She gives a small, humorless laugh.
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“I can.” My gaze holds hers, steady, controlled. “Because he’s predictable and because I have you.”
For a fraction of a second, the mask behind her eyes cracks, before it disappears.
“Send me the courier’s updated route,” she says. “I want to overlay it with the last three hours of account traffic.”
She’s already working as she speaks—fingers flying over the keys, copper hair falling over her furrowed brow.
God, how I wish I could put my tongue against her neck right now and watch her squirm.
I watch her in spite of myself. I know she feels it.
But she doesn’t meet my gaze. And that alone spreads numbness across my chest that I haven’t felt since I buried my father.
Kiro returns with updated intel.
“Courier moving early.”
Harper looks up sharply. “How early?”
“Now.”
She snaps her laptop closed.
“Then we need to leave.”
Her eyes flick to me, nothing but professional distance in them.
I nod, already dialing Kiro. “Kiro, prep the team.”
Harper brushes past me to grab her coat, taking extra care to make sure our arms don’t touch. The careful action stings somewhere deep in my chest.
The stakeout begins under a sky the color of bruised steel. Wind is carving down alleyways, streetlights flickering with the kind of electricity that predicts bad choices.
Harper sits in the back of the surveillance van, laptop balanced on her knees, face illuminated in pulse-blue code. Her focus is absolute. Kiro feeds her live intercepts from the body cam of our shadow trailing the courier.
It’s of a man in a gray coat, briefcase in hand, all casual and calm.
“Packet’s transferring,” Harper whispers.
She brushes a strand of hair behind her ear, fingers trembling just slightly, a detail no one else but me would catch. I see too much when it comes to her.
“Encryption’s… different,” she murmurs, leaning closer to the screen. “He’s using dynamic cycle masking. Old-school, but modified. Give me a second.”
Her brow furrows. Her breath slows as she loses herself in the code. And I lose myself watching her.
When she solves it, she taps the comm.
“Courier is heading to the drop point. Ready when you are.”
We move.
The intercept is quick. The courier never even sees Kiro’s man coming before the briefcase is switched, the decoy inserted, the real drive secured.
Inside, the device hums with Anton’s next chapter. And when Harper cracks it open in the van, the truth floods the screen in lines of violence disguised as logistics.
