《HE WAITED 1,095 DAYS TO CLAIM ME》全部章節：第 91 章 - 第 100 章

We got back to the compound a little past noon, and Fen was waiting at the gate before we'd even parked, which was becoming a pattern I didn't like in a different way than the one with the drawer."I pulled the eastern relay's full log history while you were gone," she said, falling into step beside me as we crossed the yard. "Going back six weeks, not just the audit window. I wanted to see if anything showed up before the ping fired that we'd missed the first time through.""And.""Silas flagged an anomaly four days before the node went live. Logged it exactly the way his protocol requires, timestamped, filed in the equipment report the same as everything else." She handed me the printout. "Nobody escalated it. Including him."I stopped walking."He saw this coming and didn't tell me directly.""He wasn't supposed to." Fen said it carefully, the way she said things she'd already turned over in her own head before deciding how much weight to put behind them. "That's the part I keep ci

Getting in to see him had taken two calls and a signature, nothing like the drive north to the custody house had required. Cord wasn't family, wasn't protected, wasn't anyone the state had reason to keep off a visitor list, and the ease of it sat strangely against how much weight I was hoping he'd end up carrying by the time I left. Renard had run his file for me the night before, thin but clean. Eight months processing, a plea that traded testimony for a shorter sentence, nothing since that suggested he'd kept any loyalty worth the state calling him uncooperative about.The visitation room at the county facility smelled like bleach and cheap coffee, nothing like the custody house's stripped quiet, and Cord looked smaller across the table than he had in my memory of the one time I'd seen him before, cuffed and compliant in the yard the night Carver's men finally cornered him eight months ago.He looked up when the guard walked me in, and something like relief crossed his face before h

He found me in the shower an hour later, the water running longer than it needed to, my forehead against the tile while I let the argument replay itself one more time before I made myself stop.I hadn't gone looking for him after the operations table. I'd needed the water more than I'd needed to be near him, needed the specific kind of solitude that came from standing somewhere loud enough to drown out my own thinking, and some part of me had wondered, standing there, whether he'd follow or let the forty-eight hours start with distance between us instead of closeness. I hadn't decided which I wanted more.I heard the door before I heard him undress, and I didn't turn around when he stepped in behind me, didn't need to. His hands found my hips first, not asking, and I let my back settle against his chest, the water running over both of us now, and for a moment neither of us said anything at all."I still think I'm right," he said, against my hair."I know.""I'm not here to relitigate

"Your hand wasn't steady," I said, before he'd fully turned from the counter. "I'm done letting that pass without asking why."Fen had gone to update Carver on the search radius, and for the first time since the tablet landed on the counter it was just the two of us in the kitchen, the gray light outside gone a shade lighter than it had been ten minutes ago, morning arriving whether either of us was ready for it or not. Raze didn't answer right away, and for a moment I thought he might deflect again, the same careful architecture he'd been building since the window, general enough to be true and empty enough to protect whatever he was still protecting. Then something in his face changed, some decision finally landing, and I understood before he said a single word that whatever came next was going to be the thing he'd been holding since the letter."I know Delacroix had outside help," he said. "I've known it since before you came back to the compound."The kitchen went very quiet."You

The compound didn't know how to hold its breath, whatever else was sitting unresolved between me and the man who'd shared this house with me for three months, and I'd spent the day proving that to myself one operational thread at a time, the way I'd been proving most things to myself lately.Maren's morning report came through clean, three more names cleared off Cardinal Freight's shell structure, nothing yet on the fourth. Renard called at noon with nothing new on Croft's movement, quiet on quiet, which had stopped feeling like relief and started feeling like its own kind of pressure. The audit Carver and I had started weeks ago finished its sweep of the west wing without turning up anything else that shouldn't have been sealed, one small mercy in a month that hadn't offered many. I moved through all of it methodically, signing off, redirecting, keeping the machine's separate parts turning the way they were built to turn, and by six o'clock I'd managed almost four full hours without