Chapter 12 Shared Air
Sloane’s POV
The napkin was such a stupid little thing for how much it unnerved me. Cheap gas station paper, creased and smudged, edges already curling. It sat in Eli’s gloved hand like a found land mine.
He slid it into a clear bag, sealing the tiny rows of ones and zeros away from the air between us.
“Evidence,” he said.
It did not stop my brain from replaying the feel of it under my fingers. The fact that it had been on my seat, exactly where my body would have been, waiting. Someone close enough to slip it in, confident enough to walk away.
We drove. Manhattan bled out behind us, lights giving way to stretches of black and the occasional highway sign. The world outside the SUV narrowed to the soft hum of the engine and the rhythmic sweep of the wipers. Inside, Milo and Diaz were distant voices on the radio. Eli was a solid presence in the driver’s seat, eyes on mirrors, jaw clenched.
I could not stop glancing at the bagged napkin on the console.
You can not hide her.
Her. Me. Not Ms Mercer. Not the company. The woman in the Berlin photo. The woman under the blanket on his couch.
Adrenaline held me upright for a while. Then the crash hit. My body remembered it had been awake for too many hours, that I had not really slept even on the couch. My head tipped against the leather, eyelids suddenly heavy.
“Sleep,” Eli said quietly.
“I do not sleep in cars,” I muttered.
“Tonight you do.”
I told myself I was just closing my eyes for a second. The next thing I knew, his hand was on my shoulder, warm and careful, and the engine was off.
“We are here,” he said.
The roadside inn looked like every movie I had ever half watched on a plane. Two stories, faded paint, doors opening directly onto a balcony that wrapped around. Sodium lights buzzed, turning the parking lot into a yellow tinted stage.
Inside, the front desk smelled like burnt coffee and air freshener. The clerk’s eyes went wide when he clocked Eli’s size, my face, the fact that we did not look like the usual clientele.
“We have a reservation,” Eli said, voice easy but carrying. He leaned in slightly to check the registry, scanning the lobby like it offended him. “Top floor, interior facing if you have it. Single access point.”
The clerk mumbled something about options. Eli dismissed every separate room layout until he hit on a suite with a sitting room and a bedroom.
“That one,” he said.
“I am not fragile,” I hissed when we stepped into the small living area and I saw there was only one actual bed and a thin looking couch.
“I sleep between you and any door,” he answered. “That is literally the job description.”
“I will take the couch.”
“You will take the bedroom with a lock and a bathroom,” he said. “I will take the couch in front of the only entrance. Anything that wants to get to you has to go through me first.”
The line was infuriatingly logical. It also did nothing to quiet the awareness buzzing under my skin at the thought of him lying so close, even with a wall between us.
“Fine,” I said, throwing my bag on the bed with more force than necessary.
The shower in the tiny bathroom was barely big enough to turn around in, but hot water still felt like a minor miracle. I stayed under it too long, letting it beat at the tension in my shoulders. When I stepped out, steam curling around me, my hair was damp and I had traded my armor for an oversized T shirt and soft shorts.
I opened the door while toweling my hair and walked straight into bare skin.
Eli stood in the short hallway to the sink with his shirt off, one hand reaching past me for his toothbrush. Up close, his body was a wall of heat, all scars and solid lines and muscles I remembered under my palms.
We both froze.
His gaze flickered over me, then jerked up to my face, as if he was manually dragging it there. My fingers tightened on the towel. My pulse went wild.
“Sorry,” he said, voice lower than usual.
“Hallways go both ways,” I managed, stepping sideways until my back hit the cool wall. We slid past each other in a clumsy dance that was far too intimate for a two second collision.
I shut my door faster than necessary, leaned against it, heart thudding. This was ridiculous. I was not a teenager blushing because a boy took his shirt off. I had literally had sex with this man.
And yet. Berlin had been a dream, a sealed file. This was different. This was after his confession, after my pillow photo, after someone had written I can still get to you over our one mistake.
Sleep refused to come. I tossed and turned until the sheets were a mess, the cheap motel air conditioner rattling like it might die. Finally, sometime around two in the morning, I heard him muttering through the thin wall.
“Do not move,” he was whispering. “Do not move.”
His voice was rough in a way that did not sound like now. More like desert air and smoke.
I cracked the door. The living room was lit only by a single lamp over the table. Eli was on the couch, tangled in the cheap blanket, brow furrowed, breath too quick.
“Eli.” I crossed the space and touched his shoulder. “Hey.”
He jerked awake, eyes going wild for a second before they focused on me.
“Sorry,” he said immediately, sitting up, hand going through his hair. “Did not mean to wake you.”
“Too late,” I said. “I could not sleep anyway. Want coffee or water?”
Five minutes later we were at the small round table, two chipped mugs between us, instant coffee tasting like cardboard. The quiet hummed.
“I have almost no one to call in a crisis,” I heard myself say. “Harper. My father, if I have lost my mind. That is it.”
He watched me over the rim of his mug. “That is not nothing. Most people do not have even that.”
“Most people do not have half the world watching them, either.”
He told me about his parents in the Midwest. About a house with a porch and a mother who called every time the news showed an explosion. About why he rarely went back.
For a moment, sitting in that ugly motel with bad coffee, we almost felt like two normal people instead of two nodes in someone’s sick network.
“Berlin is not on the table,” I said abruptly when the air shifted in that direction.
“Maybe not,” he said quietly. “But the consequences are.”
I stood then, retreating before I said something I could not take back. “Good night, Eli.”
Back in the bedroom, I eventually fell into a shallow sleep. Pre dawn gray seeped in around the curtains when my secure phone buzzed on the nightstand.
It should not have. It was in airplane mode. Inside a Faraday pouch.
My stomach dropped. I unzipped the case. The screen glowed with a notification.
Did you sleep well? I did.
Attached was a grainy image of the motel hallway outside our suite door, angle low, timestamped an hour ago.
Before I could even react, the message vanished. Screen back to my lock screen like nothing had happened.
I sat there in the half light, phone cold in my hand, realizing every protocol I trusted had just been treated like tissue paper.
There was nowhere they could not reach.