“No,” her voice stopped me. “Leave ‘em.”
“Are you sure? It’s an east-facing window. The sunwill blast you.”
She shrugged under the cover. “I like it when the sun wakes me up.”
I smiled at her as my eyes traced every corner of her face. “Okay.”
Before I could think, I bent down and pressed my lips to her temple before rising slowly. “Sweet dreams.”
And I know what this looks like. Believe me, I do. I was supposed to keep that box, stuffed with everything I wasn't allowed to feel for her, tucked away in a locked closet. Never to be touched again. But I dare you to try and not to mutterfuck itin your head when her lips are half an inch from yours. I dare you to not crumble when she looks at you like your the best thing to walk the earth.
And having that look from someone who used to roll her eyes whenever she heard my name? Knowing she thought I was more than just a shadow who craved he darkness?
It meant everything.
The second her door closed, my priorities shifted. I'd try and tackle my mess of feelings later, but right now the reason why I was in London in the first place hit me square in the chest.
I made it back to my room, settled in the centre of the bed, and pulled out my laptop. The glow from the screen ate at the darkness, flickering off the glass of untouched whisky on the table. London buzzed beyond the window. Horns, sirens—the kind of city that never slept. I hadn’t either. Not for three days. All because of what was happening with Romano.
Someone was inside my system. Slipping through cracks that shouldn’t exist. Watching us. Testing me. And whoeverit was… they weren’t just good. They were lethal. And that's exactly what we had to become.
Lines of code blurred as I scanned the intrusion logs again, each keypress sharp and deliberate. We’d built our network to be impenetrable. Every firewall, every bypass, every layer had my fingerprints. But now, it felt like I was chasing a ghost. One that was top rank. Supreme leader. Had all the fucking medals and knew our patterns, memorised the way we ran things.
I found my way to the system where our files were double and triple protected. It lit up half my screen, the other with the last general location of where this was happening. The tools I had with me were useless compared to what we had back at our headquarters, but I hoped and prayed that whatever software Oscar had riddled my laptop with could get us something clearer. Something finite.
I was halfway through figuring out that whatever had been embedded in my motherboard was definitely not legally authorised, and then it happened.
A script pinged my honeypot server, just a light touch, like fingers brushing dust off an old photo. It was impressive. If I wasn’t watching, we would have slept right through it. It was like they were tiptoeing through a manor, and I hoped to God he didn’t know where the creaky floorboards sat. I needed noise. Needed something other than light touches to nail them.
And then, he stepped on a board.
My heart flatlined as they clicked into a decoy folder, one I’d buried deep beneath layers of digital noise. One I hadn’t even told Oscar about. One only he and I knew the meaning of.
My breath caught.
No one knew her name. Not unless they’d known her. Unless they’d known us. Our life before Romano.
My heart thudded once, hard. I shifted closer to the screen, jaw tight.
Then I saw it.
The user-agent string was embedded in the command. A custom configuration I’d written years ago, back when I was the one training. I’d only ever installed it on two field devices. One belonged to Oscar, and the other was… Jamie.
The name felt like a fist when it hit. Depsite what was happening with Cora, Jamie had stayed clear of the company. Just like we'd expected him to. But he never was a silent one. Always with an opinion. Always with a statement too smart. Too cocky. And with this, knowing that this could also be his work? I hated that it made sense.
When it erupted with the media, with Cora, with me, I’d expected anger. I’d expected threats, childish revenge. But not this. Not a surgical, slow-burn thing that smelt less like fury and more like planning.
I swallowed. My throat burning in a way that wasn’t just from the alcohol. The logs on the screen blinked at me, neat rows of time codes and IPs and packet headers. Cold, clean data. The kind that didn’t lie.
Why go to these lengths? And how was he doing it without any of us, even Oscar, catching him until now?
Jamie had always been easy to read. Bold, sloppy, the kind of man whose mistakes were loud.
This wasn’t loud.
It had corridors. It had a map. It was planned without the expectation of us ever catching on.
As soon as that thought made a home in my mind, only then did the word 'scapegoat' shine in big bright lights. It was as though Jamie’s leash had been traded for a heavier chain. Nothing but the bait. And I only knew this because if he wasn’t smart enough to think before doing what he did to Cora, he wasn’t smart enough to pull this off.
