Griffith’s slow exhales warmed the back of her neck, his arm draped heavy over her waist. It took a concerted effort of will to slide out from under its warmth. She shifted to the edge of the bed and sat up, swiping the notification open: the crew-evaluations report reminder she’d snoozed earlier. She dismissed it with a sigh, then rubbed the heels of her palms deep into her dry eyes.
The bed shifted, and Griffith let out a soft yawn. “Everything okay?” His hand trailed down her back.
Nodding, she slid her nexus band off and tossed it on the bedside table. She turned and lay back down under the sheets to face him. “Fine, it was nothing.”
He laid his arm over her shoulder, shifting toward her. “Tell me you don’t normally get up at this time of night and work?”
“Not usually, no.”
“You work yourself too hard, Quin.”
“I don’t mind having things to do. I need it that way.”
“I know,” he whispered, then kissed her forehead lightly.
“So…” she began, sliding closer, “how long have you been lying to me?”
His brow furrowed. “What?”
“Pretending not to have feelings for me?”
He smiled. “Oh, uh, I’m not sure I’ve done a very good job of pretending for quite some time. The way Lace acts, you’d think we’d been dancing around it for years.”
“Is that what she’s been giving you grief about? She knows?”
“Yeah. Hard to keep something like that from someone who’s known you half your life. She probably knew before I even did.”
“And when was that?”
“Since well before we came to the Argus. Hell, practically since we met.”
She bit down on the inside of her lip. “Really, that long?”
“Yeah, that long.” He let out a weighted sigh. “Back when I joined the Titans, well … you weren’t with us at first, but you know how it was. After Redcliff, they were throwing commendations at me, then I finally gave in and came over from the Vanguard—”
“Back when Titans and Vanguards could still be in the same room without killing one another?”
“Right. Before we ‘stole their war.’” His lips tilted in a smirk. “Your fault, by the way.”
“I’m aware. But this isn’t about me…”
He nodded. “I don’t know if you remember, but for those first few years, they couldn’t stop talking about everything that happened at Redcliff. They all acted like I was some divine gift to the Legion.”
“Yeah, I remember,” she said quietly. As a Vanguard, Griffith had been part of one of the first offenses against the new Viator threat—named after the cavernous gulch the worst of it had taken place in: Redcliff. It’d gone the true definition of SGL when shitty intel led them straight into a trap. As second-in-command, when Griffith’s CO died, the responsibility had fallen on him to get the company out. He’d managed to save dozens of Vanguards in a situation in which, by all rights, every one of them should have died.
Only a few weeks later, Lugen recruited him into the Titans, where his new comrades had been privy to every detail of the op and had just enough time to deify him before his arrival. From the moment Adequin arrived, the strange power dynamic had been obvious. They were all the same rank, all dexteras, but the others treated Griffith differently. They made him their liaison to upper brass, asked his permission for things he had no authority to grant or deny, and readily deferred to his opinions on the ground. They’d put themselves a class below, which had left him alone.
Adequin had seemed the only one unaffected by it. Coming straight from a delta-grade infantry unit into spec-ops training, she hadn’t had the same access to reliable gossip, so it’d taken her time to piece together what Griffith had done, and why they were acting that way. Even after she found out, she’d been the only one that treated him like any other colleague. An experienced teammate—someone to learn from, certainly—but still a peer.