“It’s complicated.”
Another evasion. Another bullshit nonanswer.
Fury blooms through my chest in sharp, bright streaks.
“Complicated,” I echo. “Right. Just like everything else that somehow ends up in our house without explanation.”
He doesn’t rise to the challenge. He just watches me with that unreadable calm that always makes me feel like he’s seeing more than he’s saying.
That silence bothers me more than an affirmative would have. Why is he acting like this? Why isn’t he answering me straight-up? Is there something he’s trying to hide? Is there something else, something that’s related to the doubts I’ve tried to bury ever since I saw that godawful blonde talk to him so sweetly in his office?
“What am I supposed to think, Damian?” I grit through clenched teeth. “She’s been going around saying shit to the staff. They are hesitating. They’re second-guessingmyinstructions, Damian. And you sit here, saying nothing.”
“I’m handling it,” he replies coolly.
His words, his tone, his gaze, they’re all dismissive. He wasn’t like this even before we married, before everything went wrong. What the fuck has gotten into him?
“So youknow,” I snarl. “You knew she’d be a problem.”
“I thought she might be.” He leans back in his chair, voice low. “That doesn’t make her ours to dismiss.”
Silence permeates the air, as loud as a glass plate being smashed on the floor. We stare at each other across the desk. He sits there with his unreadable stillness, me with my pulse hammering like a trapped thing. Neither of us yields.
The cold war clicks into place. It’s pride against pride, logic against emotion, silence against frustration. It settles between us like smoke, thin enough to see through but dense enough to choke on.
After a long moment, I pull back.
I have my answer.
The storm inside me needs somewhere else to go.
Back at my desk, I bury myself in the work. This work, that has always been mine, the work that never doubts me, the work that doesn’t question my authority because I built it with my own hands, my own mind.
Project Velvet Blade.
The remnants of it still pulse like a half-dead heartbeat in the depths of the archive system. Fragmented code, corrupted sequences, a project designed to manipulate perception itself. A weapon masquerading as intelligence.
And if Inessa is part of whatever is coming, Velvet Blade might be the only place I can find leverage.
You’ll see it, Damian Ignatov. I’ll make sure you fucking see it.
With spite fueling me, my fingers fly across the interface, matching corrupted blocks to older prototypes. The room around me fades, hours slip past unnoticed.
It’s no longer about proving anything to Damian, or his legacy. This is far personal. It’s about proving myself to me.
Proving it to the girl who survived Anton’s digital labyrinth, to the person I refuse to let anyone, not even a polished liaison with red-lacquered nails, diminish.
I exhale slowly, my pulse still sprints beneath my skin, restless, craving answers he refuses to share. If I could peel back his ribs and look directly at the truth, I think I would.
Anton’s fingerprints are everywhere.
Code scrolls across my monitor, each character a bead of cold sweat trailing down my spine. His revived network moves like an organism rebuilt from old bones.
I find it in media channels first. News feeds and entertainment conglomerates that look clean on the surface but hum with hidden carriers. Compressed packets disguised asmarketing reports. A blackmail pipeline dressed up as public relations.
Like arteries pumped full of poison.
All of them lead me back to Inessa’s company.
