Page 113 of Hidden

You can change my name now too.

I look at it for a long moment, smiling. I’m never going to be able to keep things from him. I won’t be able to surprise him. Ever.

Twenty-Five

Miles

I’m a good hacker, I’m good at opening things which shouldn’t be opened, but even I’m starting to lose patience with this shit.

The decryption is at eighty-nine percent. I've been watching the number tick upward for the last hour. I’m running the cross-reference work in parallel, the five city contacts mapped against the network database, the upper tier communication structure which is starting to resolve into something I can actually read. It's close. Everything is close but still taking forever. The next twenty-four hours is either going to give me everything, or I’ve just wasted my time.

Mason comes in without knocking and drops onto the end of the bed. I don’t look over at him as I keep my focus on the screen.

"Grounds tonight?” he asks.

“Can’t,” I reply, and move my attention to the other screen.

“Got better things to do?’ Mason jokes.

“Out with Sadie.” I stop working on my laptop and turn to face him, and he smiles.

"You kissed her." I look at him, how the hell does he know? "Declan saw from the window. I'm not apologizing for Declan having eyes."

I go back to the screen. "Is there a question in there somewhere?"

"Several." He leans back on his hands. "Starting with, what's the plan, Miles?"

"Dinner.” I’m not sure what else he wants me to say.

"That's tonight's plan. I mean the actual plan with Sadie. Because from where I'm sitting you've spent three weeks saying she needs to be kept at a distance to keep her safe and then this afternoon you kissed her outside the humanities block. So, I'm wondering which version of the plan we're currently operating under."

I close one of the windows and open another. The eighty-nine percent hasn't moved. Fucking hell, this is pissing me off.

"She knows," I say.

Mason goes quiet for a second, and even that's long for him. "How much does she know?"

"Who I am. What I've been doing." I pause. "The flowers. The contact. All of it." Mason is the best one at reading me, so there’s no point lying to him about anything. He’ll know straight away I’m not telling the truth.

"She figured it out."

"Yes."

He's quiet for a moment longer. "And she didn't run?" He starts laughing. Only he would see the funny side of her not being scared that I’ve been stalking her, and she finds it… okay.

"No."

"You know, going for dinner in public is putting her at risk," he says finally.

I sit back from the screen.

That's the thing I've been sitting with since I walked back from the humanities block. The problem is what tonight means logistically, not emotionally. The organization has been on campus. They've been in the stands at the athletics center during practice. They have photographs of me at Grounds, at the merged table, with Sadie in the same frame.

They know who she is, and they know I’m with her.

Taking her to dinner in public means being visible with her. It means confirming to anyone watching that she matters, which they may already suspect, but suspicion and confirmation are different things.

I look at the five city codes on the screen. At the message on the stolen phone. Escalate timeline.