Chapter 21 · Whoever Holds the Switch

"Ellis." Dean's hand closes over my wrist before I can hit the key, and the metal edge of the console bites into my hip. "Don't touch that."

"You just killed the auto-lock. Somebody's got to hold it manual, or this door cycles open on its own in four minutes and lets every reporter on Fifth Street watch us climb out of a Faraday cage together." I twist my wrist under his grip, feel the tendons grind, don't pull away. "That somebody's me."

"That somebody's whoever I say it is. I'm still commissioner in this room."

"You're still a guy who can't smell his own blood pressure right now." I get two fingers on the manual toggle before he pins my hand flat against the panel, his palm hot enough I feel it through the plastic. Bone against bone, his knuckles grinding mine into the switch housing. Neither of us lets go.

The air in the bunker's gone thick, wrong-thick, the kind of heat that comes off a body and not a vent. His breath lands on the side of my throat, ragged, and for one second I think he's going to do something we can't walk back from an hour ago already.

"You reek like a fever," he says, low, like it costs him to say it.