Page 22 of Code Name: Scorpio

Cassandra’s eyes were crossing.

She’d been staring at the same screen for four hours, finessing the last layer of Ryder’s employment history, and the details were starting to blur into each other. The persona was almost finished. One more client reference to build out, a phone routing to complete, and the digital identity of a man who didn’t exist would be solid enough to fool people who trafficked children for a living.

Ryder’s meeting with the Diehl brothers was in two days. That was how long they had to finalize everything before he went undercover.

Two days was like nothing—it would fly by with everything that still needed to be done. She still needed to walk him through the final system procedures tomorrow, and it had been tough going over the past two days since she started coaching him on the steps.

Learning what he’d have to do at the computer wasn’t easy for Ryder, so she needed to be at her best when she explained it. Sleep would have to wait. She could sleep once he was under. Right now, she needed to work.

That meant she needed caffeine, which meant she had to leave this lab.

“Real coffee exists. Go get some.” She couldn’t drink another cup of the sludge she’d been making in the lab. She wanted something real, and the twenty-four-hour café had some of the best.

Whatever principles Zodiac Tactical lived by, they got the most important one right: good coffee made good agents.

She saved everything, locked the screens out of habit, grabbed her mug, and headed out.

The compound was quiet at two a.m. Low ground lights lined the paths, and the air was warm and still. This was her favorite version of this place. Nobody to run into, nobody for her brain to latch on to and disassemble against her will. Just her and the dark and the walk.

Not that she’d been around a bunch of people even during the day. It had mostly just been her and Ryder together in the lab working through the computer procedures he’d need once he was inside.

What he’d said that first brutal session the day before yesterday had hurt. He’d had every right to say it, but it had still landed somewhere soft and stayed there. She could feel it when the sessions started each day, a brace in her chest, waiting for him to look at her with that same frustrated disappointment. Accusing her of not caring.

But he hadn’t. Yesterday had been different, almost easy. He’d been patient when she corrected him, asked questions instead of snapping, even made a dry comment about his own incompetence that had caught her off guard enough to almost smile. Three hours of working through procedures and she’d barely noticed the time passing. The version of Ryder who’d accused her of not caring felt further away every session.

And something else had changed that she hadn’t expected. She’d been able to look at him. Actually look at him, without her brain launching into its involuntary cataloguing of every detail it could find.

Evidently, her brain was settling in with Ryder the way it had with Fallon. Familiar. Safe. Quiet in her head. Maybe it was because she’d known him before and had talked to him over screens. She didn’t care. She would take it. It was refreshing to be around someone for hours and not leave feeling wrung out and fighting a headache.

She wasn’t even going to allow herself to dwell on the fact that without worrying about the pattern spiral, all her brain could focus on was Ryder himself. The strong chin and carved jaw. Eyes streaked with gold and green. All long legs and broad shoulders and…

She was smiling as she pushed open the café door. But then she stopped and the smile faded.

Ryder was sitting at a table near the back wall.

Seriously? Come on. Two in the morning, and the one person she was trying not to think about was sitting over by the window in the one place that had amazing coffee.

She was stepping backward to make her silent escape when she caught sight of his table.

Salt shaker on the left. Pepper shaker beside it. Sugar caddy in the center. Three sweetener packets fanned out in a row behind the napkin dispenser, two forks laid parallel on the right, and a knife set apart near the edge. His back was to her, and he was talking to the table in a low mutter, his fingers moving from one item to the next.

He was mapping the computer procedures onto physical objects.

The whole sequence, not just the first seven steps. Salt was step one. Pepper was step two. He touched each item as he worked through it, muttering command strings under his breath, because the characters on a screen wouldn’t stay in his head so he’d built himself a system that would.

She respected it in a way he would never understand.

She watched from just inside the door. His shoulders were tight, and he was hunched forward over the table with the focus of someone who’d been at this for a while. His coffee cup was pushed to the side, forgotten. Everything about his posture said this mattered to him in a way that went past professional obligation.

He moved through the first seven steps clean and confident. Those were solid now. But when he hit the material from yesterday’s session, his fingers hesitated over the sugar caddy. He moved it, muttered something, moved a sweetener packet. Then a fork.

Wrong. The fork should come after the second sweetener packet.

She’d moved farther into the café without deciding to. Close enough now to hear the commands he was muttering, close enough to see exactly where the sequence broke down.

He backed up and tried again. Same mistake. Same place. Fork before the second sweetener packet.

She could walk away. They had a session later today. She could catch it then.