The way her breath warmed the space between us.
The way I had almost given in to the pull, the same pull I felt in my car that night when she came to visit Sera.
I exhale slowly, and then I pull up the files she accessed.
I dive into the logs with a precision that borders on surgical. Her digital fingerprints are deliberate, clean, almost elegant.
Good analysts leave little behind. Excellent ones hide their steps. Harper removes her footprints entirely, but I know where she’s walked; I know her rhythm, her logic, her instincts.
She was close.
When I peel back the final lock disguised as corrupted code, my blood freezes as I see what the screen spits at me.
A string of correspondence between my father and Anton Lebedev.
My vision sharpens so quickly it hurts.
The letters are short and efficient. The phrases are clipped, but beneath the clean language lies the stench of something far uglier.
Internal cleanse.Containment of witnesses.
No survivors.
My fingers go as cold as ice.
For years I avoided these archives, the way a man avoids looking into the coffin of someone who died wrong. I told myself there was nothing there. My father’s death was old history; as stale, closed, unchangeable as it was, I let it be.
But instinct always whispered otherwise.
And Harper walked straight into the one place I never let myself go.
She almost found the truth, the truth I’ve spent a decade refusing to name.
I close the files before the bitterness rising in me spills into something violent. My hands are too steady, the way theywere the night I buried the last piece of my mother’s memory and vowed never to feel anything that could be used against me.
Emotion is a liability. Harper is becoming one too quickly.
I should remove her from the project. It would take three keystrokes. Maybe four, if I bothered with politeness.
But I don’t.
Because I can’t pretend anymore. She isn’t just a liability.
She’s a fault line I haven’t figured out how to seal.
During the night, my penthouse overlooks a city blurred into white and shadow, every light softened by winter’s breath. The glass is freezing under my palm. The whiskey in my other hand is the color of old wounds.
I should be sleeping.
Instead, I’m replaying the moment Harper and I nearly kissed, nearly collided into something neither one of us has the discipline to control. My body remembers her warmth far too easily, the way the space between us felt like a live wire stretched thin enough to snap.
She infuriates me. She complicates me. She thins out my control with a precision even enemies have failed to achieve.
I take another sip.
I want to forget her. I want to never stop replaying her. I want both, and wanting both is tearing me open.
My phone vibrates on the table, a short coded pulse that bypasses all standard channels. Only three people ever had access to this cipher.
