I recognize the signature immediately—a ghost protocol I haven’t seen in years.
Unregistered and untagged, it slips through my firewall easily.
My throat constricts.
One line of text appears, no header, no sender:
He trusts the wrong woman.
What the fuck does this mean?Is this some kind of a joke?
Before I can move towards the keyboard, an attachment loads.
A grainy, slightly blurred picture, timestamped with tonight’s date, taken from a hallway camera angle.
Inessa.
She’s standing outside Damian’s office, and the door is partially open. There’s nothing weird about the picture, except for the fact that I can see Damian’s shadow on the other side, way too close for comfort. And there’s a grin on her face I can’t make sense of, the top button of her blouse popped open.
My stomach twists.
This is bait, right? It’s got to be.
Except it doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’ve seen the way Damian’s eyes have followed her, even in my presence, and I’ve seen the particular grin she reserves for him specially.
I close the window too fast, but the image is already seared into my mind. The ugly green monster rears its head again, and this time, I can’t beat it back with a stick.
The wheels of my chair roll back, bumping into the wall as I stand up abruptly. My palms are sweating.
I hate this.
I hate the tight coil in my chest, the question twisting itself into a noose:What if?
What if she’s not just a trap he’s setting? What if she’s a trap he’s falling for?
I pace the room.
Please let me be wrong.
He trusts the wrong woman.
Jealousy has now melted into fear. It’s ugly and it makes me feel small, but it’s there nonetheless.
I can’t lose him to that woman.
I just can’t.
Chapter 13 - Damian
A thin line of pale winter light cuts across my desk, severing the remnants of last night’s battles: Harper’s venom, my restraint, her wounded suspicion. The air still holds the shape of the argument we didn’t finish, the accusations she swallowed but didn’t hide.
Of course, I don’t look toward her office door or listen to her footsteps.
Fucking loser.
Screens bloom awake across the wall, a line of code glowing in red, stretching from Cyprus to Hong Kong to a shell corporation with a name so forgettable it screams importance.
The false intel I fed through Inessa’s channels worked. Anton bit the bait with the hunger of a man who believes himself untouchable.
