Her body grows taut, back arching as she climaxes. The sight of her, sweaty and lost in pleasure, is enough for me to reach my peak too. I groan a curse under my breath, letting my head fall in the junction of her neck and shoulder.
Right here, the scent of her is the strongest. It’s a scent I’ve begun to seek in days when shit doesn’t go right. As her arms wrap around me, playing with my hair as she comes down, I realize that things might be changing in a way I don’t want them to.
This was nothing like the sex Harper and I usually have, and I loved it the same.
Chapter 14 - Harper
The estate feels different like someone replaced the air with glass.
Every step threatens to crack something I can’t see. Damian and I move through the same rooms but orbit like twin stars refusing to burn in the same direction. We work, side by side, avoiding each other’s eyes.
We have become masters in pretending the heat between us isn’t smoldering under every clipped word and shallow breath. We’re rebuilding the wreckage left by the leak, picking through the ashes for anything that still holds shape.
Kiro has half the estate in controlled lockdown, a quiet storm of cables and code sprawled across the war room’s long table. Screens glow, their light painting our faces in cold geometry.
I sift through packet trails and corrupted fragments, fingers moving before I think. My exhaustion feels like an inhabitant sitting behind my ribs. It doesn’t slow me down, though, maybe because Damian is this close.
Our shoulders almost brush every time one of us shifts. He keeps his voice low when he speaks to the room, but there’s a tension beneath it.
“We’re missing the origin. The leak didn’t come from the council,” he says. His eyes flick over the screen Kiro is projecting. “Whoever planted it is inside our perimeter.”
Inside our home, he means,inside the walls that were supposed to be safe.
I search the metadata again, the strings of numbers swimming like constellations. My eyes almost slip over it, but I catch it at the last second. A ghost of movement.
“I’ve got it,” I murmur.
Damian turns. Having his full-blown attention shouldn’t affect me, but it does.
“What did you find?” he asks neutrally, soft around the edges, sharp at the core. His voice slides under my skin like a memory I’m not supposed to keep.
I zoom in on the signal clusters.
“A transmitter hidden in the estate’s private network. It’s been injecting packet fragments into our outgoing traffic for weeks. Masked as bleed-over from the security vault’s internal subchannel.”
“Internal,” Damian echoes, jaw tightening. “Meaning it had to be placed physically.”
Kiro curses under his breath.
“Sneaky as fuck. This is professional-level penetration.”
I already know what Damian is thinking. The same thought that lodges in my chest like a buried blade.
Who would dare do thishere? Who was invited inside long enough to plant something like this? Who else had access apart from me and Damian?
He steps closer to examine the heat-map overlay on my screen. The faint warmth of him grazes the side of my arm, making my pulse jump.
His gaze locks on the routing line. “Where does the signal terminate?”
I swallow drily. “Moscow. Downtown business sector. Corporate tower owned by—”
I already know the name, but saying it out loud tastes like betrayal and acid.
Damian’s jaw flexes. He finishes the sentence for me.
“—Inessa’s parent company.”
The silence that follows is too heavy for the room. He stares at the map, expression unreadable. But there’s a ripple of pain, fury, disbelief—or all three, tightly compressed behind his eyes.
