hadn’t fought her. Maybe if Ava was buying area rugs she wouldn’t buy a juicer.

  Eight. Nine.

  Ten.

  She hit the final target and stopped, her back to Gray. He stood just outside the ring of targets. She could hear his breathing. Steady and even. Not even winded. Whatever Savitri had done to his implant to prioritize rapid healing had been astoundingly effective. Anyone else would have been flat on their back still, struggling for the energy to sit upright.

  Not Gray.

  She blew out a breath without turning. “I’m getting pretty good at this.”

  “Wasn’t much room for improvement to begin with,” he rasped.

  His voice stroked over her skin, all the more intense because she’d narrowed her focus to sound. Swallowing hard around a sudden lump in her throat, she dragged off her blindfold and tossed it onto one of the cots next to her la
ser pistol.

  Then she turned, and the sight of him punched her in the gut.

  He was fully dressed, including his boots and ever-present jacket. His hair, which had just started to grow back, stood out in tiny blond prickles that caught the light. His face still bore bruises, though they’d faded to a sickly green yellow.

  He was alive, and whole. He was a goddamned miracle.

  He was beautiful.

  Maya wrapped her arms around herself to keep from reaching out to touch him just to make sure he was real. “You seem good.”

  “Better,” he confirmed. “I got the all-clear from Mace and Savitri. No more monitoring.”

  A tiny bit of tension she hadn’t realized lingered unraveled so abruptly, the world wobbled. She took a half step toward him, then stopped again, remembering Ava’s words. He’d come looking for her, but that didn’t mean he was ready.

  She couldn’t push. So she settled for a shaky smile. “I’m so glad.”

  He shoved his hands nervously into his jacket pockets, but his gaze remained fixed on her. “I’m sorry, Maya.”

  “No, Gray—”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “You need to let me be sorry, as long as it’s for the right reasons.”

  The hurt she’d fought to extinguish trembled inside her. If she didn’t acknowledge it, anything they tried to build would rest on a bed of dangerous embers. “Okay,” she whispered. “Tell me the reasons.”

  It took him a moment to speak. “I was ready to die. I’d faced it, made my peace with it. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was what I had. My reality.” He exhaled sharply. “Then I woke up alive, and I didn’t know what to do with that.”

  “Because I made the choice for you.” She bit her lower lip, then forced herself to ask the question that haunted her at night. “Are you mad at me for that?”

  “No. No. It’s not—” He drove his hands through his hair, just like he’d done a hundred times before—except this time his palms slid over his nearly bare scalp. “I’m not upset that I’m alive, and I’m damn sure not angry with you. But it’s so hard to explain, Maya. You finally come to grips with the finality of it, and then it’s all over, and everything’s fine. It feels … like trying to turn a freight train.”

  “It’s okay to not be okay.” She took another step, closing the space between them to a scant meter. “You don’t have to apologize for that. You got tortured, for fuck’s sake. And then almost died. And then … everything else. You don’t have to be okay. Not for me, not for anyone.”

  “That’s not what I’m sorry about.” His chest heaved. “I should have talked to you. I should have told you what I was going through instead of pushing you away. It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, and I’m sorry I hurt you.”

  Tears stung her eyes. “You should have,” she told him shakily. “I was so sad that Ava tried to give me a pep talk.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah.” Maya rubbed her hand against her chest, but the ache there was easing. “You’re so good at hiding what you’re feeling from the world. But you don’t need to hide from me, okay? I don’t need you to be happy and fine all the time. I just … need you.”

  He held out his hand.

  Trust me. Trust yourself.

  She trusted him. She had since before she should have. She’d trusted him because her instincts had told her that Gray would destroy himself before he hurt her.

  Her instincts had been so right. Too right.

  She trusted him because she trusted herself. So she reached out and rested her hand on his.

  “I need you, too,” he said simply, as if it was a foregone conclusion. A known fact of the universe. “I’m not good at talking, but I’m good at doing things. So I made you something. If you want it.”

  “Of course.” She smiled at him. “I want anything you made for me.”

  He shoved his hand into his jacket pocket again and pulled out a ring.

  Her heart skipped a beat. It skipped a bunch of them, she was pretty sure, and that was definitely why her fingers trembled as he gently slipped the burnished silver onto her finger.

  Not just any ring. A ring that could only be hers.

  Because he’d made it out of a damn fork.

  The craftsmanship stole her breath. The neck had been pounded flat and shaped to curve around her finger. The tines were twisted in delicate interlocking loops, framing a sparkling blue crystal that perfectly matched her favorite necklace.

  “You made this?” she demanded, her voice trembling. “Like, with your hands?”

