implants on. I responded remarkably well, better than they expected, I guess. For the first few years, they were just excited to see what I could do. But it became clear pretty fast when I started going on missions under my first captain.”
Nina fell silent. She hadn’t meant to interrogate him, but it felt like everything she’d learned about him on their trip north had been distorted, skewed as much by half-truths as outright lies.
On some level, this was more than important. It was vital that she figure out who the hell he really was.
But it couldn’t happen in one conversation over coffee. Hell, it might not happen at all, and she had to reconcile herself to that possibility. “Sorry. You didn’t come out here to play Twenty Questions.”
“That was only four.” Knox reached for his coffee and took a sip before offering her a tired smile over the rim of his mug. “I’ll give you one more for free.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. It was such a tiny thing, but it hit her with the force of a sucker punch, stealing her breath. It made her want and it made her hurt, and she didn’t know which emotion would win out until an errant tear slipped down her cheek.
Knox made a pained noise. “Nina.”
Fuck. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just—” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes until the burning subsided. “This is … a lot.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
Because she had to. Because her sister, at the very least, owed him and his team. Because Nina could, and they needed her help, and somehow, somehow—
She’d lost the ability to imagine the world without him in it.
But she gave him a shaky smile and the blithe, easy answer. “It’s who I am, remember? The lady who doesn’t understand how the world works.”
“That’s right.” Knox sipped his coffee again. “You know, I’ve been thinking—”
Nina’s vision wavered, and she rose so abruptly that her chair scraped over the pitted concrete floor of the patio. “I have to check on the replication vats,” she blurted. “It’s a tricky process. If something goes wrong…”
“I understand. If you need any help—”
“I can handle it.” She stood there for one more miserable moment, then tossed her rapidly cooling coffee into the scrub beside the side door and fled.
She stumbled blindly through the warehouse, up the stairs. She didn’t stop until she was alone, clutching her chest in the dark solitude of a dim hallway.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
One, two, three.
She’d assumed that seeing him again would be the hard part. That if she could only get past that initial meeting, she could handle the rest. She could save him and then send him off with polite courtesy to live the rest of his life. But every minute that ticked over into hours drove home a truth she’d hoped to escape.
When Garrett Knox finally walked out of her life, he was going to take her heart with him.
* * *
Twenty-four hours of forced proximity wasn’t making Ava less unsettling.
At least, it wasn’t for Knox and his team. Incredibly, Dani and Maya seemed to be getting used to her. Knox couldn’t tell if it was her resemblance to Nina, or if they both just respected violent, potentially deadly women, but they had unbent enough to welcome Ava into the poker game Rafe started.
Civility took a marked downturn immediately.
“She’s cheating,” Conall protested as Ava swept the makeshift chits toward her and started organizing her pile. “She must be using superpowers.”
“It’s not cheating if everyone has them,” Maya shot back. “You don’t see them over here, whining that our brains are so fast we can calculate the odds in our heads.”
“Which really is cheating, since the rest of us can’t do it,” Rafe grumbled. “You’re just pissed off that you’re losing for once.”
“Obviously,” Conall said loftily. “Why am I losing? That’s what I want to know.”
“Because you’re riddled with tells.” Ava didn’t look up from her stacks of chits. “You’re so used to thinking faster than everyone else at the table, you haven’t bothered to cultivate a disciplined game face.”
Dani raised both eyebrows as she threw her hand into the discard pile. “She’s not lying.”
“Excuse me, I am extremely disciplined.” Conall swept the cards toward himself and began shuffling. “And don’t think I’m not watching you and your ridiculous reflexes.”
Maya snorted. “You can’t watch Dani. That’s the point. If she wants to look at your hand or switch cards around, you won’t