Page 83 of Hollow Code
"I’m not leaving you."
"Zadie—"
"Don't." She held up one finger. "If you're about to tell me I should go get some rest, or that you're fine, or that I'm being dramatic?—"
"I was going to tell you that I love you."
Her finger remained in the air. Her lips parted. Her eyes narrowed for a moment and then grew wide.
"I’ve said it in my head a hundred times," he continued. "At the hub. In the woods. When Isaac held a gun on you. When I was on the ground and you were pressing your hands into my side." His voice scraped his throat. "I kept thinking—if I die in these woods, she's never going to know. And that was worse than the knife. That was worse than anything."
She reached for his hand and threaded her fingers through his. "When you told me to walk through that code, when you stood over me while the ceiling came down, when you fought that soldier with your bare hands so I could finish, I knew right then. Hell, I knew long before that.
"Knew what?"
"That I loved you." She palmed his cheek. "Not the legend. Not MacGyver. Not Flatline. You. The man who rebuilds broken clocks, can't cook, and left me standing in a hallway because he was too scared to knock on my door."
"I did come back."
"You did." Her thumb moved over his lower lip. "And you're going to keep coming back. No matter what happens next. Because that's who you are. You don't leave. You just take a really long time to walk through the door."
He laughed, and the pain was immediate and enormous and completely worth it. "God, it hurts to laugh."
"Don't be funny."
"I'm not trying to be funny. I'm lying in a hospital bed with a hole in my side telling the woman I love that I'm not going anywhere. That's not comedy. That's a commitment."
"With us, it’s a little of both." She smiled.
He tugged her hand. She leaned forward, one hand bracing on the mattress beside his shoulder. Her lips pressed against his in a tender kiss.
Pulling back, she stared into his eyes.
"I'm not leaving this bunker," he said. "Not until this is over. These people are my family. You’re my future. Whatever comes next—Finch, the next phase, all of it — I'm here. Not a foot out the door."
She kissed his forehead. "You think we can both fit in this bed without moving your pain level to a nine?"
"Won’t know until we try." He inched closer to the side rail, and she curled in next to him, head resting on his shoulder, knee tucked up between his legs."
"Be honest? Do I need to go back to the chair?"
"No," he said. "That would be hell." He lay in the dark and listened to the sound of the woman he loved falling asleep in his arms.
He closed his eyes. The pain was a seven. Maybe an eight. But he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Chapter Twenty
Zadie scrolled through another directory and hit a dead end. "That's the fourth partition that's been wiped clean."
It had been five days since Gideon was stabbed, and Darwin had finally cleared him for work. Not that Gideon had been doing nothing. Zadie had been secretly—or perhaps not so secretly—having him help her with ORACLE. The backdoor worked, but the AI was still real and still a bitch.
"Try the adjacent branch." Gideon tapped his screen from his desk. "One level up. There should be a transit log attached to it."
She backed out and navigated up. The comms room was quiet except for the faint hum of the servers and the click of two keyboards. Everyone else was in the kitchen eating brownies and drinking wine. Or beer.
This was Zadie’s and Gideon’s first night inside ORACLE through the backdoor, and so far, the core had given them exactly nothing useful. Public data. Org charts. Sanitized project summaries that read like brochures.
Finch kept a clean lobby.
