He and John had been partners, in all senses of the word, for only three months. Still getting used to each other. Working out shorthand. Learning when to look or leap.
John had said once he’d not expected to fall in love with anyone else, never planning to, not looking. He’d been thinking about the next mission and going home alone and going out again, day after day, over and over; and then he’d locked eyes with Captain Justice’s electric young former partner, all sparks and passion and a fierce need to prove himself, across the barrel of an adversary’s icicle gun. That’d been that. Defenses down. Taken out.
That’d been the year Arachne and Horatius Jones had tried to pull down the moon, to cause an extinction-level event, to preserve only their chosen people in a mystically secured saf
