Sarah catches me looking and raises an eyebrow. She smiles. I look away.
Victoria and Roman arrive together. Victoria, as usual, is wearing something that costs more than my entire wardrobe.
Roman is behind her with a cup of tea, his face carrying the quiet contentment of a man who spent a decade believing thewoman he loved was lost and is still adjusting to the fact that she came back. He holds her chair. She accepts with the grace of someone who has decided that letting Roman be gallant costs her nothing and gives him everything.
Team celebration.
Someone found wine. Tommy brings three cans of Mountain Dew from his private stash and lines them up beside my plate with a precision that the team would find endearing if they knew about his optimization files.
"Three cans," I say. "You usually stock two."
"Special occasion. The world isn't ending tomorrow."
"Lower your voice. You'll jinx it."
I sit between Tommy and Sarah. The conversation wraps around me, loud and warm and profane and punctuated by the kind of laughter that only happens when people who have seen each other at their worst decide to show each other their best.
Stryker tells a story that ends with Mercer in a compromising position and Dylan refusing to corroborate. Dylan denies the story without denying the underlying incident, which is its own kind of confirmation.
Reagan, beside him, catches my eye with an expression that says she's heard this story before and the truth is worse than either version.
She leans across Dylan to catch my ear. "For the record, the evidence package you and Tommy pulled from Webb's servers is the most comprehensive intelligence haul I've ever worked with. Three prosecutors have already called it career-defining."
"You're welcome."
"I'm saying thank you. Take it." She leans back, and the look she gives me carries the particular weight of a woman who spent years building a case that could have died a hundred times and watched it survive because the right people showed up at the right moment.
Micah says something quiet that makes Sarah choke on her wine. Victoria delivers a commentary on the team's collective operational hygiene that is so precisely devastating that even Kane coughs to disguise a laugh.
Kane raises his glass. The room goes quiet with the automatic deference of people who have followed this man's voice through years of operations and recognize when it carries weight.
"To the people at this table," he says. "And the ones who aren't here. The ones we lost and the ones we carry."
Dylan raises his glass. The motion is slow. Deliberate.
His eyes are fixed on a point above the table that nobody else can see, and the silence he holds around the gesture is louder than any toast.
Lisa and Maya are in that silence. They always will be. But Dylan honors them from solid ground now, from the life he rebuilt with Reagan and the family he chose inside this mountain, and the glass he raises is a salute, not a plea.
Reagan's hand covers his on the table. Dylan doesn't look at her. Doesn't need to.
"To finishing it," Kane says.
"To finishing it," the team echoes.
Tommy's hand finds my knee under the table. His thumb traces a pattern on the fabric of my jeans. Code. The same three characters from the mattress, from the server room floor, from every moment we've built between crisis and confession.
I press my knee against his palm.
His thumb pauses. Resumes. Traces a different path, slower, higher along my thigh, and the deliberateness of it in a room full of people who can't see makes my breath catch behind my sternum.
I cover his hand with mine. Stop the trajectory before it becomes a problem.
His fingers lace through mine, and the pressure of his grip is warm and possessive and carries the particular weight of a man who claims by proximity, by attention, by weaving himself so thoroughly into the pattern of your days that removing him would leave gaps in every system you run.
I don't want to remove him. That's the point. That's always been the point.
After dinner, I walk.