Chapter 16 Quiet Variables
Sloane’s POV
For a few blissful seconds I did not know where I was.
I opened my eyes to a low wood ceiling instead of concrete and glass, to birdsong instead of horns. The air smelled like pine and something faintly metallic from the lake. No hum of servers, no distant sirens. Just quiet.
Then memory rushed back in. Berlin. The garage. The photo under my pillow. The hacked fire alarm. The safehouse with roses on the bed and my words on the TV. Eli saying, Out here it is just me.
My heart kicked up. I lay there and listened. The cabin creaked once, lazily, like it had not noticed I was terrified. Somewhere downstairs I heard a pan clatter and a muffled curse.
I followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen.
Eli stood barefoot at the stove in flannel pants and a T shirt, spatula in one hand, frowning at eggs that were sturdier than they should have been. The image was so ordinary my brain shorted.
“Morning,” he said without turning. “You are late. Sun came up hours ago.”
“I do not do mornings without meetings,” I said, pulling his sweatshirt tighter around me. I did not remember putting it on last night.
He slid a plate toward me. The eggs were uneven, toast a little too dark. It should have offended the part of me calibrated on Michelin stars and private chefs. Instead it made something in my chest ache.
“A billionaire eating burnt eggs in the woods,” I muttered. “My brand manager would faint.”
“Connectivity detox,” he said. “We start with actual food, not whatever powder you drink in the city.”
That word hooked me. “Connectivity detox,” I repeated. “Is that your cute way of saying you are holding my internet hostage?”
He nodded at the corner where his portable hotspot sat, dark. “You get narrow windows. I am not letting you light this place up like a Christmas tree for whoever is sniffing your traffic.”
“I need connectivity to fight back,” I snapped. “You want me to sit here and whittle while they rewrite my life?”
“You need to not give them an easy lock on our location,” he countered. “We agreed. Scheduled sessions, supervised, then devices sleep. You can fight back in bursts instead of bleeding signal twenty four seven.”
I hated that he was right. I hated more that my thumbs were itching for a keyboard like an addict reaching for a fix.
“Fine,” I said. “But the first window starts now.”
He flipped the hotspot on with a thumb, timer already set. “You have one hour.”
Mercer’s secure tunnel felt like slipping into a too tight suit. Familiar and constricting all at once. My inbox exploded. PR drafts about my temporary withdrawal, full of phrases like focusing on safety and cooperating with authorities. Investor messages that read like threats wrapped in concern. Board threads where my name showed up a lot more than my actual input.
Harper’s face popped up in a video request. I accepted.
“You look like you slept for the first time in a week and hate yourself for it,” she said without greeting.
“Hello to you too,” I replied.
She filled me in on Richard Kline and a couple of others quietly floating ideas about interim leadership for continuity. Smiling phrases for a knife aimed at my chair.
“They are testing the water,” she said. “You being physically gone makes them brave.”
“I am not gone,” I snapped. “I am working.”
“You are in a cabin with your very intense security upgrade,” she said, eyes flicking sideways. “Speaking of, how is the hot bodyguard slash walking liability?”
“He is being extremely professional,” I said too fast.
Harper’s eyebrow arched. “Of course he is.” She smirked but let it go. “Just remember, they will use anything they can frame as instability. You give them a whiff of scandal again, they will pounce.”
After the window closed and Eli shut the hotspot down, the silence came back like a thick blanket.
He took me on a perimeter walk.
“We treat this like any other site,” he said, leading me around the cabin. “Sightlines. Choke points. Where someone could approach without being seen.”
He pointed out trees that broke our view, angles of the hill behind us, the way sound carried across the water. I found myself translating it all into network diagrams in my head. Nodes, edges, vectors.
“Perimeter is an analog firewall,” I said. “Cabin is the core. Our eyes are the IDS.”
He glanced at me, a real smile tugging at his mouth. “Exactly,” he said.
We ended up on the dock, legs dangling over still water. The lake held the sky like a mirror.
“I never had vacations,” I heard myself say. “Growing up. Work trips were the treat. New hotel, new conference, same laptop. Quiet meant something was wrong.”
“Before I deployed, I used to come here with my godfather,” he said. “We would fish and pretend beer qualified as hydration. After I got back, the silence was too loud. Every creak sounded like something I was not seeing.”
We sat there, side by side, sharing pieces of ourselves that did not fit into incident reports. It felt more naked than Berlin, in some ways. No sex to hide inside, no adrenaline to excuse it. Just words and the soft slap of water against the posts.
By evening, clouds rolled in fast. Thunder rumbled. The lights flickered once, twice, then cut out completely.
For a heartbeat the cabin went utterly dark. No glow from screens, no city spill. Just black. My breath shot up into my throat. My brain threw up images of dead cameras above my bed, red letters on photos, alarms triggered from nowhere.
“Hey,” Eli said somewhere to my left. I felt his hand find mine, warm and solid. “Generator will kick in. Count with me. One.”
I forced air in. “Two.”
“Three.”
On four the lights came back, a little weaker, the generator’s hum filling the walls. I realized I had crushed his fingers. I did not let go right away.
Later, in the small bedroom, I lay staring at the wood ceiling again. This time the quiet did not feel like a gift.
Something scratched across the roof, a muffled slide. Then another.
Branches, I told myself. Squirrels. Normal woods noise.
My chest tightened anyway. My trauma whispered intruder.
My hand hovered over the edge of the bed, half an inch from the floor, stupidly tempted to reach for the man in the other room instead of my phone.