Chapter 24 · Whoever Holds the Switch

"Don't." Dean's hand closed over mine before I even touched the switch.

His thumb pressed flat against my wrist, right over the pulse, like he could read my next move off my heartbeat before I made it. Maybe he could. He'd had his whole forearm bar-locked across my chest ten minutes ago, bone against bone, both of us refusing to be the one who folded first.

My shoulder still ached where that gravity-pin had bitten into the door. He'd been reading me wrong for two weeks and right for the last two minutes, and I still didn't know which version of him I was standing this close to.

"Sixty-two." Voss's voice again, chewed up by the bunker speaker, flat as a dial tone. "Sixty-one."

The kit sat behind us on the floor where it fell, lid cracked, my name faceup on the strip where anybody with eyes could read it. ELLIS WARD. OMEGA REG 04471. Dean hadn't looked at it again since the first time. He didn't need to. He already had the smell.

"I'm not going to his office," I said. "That's not a negotiation, that's a leash."

"So don't walk it." Dean's grip didn't loosen. "You touch that panel, you shut the whole board dark for six seconds doing it.