In my office, the monitors glow with soft blue light, casting long shadows across the desk. I scroll through files under the guise of routine surveillance checks.
A lie I don’t bother to justify.
The footage plays on the central screen: hallways, entry points, elevator interiors. Standard oversight. Necessary oversight.
Then, Harper stepping into the third-floor corridor on the screen catches my attention.
She walks with a steady, deliberate cadence, heels tapping a pattern that sounds almost mathematical. Composed presence, each stride a demonstration of self-governed power.
It’s infuriating. It’s admirable.
I tune the audio up a notch even though these corridors barely catch sound; it’s instinct, nothing more. The footage stays silent. Her figure moves through the frame with ease, a dark silhouette trimmed in the cool light from the overhead fixtures.
It occurs to me, sharply, that she doesn’t belong in these halls.
Not because she isn’t qualified but because she changes the air.
She always has, in every room that she’s stepped into.
Even now, months after the incident I pretend to have stripped from memory, she disrupts the normalcy I’ve spent years cultivating.
I flick to the next camera angle. She appears again, passing the server room, shadow slicing across the sensors.
If she hated me, she could poison every corridor she walked through. Through rumor, influence, strategic sabotage, she’d have every tool at her disposal.
And yet I approved her transfer.
I tell myself it’s because she’s the best mind for the job.
You want her where you can see her, Damian.So you can understand why the hell she still gets under your skin in ways no ally or enemy ever has.
I shut this thought and banish it from my mind. Her image disappears as she rounds a corner and the next feed shows only empty hallway.
I let the footage loop again.
I justify it the first time. I rationalize it the second. By the third, I’m out of excuses.
She shouldn’t have this effect on me.
Harper Quinn shouldn’t make me feel anything at all.
But she does, like a fracture spidering beneath polished steel, impossible to repair because I refuse to acknowledge it’s there.
I switch off the monitors.
Darkness folds in around me.
Her reflection lingers behind my eyelids like a warning I won’t heed.
Chapter 2 - Harper
Working under Damian Ignatov is an exercise in restraint.
It’s like balancing on the blade of a knife lined with glass. Every morning, I sit at my workstation and remind myself to inhale, exhale, and not let him see that he still has any effect on me whatsoever.
He never falters, never lets so much as a misaligned decimal pass without correction.
Everyone in the Ignatov network knows that he’s the type who rewires a system at two in the morning because a vulnerability reports a hairline fracture. But working under him directly, feeling the precision of his expectations tighten around the department like surgical sutures, I realize “perfectionist” isn’t the right word.