  “And some tools.” He smiled down at her. “Rafe helped me find the materials. Pretty sure he thought I’d finally lost it when I told him what I needed was the perfect fork.”

  The ring blurred as her tears overflowed. She made a protective fist around it—then thumped it lightly against Gray’s shoulder. “Why are we wasting you as a damn sniper? We should be running a jewelry empire.”

  “No.” He rubbed his thumb over her cheek, brushing away the tears. “This is only for you. No one else.”

  And he claimed he wasn’t good at words.

  Maya went up on her toes and twined her arms around his neck. His lips were right there, warm and gentle, welcoming her with a kiss that proved some things were beyond her burgeoning powers of mental control.

  When he kissed her, she felt it everywhere. The tingles along her scalp, the sweet warmth sliding down her spine, the heat kindling lower—straight down to her toes, which were trying to curl in her boots again.

  Kissing him might always sweep her away. But that was okay. Gray would always catch her.

  “Do you forgive me?” he murmured against her mouth.

  “Yes.” She kissed the corner of his mouth. His chin. The tip of his nose. Laughter bubbled up in her. “Gray, you’re going to live.”

  “I’m going to live,” he agreed. “But, more importantly, I’m going to try. I’ll be everything you deserve, I swear. I’ll find a way.”

  “Just be you.” She reached up, ghosting her fingers over the soft stubble above his brow. “That’s enough.”

  “Deal.”

  CONALL

  For a week, Conall had watched Tobias Richter’s disappearance ripple through the TechCorps.

  His absence was like a black hole at the heart of their world—visible at first only through inference. Messages piled up in his many inboxes. Pressing questions were left unanswered, security concerns ignored. Follow-ups started to drift in, cautious at first and then increasingly terse.

  I would appreciate a response.

  This is time sensitive.

  Per my last three messages …

  Conall had assumed at that point that someone would connect the dots and send up an alarm. Maya had been the one to point out the ironic reality: no one involved in day-to-day operations at the TechCorps had the authority to question Tobias Richter’s whereabouts. He might have chipped every employee on the Hill, but he didn’t have a convenient tracker embedded under his skin.

  Tobias Richter came and went as he damn well pleased.

  Conall had started to think they’d been delivered a miracle. If Cara Kennedy had a scrap of sense left in her, she’d be across the Mississippi by now. Conall sure the fuck would have been, in her shoes. And with no idea what had happened to Richter, the TechCorps could spin themselves in increasingly dizzy circles for weeks as his status slowly morphed from not here to actively missing to presumed dead.

  Then again, they had been delivered a miracle. Gray was on his feet and walking around, apparently no worse for the wear. Savitri was over there now, assessing his progress and adjusting his healing protocols. If Conall had to choose one miracle, that would be the one: Gray, alive and healing.

  And it looked like that was the only miracle they were going to get.

  Maya was seated next to him in the warehouse, idly scrolling through her catalog. They were ostensibly in charge of the kids while Nina and Knox scoped out Ava’s contacts, but the k
ids didn’t exactly need babysitters. They were tiny, overserious adults in a way that depressed Conall—and that was saying something, considering how young he’d been when the TechCorps had swept him into their program.

  At least these kids would get a chance to be kids. That was worth a gut shot or two.

  It was an idyllic scene. And Conall was about to ruin it. Sighing, he nudged Maya. “Something just happened.”

  “Hmm?”

  She had a distracted, dreamy look on her face. Conall wanted more than anything to let her stay in whatever blissful daydream about Gray she was currently having. Maya deserved happiness. Hell, given the past week, Maya deserved to take Gray into a locked room and stay there with him for a year, if she wanted.

  But Maya was the only one who could tell him how much shit they were in.

  “There’s been some weird chatter this morning,” he told her, trying to ease her in gently. But there was no gentle way to say this. No way to soften the blow. “Cara Kennedy is DC-025, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “She just turned herself in.”

  Maya’s head turned slowly. By the time she was facing him, her expression was blank and her eyes dangerously hard. “Show me.”

  The message was short. A company-wide memo, restricted to Level One security, it consisted of two concise lines.

  DC-025 remanded to acting VP of Security for comprehensive debriefing.

  Impose radio silence.

  “I don’t know what the fuck it means,” Conall said as Maya stared at the tablet. “Radio silence? Do they mean internal comms?”

  “They mean everything.” Maya was still looking at the tablet, but her gaze was unfocused. “It’s code. It means the topic of conversation is too sensitive for anything but in-person communication. But this is a multi-department L1 memo.” Maya finally lifted her gaze to Conall’s. “Make sure there’s no trace of you in the system. Because they suspect they’ve been compromised.”