The Cyber Twins novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Study
At 2 a.m. Wynne sees her own words on Nico's screen; tea burns his hand, he tells her she is the one thing he never has to explain himself to, and they nearly give in on his desk until Gia knocks: a manifest was rewritten at the docks and Ottavio wants Wynne there too.
Jillian left my studio at nine with her croissant bag and her warm smile.
I locked the door behind her and stood there with my hand on the bolt.
Three days.
I had a plan, and I hated it.
Before I told Nico anything, I needed to see what he knew.
At two the next morning I made him tea and carried it down the hall to his study.
His door was open an inch.
He sat with his back to me, shoulders bent, his sleeves pushed up past his elbows.
On his screen was the black window I knew better than my own hands.
My words were in it.
*Go to sleep, Nico.*
He had typed under it: *Never. Who are you?*
I stood in the doorway with the cup shaking on its saucer.
"Nico."
He snapped the laptop shut so fast the lid cracked.
"Baby." He turned around and smiled, and it cost him something. "You should be asleep."
"You've been up three nights running. I brought tea."
"You're sweet."
He took it from me and the saucer slid.
Hot tea ran over the back of his hand and down his wrist.
He didn't flinch.
I grabbed his arm and pulled his hand toward me and turned it over.
The skin was bright red from the knuckles to the wrist.
"You idiot, you're burned."
"It's nothing."
I put his hand to my mouth and blew on it, slowly.
His breath stopped.
I looked up.
He was watching my mouth, and he had forgotten the burn.
"Wynne," he said.
"What?"
He set the tea down on the desk without looking where it went.
"You're the one thing in my life I never have to explain myself to," he said. "Everything else I fight. You, I just come home to."
It was the kindest thing he had ever said to me.
It was also the worst.
I opened my mouth to tell him he had it wrong.
He kissed me before I could.
He kissed me hard, with his good hand tangled in my hair and his burned one flat against the desk, holding himself up.
I kissed him back.
I could not help it. I had wanted this man every night for fourteen months.
He lifted me onto the desk, and papers slid off the edge and landed on the floor.
His mouth went down my throat.
"I'm going to ruin this desk," he said against my skin.
"Good."
His hand slid under my sweater and spread across my ribs, rough and hot, and I made a sound I hadn't planned to make.
He stopped breathing again.
"Make that sound again," he said.
"Make me."
I pulled his belt, and the buckle clinked.
He laughed against my collarbone, low and wrecked.
"You never talk like this."
"You never ask me anything," I said.
He lifted his head.
I couldn't tell if he had heard it.
His pupils were huge, and his eyes went somewhere very far away for a second.
I thought, now. Tell him now.
Somebody knocked on the open door.
"Nico."
Gia stood in the doorway in a silk robe, with her curls pinned up and her phone in her hand.
She looked at me on the desk, and at my sweater, and at her brother's belt.
"Wow," she said. "Okay."
Nico stepped in front of me so fast he knocked the tea over.
"Gia, what the hell."
"The door was open. Next time, lock the door like an adult." She held up her phone anyway. "Papà's calling. He's been calling you for ten minutes. You've got it on silent again."
"What does he want?"
"The docks." Gia's face stopped joking. "Somebody rewrote a shipping manifest at the Elizabeth terminal two hours ago. Three containers that were supposed to go to Newark are sitting in a lot in Camden."
Nico was already tucking in his shirt.
"Whose containers?"
"Papà's. The ones he promised to the Chicago people."
He looked at me.
For a second I thought he would say something.
"Go to bed, baby," he said. "I'll be back before breakfast."
He kissed my forehead and walked out, grabbing his jacket off the chair on the way.
I slid down off the desk and stood there with my sweater wrong and my face on fire.
Gia hadn't moved.
She looked at the cracked laptop on the desk, then at me.
"You know," she said slowly, "my brother has been typing to somebody on that thing for six months."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I didn't answer.
She smoothed her robe and walked over to my side of the desk, close enough that I could smell her night cream.
"Get dressed," she said. "I'm coming with you. Papà asked for you too."
"For me?"
"He wants you at the docks. He says a woman who can sit through forty guests without a single word is a woman he wants nearby."
She said it lightly.
She was not joking.
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