Because I am no closer to peace than I was when she stood in my doorway covered in fear she tried to hide. If anything, having her in my space, my daily routines, my every field of awareness turns control into torment.
Every detail becomes a wound with memory behind it.
Her voice drifting down the corridor at night as she hums low, steady, threaded with that faint rasp she gets when she’s thinking too hard; her scent of coffee and warmth and something sweet in the kitchen every morning when I walk in to get my cup of coffee; a trailing fingerprint on the steel railing; or a hairpin left absentmindedly on my desk.
It’s maddening, the quiet domesticity of it. Maddening because it feels like a life I buried years ago, like a life I want.
She walks like she’s trying not to disturb the house. She pauses outside her door sometimes, exhales softly, as if working up the nerve to face another sleepless stretch of darkness.
And I lie there, jaw locked, telling myself not to go to her.
The urge isn’t protective, no.
It’s something darker, older, carved into the bones of the boy I used to be before power reworked me into its own shape.
I force myself to stay in bed until the footsteps stop but sleep rarely ever comes.
“I’ve got something,” Kiro says as he bursts into my office with a tablet in one hand, snapping me out of my reverie. “New breaches.”
The screen glows with a cluster of encrypted shells, stripped metadata, point-to-point leaps through dead nodes and falsified routing tables. But beneath the chaos, a pattern pulses like a heartbeat I recognize too well.
Anton’s encryption signature.
My jaw tightens.
“Where?”
“Tracing through Malta,” Kiro says. “Offshore relay. Sloppy enough to be bait, sharp enough to be dangerous.”
“And?”
“And that’s not the worst part.” He zooms into the decrypted fragments. The code rearranges into a symbol so familiar it might as well be etched on my skin.
The Ignatov crest.
Two crossed wolves encircling a blade.
Someone internal is cooperating. My stomach goes cold with the clinical edge of anger.
“Someone wants us to know they’re inside,” I mutter.
“Or they’re mocking us,” Kiro replies. “Either way, Anton isn’t working alone.”
I stare down at the unmistakable echo of betrayal.
This breach is only the surface, I realize grimly. Anton is probing, testing the waters. He’s building a map, and Harper’sinvolvement in the last incident marked her as a link in a chain he wants to pull.
She’s not bait anymore.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
Kiro raises an eyebrow.
“You mean you’ll let her handle it.”
The instinctive flare of possessive refusal nearly slips out—No, she’s not touching this again.
I swallow it before it can escape.
