Page 64 of Crosscurrent

Beside him, Cara shoved her hands deeper into her jacket pockets against the cold. He still hadn’t fully figured out what he wanted to say. He’d started four different conversations in the stairwell and abandoned every one of them before it reached language.

This was not, generally, how he operated.

“I don’t want David and Sophie there,” he admitted finally. “David’s brilliant, but not at this. You know what happened last time. If Neptune grabs him again…”

Cara reached over and squeezed his hand once, brief and grounding. “They won’t.”

“You can’t know that.”

“No.” She looked out toward the harbor lights. “But your brother’s tougher than you give him credit for.”

“I know he is.” Gabe exhaled sharply. “I know. He’s an asset. Sophie’s an asset. I’m not saying otherwise.”

“But?”

He scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “I spent years keeping him away from this part of my life. That was the deal. He dug for facts and stayed out of the dangerous stuff. Now he dives right into the deep end, headfirst.”

The words landed heavier than he intended.

Fog drifted slowly across the mouth of the alley while they stood there. Gabe looked toward the marina lights and tried not to think too carefully about all the ways Norway could go wrong.

Neptune already knew about Owen. And Skye.

Almost certainly him. Maybe Cara.

And somewhere inside all of that sat the possibility that Neptune expected them to chase this lead all along. He hated that possibility most of all.

Because it meant they weren’t advancing the board. They were already on it.

“You run a group like somebody who grew up managing siblings,” he said after a minute, partly because he needed the subject to move somewhere less dangerous. “Oldest child energy. Definitely.”

Cara’s face changed instantly. Most people wouldn’t have noticed it. But something unguarded crossed her expression before she sealed it back up again. She looked away, toward the harbor.

“I’m an only child,” she said quietly.

But there was far more. Gabe waited.

“I had a family once,” she continued after a moment. “Not a real one. A crew. People who worked together long enough to start believing that meant something permanent.” Her mouth curved faintly without humor. “Shared mythology. Shared rules. Shared disasters.”

“Where are they now?”

Cara tucked dark hair behind her ear and avoided his eyes. “No idea. I went straight. They didn’t.”

Gabe considered everything he knew about her then, which somehow still managed to feel both substantial and painfully incomplete.

The woman who nurtured half the town. The woman whose past was so radioactive she was still running from it.

The woman he wanted to make his far more than he should. Instead of voicing his thoughts, he knew he had to keep things light. Asking her for revelations, for emotions she was too afraid to share would only send her running.

“Yet another piece of the puzzle that is Cara Sweet,” he said lightly. “Honestly, this explains so many things.”

She smacked his arm, the kind of hit that was really a laugh trying to figure out what shape it wanted to take, quiet and warm and carrying more relief than the joke itself deserved.

He laughed first. To his infinite relief, she laughed, too. He savored the tiny glow of joy, until it faded into the alley around them.

He turned to face her now, stepping close enough he could smell the light vanilla scent that always lingered around her. .

She didn’t retreat, just stared up at him, her body going quiet. Not stiff, as if ready to run. No measuring of risk versus disclosure. Just Cara standing in fog-softened harbor light looking at him like she’d stopped bracing for impact for one minute.