He’s obsessed.
Commands land in my inbox with timed precision, concise enough to cut the air.Check the load-balancing latency. Review anomaly markers in quadrant six. Update encryption salt values.
When he corrects something, he never raises his voice or shows anger. Damian Ignatov can make the world bend with a raised brow, and he knows it.
So I respond the only way I can, with no emotion left to be detected. I refuse to give him even a flicker of reaction, not even the memory of how his hands once touched me like he owned the moment.
If he notices my neutral tone, he doesn’t show it. And I certainly don’t give him the satisfaction of anything else.
But my work under him is only the surface.
My real task is buried beneath the daily audits: tracing irregular data streams bleeding from offshore Bratva accounts.
Someone is siphoning money in steady, disciplined threads, hiding behind modified Ignatov encryption. And it’s happening now, in real time.
The more I dig, the more wrong everything feels.
Anomalies appear in places that should be sealed—signatures that mimic the internal style of Ignatov architects, patterns so clean they should be untraceable—except someone made them imperfect on purpose, like a whisper left behind.
A whisper in Damian’s coding dialect.
I stare at the pattern for a long time the first time I see it. My stomach tightens and coils, becoming a stone lodged under my ribs.
Could it be him?
The structure, the logic, the mathematical ruthlessness. I wonder, if it’s—
I bury the thought under a firewall of work and code. I encrypt these questions behind layers even his most paranoid protocols wouldn’t expect, hiding the investigation inside replicated directories, ghost paths only I know how to follow.
No one can track what I’m doing, not even him.
Especially not him.
Somehow, the more I uncover, the more I feel his shadow creeping in through the corners. He appears in doorways without sound, scanning our screens with hawklike efficiency, always three steps ahead in ways that feel less like management and more like surveillance.
Even sleep has begun to evade me.
At night, I lie awake in the dim wash of my apartment’s streetlamp glow, the city humming soft and low outside my window. When sleep finally drags me under, it drags me backward—into the car.
At night, I dream of his touch as he lights me on fire, and during the day I pretend his mere presence doesn’t shake me.
“You’re editing the anomaly logs.”
Damian’s sudden comment makes me jump in my seat.
Where the fuck did he come from?This is what I mean. He appears as quiet as a ghost, sharp as a blade. His voice is low and calm, observant as usual.
His reflection catches in my monitor—black suit, gloved hands folded behind him, a pale peach tie hanging from his neck, expression unreadable. He stands close enough that the faint scent of his cologne stirs the air between us, subtle and clean and infuriatingly familiar.
I continue typing, trying to will the blood away from my cheeks at my reaction.Way to appear unsuspicious, Harper.
But the cascading lines of code blur for a moment. The symbols split, double, rearrange in trembling patterns.
I hate that he can do this to me without touching me.
I school my expression, keep my eyes on the screen.
“I’m auditing them.”
