Chapter 5 · Zero Isn't a Number Anymore

"Zero," Dean said, teeth already on the gland, and the word didn't sound like a countdown anymore. It sounded like a dare.

I didn't answer him with words. I got my knee up into his hip and drove, and two hundred pounds of Dean Rourke tipped sideways for half a second — that's all the room this bunker ever gives anybody, half a second — and I took every bit of it.

I slammed him into the dead radio rack, bone-on-bone, his shoulder cracking a server housing clean off its bolts, and for one clean beat I had the gravity. His pupils blew wide. Not fear. Something a lot worse than fear.

The bunker's steel walls sweated with us, dead machines ticking as they cooled, and every breath either of us took came back scorched with the other man's scent — cedar and gunmetal and something feral neither of us used to have a name for.

"There he is," Dean said, breath scorching my jaw. "There's my dispatcher."

"Not yours."

"Say that again with your hand fisted in my collar."