Chapter 2

"Get your hand off my jaw." Dean doesn't move it. His thumb sits right under my ear, pressing where the gland would be if I were what my badge says I am. The airlock door behind him hisses one more time and seats itself with a thunk that means it's not opening for six hours. Faraday steel, riot protocol, override dead. Just us and the hum of the board room on the other side of that wall. "Say it again," he says. "Beta." "Beta." I don't blink. "Same as it says on every form you've ever pulled on me, Captain." "Forms lie." His nose is an inch off my throat now, and I hate that I can feel him breathe. Cedar and gun oil and something underneath that's just him, not aftershave, not soap. "Noses don't." I shove at his chest with both hands. He doesn't even rock back. Six-two of muscle and a badge that's put men away for less than what I'm hiding, and he's got me boxed into eighteen inches of steel with dead suppressant patches peeling off both our necks because the seal killed them the second it engaged. "You want to talk chemistry," I say, "or you want me back on that board? Because Charlie-Twelve's got six units in a crowd that's throwing bottles and nobody's running their channel but me." That gets him to lean back. Half an inch. Enough that I can breathe air that isn't him. "You still remember your call signs with your patch dead?" he asks. Testing. "I remember them dead, drunk, or bleeding. Try me." "Then run it." He steps aside, finally, waving a hand at the panel bolted to the airlock wall — a slave board, half the real console, enough to patch a channel through if you know which switches lie. "Prove it." I slide past him — close, closer than I need to, because backing down first means he wins whatever this is — and drop into the chair. My fingers find the switches without looking. Old muscle, ten years of graveyard shift. I key Charlie-Twelve, and my voice comes out steady even though my whole chest is doing something ugly. "Charlie-Twelve, county. Say status." Static. Then a voice, ragged, half-shouting over glass breaking somewhere behind him. I patch him to backup before he finishes his second sentence. It's clean. It's fast. It's the one thing in this building I'm actually good at. And it costs me. Every channel I open right now feels like someone's turning a dial behind my eardrums. A whine starts low and climbs. I keep my face flat because Dean Rourke is three feet away watching me like a lie detector with a badge. "You're bleeding," he says. I touch my ear. My fingers come back red. Just a little. Just enough. "Copy that," I say into the mic instead of answering him, and cut the channel before my hands shake bad enough to show. Dean crosses the airlock in two steps and grabs my wrist before I can pull it back. Not gentle. His thumb finds my pulse and presses like he's checking a suspect, not a man who almost passed out running comms. "Betas don't bleed from the ears running a radio," he says. "Betas don't smell like a struck match when a Faraday seal kills their patch. What are you, Ward?" "None of your business." "Everything in this bunker is my business for the next six hours." "Then arrest me for having good hearing." His grip tightens. Not painful. Just absolute, like he's already decided I'm not going anywhere and my opinion on that is a formality. I twist my wrist the way they taught us in the one self-defense class the department actually funded, get my hip into his, and for one glorious second I've got him off balance, his back half-turned to the wall, my hand flat on his sternum like I could actually hold a man his size there. "Give me the master key," I say. "You're not the only one who can run an override." He laughs — short, no humor in it — and that's the only warning I get before he reverses it. My back hits the wall hard enough to knock the air out of me. He's got my wrist pinned above my head against the steel, his other hand braced flat beside my skull, his whole body a wall in front of a wall, one thigh wedged between mine because I tried to get a knee up and he read it before I finished the thought. "I could've had that key in a drawer at HQ," he says, voice low, right against my ear now, close enough that his breath moves the hair at my temple. "Instead I've got you." "Lucky you." "You're shaking." "I'm pissed." "You're shaking," he says again, softer, like it's a fact he's filing away instead of a taunt, and doesn't let go of my hand even though I've stopped fighting it. His thumb moves once over my knuckles. Just once. Like he doesn't know he's doing it. "I'm not going to beg you for a key, Rourke." "I didn't ask you to." His face is four inches from mine. Close enough I can see he hasn't slept, close enough to smell the burn under the cedar that means his own patch is dying too, close enough that if either of us leaned the wrong way this would stop being an interrogation and turn into something neither of us has a badge number for. My pulse is going so hard I know he can feel it under his thumb. Then the board screams. Three lines light up at once on the slave panel — red, red, red, the kind of triple-tone that means dispatch is about to drown. Dean's head snaps toward it. His grip on my wrist loosens half a second before he lets go entirely, and something in his face closes back up, captain again, not whatever he was a breath ago. "Go," he says. I'm already moving, dropping into the chair, hands flying across switches that are burning my ears just to touch. Three units screaming over each other. No time to be careful with the channel I open. Dean's hand closes over mine on the console — not stopping me, just there, warm and steady while my whole hand trembles — and when he pulls it back, there's something small and cold pressed into my palm. The master key. "Run every one of those calls," he says. "Keep the board." I close my fingers around the key, heart still slamming, ear still bleeding a thin red line down my jaw. "And if I run for that door the second the seal breaks?" He leans down, close again, close enough that his mouth almost brushes my ear when he says it. "Run," he says, "and I air your name to every precinct in this city before you make it to the stairwell."