“Your mole isn’t hiding well,” she murmurs, scrolling deeper into the breach. “They’re sloppy. Or overconfident. Or both.”
“You recognized that quickly,” I say.
“Of course I did.” She doesn’t look back. “You brought me here for a reason.”
Not just one reason, Harper.
There were a thousand, none of them strategic.
Her fingers stop suddenly, body freezing.
Eureka.
“Damian,” she whispers.
And the way she says my name—soft, focused, unaware of what it does to me—makes the room feel smaller.
I step closer.
The screen fills with strings of code, each one pulsing with Anton’s unmistakable signature.
But my gaze doesn’t stray away from her long enough.
She never was strategy, and knowing that terrifies me more than Anton ever could.
Just a few days after I’ve put Harper on the case, she’s sitting beside the main console, tendrils of blue-white code reflecting sharp lines across her cheekbones. The hour is late enough that the compound has settled into its nocturnal hush.
The servers are still running, humming with the consistency of trapped bees. She works with the contained ferocity of someone who knows she’s being watched and refuses to be intimidated by it.
Kiro left an hour ago, muttering something about packet logs and Malta’s relay boards. The moment the door shut behind him, the temperature in the room shifted subtly like it always does whenever Harper and I are left alone in a contained environment.
She scrolls through Anton’s encryption signature, mouth set in a narrow line. Her fingers move over the keys, and like the pervert I am, I feel something hot and unwelcome coil low in my chest.
Focus, dumbass.
She doesn’t look at me when she says, “You inserted a command I didn’t authorize.”
“To avoid corrupting the metadata.”
“That’s not why you did it.” She finally swivels toward me, narrowing her eyes. “You did it because you don’t trust anyone to do something without your fingerprints on it.”
A small, sharp laugh escapes me. “I don’t trust easily. And for good reason.”
She stands, pushing her chair back with a controlled force that still manages to echo off the steel cabinets.
“You treat every person like a variable. Something to be manipulated until it fits whatever outcome you’ve already chosen.”
“And you don’t?” I ask, rising as well. “You use logic like armor.”
“Because logic doesn’t lie.” Her voice cracks like ice. “People do.”
We face each other across the small divide of the operations room. Her breath rises and falls in short bursts; my own feels lodged somewhere between my ribs, refusing to move. The fluorescent lights overhead cast an unforgiving glow, stripping both of us down to raw edges.
“You think I treat everyone like assets?” I say quietly.
“Isn’t that what we are to you?”
“Assets are predictable,” I answer before I can stop myself. “People are not.”
