faded into dull, tense silence.
Knox was trying to ignore that, too.
He was getting good at ignoring things. He ignored the hollow, helpless guilt that opened up inside him every time he thought of Nina, standing in that clearing, telling him he was right. That the world was bad. People were bad.
He ignored the knowledge that he’d broken her.
He ignored the exquisite pain of being back here, staring at the wall where Conall had first projected her image, an inescapable reminder of the first shitty choice he’d made—the decision to give her lies instead of the truth.
He ignored the fact that constantly reviewing his list of transgressions was like poking an endless row of bruises, the literal opposite of ignoring anything.
“Great news,” Luna muttered. “I managed to figure out the final layer of encryption.”
Knox glanced at Luna. She had her dark brown hair pulled back from her face and her eyes narrowed in concentration, and nothing about the tension in her body said great news. “So why don’t you sound happier?”
She blew out a breath. “Because if I try to actually decrypt it, your head will explode.”
“Figuratively or literally?”
“Do you really need me to answer that?”
“No.” Knox rubbed at the back of his neck, his fingers lingering over the scar from his tracker. “So what does—”
Before he could finish the question, the warehouse door crashed open. Knox was on his feet with his gun in hand before the door finished rebounding off the wall. Conall practically bounced in, his eyes alight with a giddy, familiar amusement. It hadn’t taken much to set Conall’s world right—a swift surgery to remove Boyd’s hack job and an afternoon with Luna fine-tuning his implant, and Conall was walking on air, joyously embracing his second chance at life.
Seeing it dulled the sharp pain in Knox’s chest to a softer ache. “What’s got you grinning today?”
“Rafe.”
Conall ducked out of the way as Rafe stormed in, looking decidedly less amused. He glared at Conall, stomped to the table with a decided limp, and stripped off his shirt. “We tried to stop in at Clementine’s to get a drink.” Rafe twisted to poke at his side. “And now I have buckshot in my ass.”
Unable to contain himself anymore, Conall collapsed into a chair, laughing.
“Very funny,” Rafe growled, jerking at his belt. He shoved down the edge of his slightly shredded pants and glared at his hip. “You’re not the one she tried to murder.”
“Eh, she wasn’t trying to murder you.” Gray retrieved the medical bag from its spot in the corner and hefted it onto the table. “Miss Clementine doesn’t strike me as a lady who misses too many shots. If she’d wanted to hit you square, she’d have hit you.”
“She got enough of me,” he grumbled.
Luna eyed Rafe dubiously. “What did you do to her?”
“Like I said, I tried to order a drink.” Rafe winced as Gray probed at one of his wounds. “I’m guessing word has gotten around.”
“Yeah.” Conall’s mirth mellowed a little. “I don’t think we’re going to be very popular in this neighborhood. Not until tempers cool.”
No, they likely wouldn’t be. Knox doubted that Nina had told anyone the whole truth—they’d have been greeted with worse than buckshot in that case—but she didn’t need to share the details to be damning. The people she’d helped so much would close ranks around her.
In a perverse way, he was glad. Nina deserved that loyalty.
Knox exhaled roughly and glanced at Luna. “What’s the prognosis on the implant? Is there a way around the encryption?”
“Sure. All we have to do is go to TechCorps headquarters, find a lab with Level One security, and steal an administrative log-in.” She shrugged. “Piece of cake. Except for the part where we all die about thirty seconds in.”
“They’re geo-blocked. Of fucking course they are.” Conall drove both hands into his hair and curled them into fists, like he was trying to pull out a solution along with his hair. “No one can get into the L1 labs. You basically have to be a VP just to empty the trash. And the network is a completely closed intranet. Tobias Richter manages all access personally.”
Even if Knox could have bribed his way through enough support staff to get them inside, even if he could have somehow traversed the maze of surveillance that intensified the deeper you went into the heart of the TechCorps research division, no one subverted or betrayed the vice president of security. The only thing more legendary than Richter’s loyalty was the