The way she’d looked at him last night. The weight of her body against his. The sound she’d made when?—
He shook his head, irritated with himself. His brain was supposed to be an asset, not a distraction.
He’d been wrong. That was the variable he’d miscalculated so badly it should have been embarrassing. He’d spent two days convinced she was pulling away because of the kiss at the cliff. Two days of rehearsing apologies and preparing for rejection. Two days of watching her push herself to exhaustion and assuming it was about him.
It hadn’t been about him at all.
I’m scared. Of something else. Something I can’t explain.
She’d said it like the words cost her something. And then she’d kissed him, and everything after that had become sensation and closeness and the overwhelming relief of not being alone.
She’d looked at him like she actually saw him. Not the awkward parts she had to tolerate, not the social deficits she had to navigate around—all of it. The whole architecture of who he was. And instead of finding it strange or off-putting, she’d pulled him closer.
He hadn’t had to translate himself. Hadn’t spent thewhole time running parallel processes, trying to decode her expressions while simultaneously performing the appropriate responses. He’d just been present. With her.
That had never happened before.
An alert flashed across his secondary monitor. Lincoln leaned forward, his body shifting into operational mode before his conscious mind fully registered the threat.
Someone was probing his systems.
Not sophisticated enough to be government. Too targeted to be random. The intrusion attempts were focused on his communication logs, his recent network activity—the sectors where evidence of Morgan’s presence might have left traces.
Randall’s people. Looking for breadcrumbs.
Lincoln’s fingers flew across the keyboard. He’d anticipated this—had been running countermeasures since the night of the rescue—but seeing it happen in real time sharpened his focus to a knife’s edge. They were hunting her. Actively, persistently hunting her.
He erased traces before they could be cataloged. Laid false trails that would lead their searches into dead ends. Rerouted their probing algorithms into honeypots designed to waste their time and resources. Every move they made, he was three steps ahead.
This was what he’d built himself for. Data warfare. Digital chess. The satisfaction of outmaneuvering an opponent who didn’t know they were already beaten.
But even as he worked, part of his mind was running a parallel search. Hunting the hunter.
“Gary. Status on the Randall trace.”
“Still running. Results remain underwhelming.” A pause. “The name ‘Randall’ doesn’t appear in any criminal networks you’ve mapped. Facial recognition from the warehouse footage failed—image quality was insufficient. Nodigital footprint corresponds to the profile Morgan described.”
“Expand the search parameters. Cross-reference with known federal breach operations. Coordinated attacks on multiple agencies.”
“Already done. Twice.” Another pause, longer than strictly necessary. “Either ‘Randall’ is an alias wrapped in more aliases, or this individual has professional-grade invisibility. Someone with significant resources has made him very difficult to find.”
Professional-grade invisible. Lincoln’s hands stilled on the keyboard. He was used to finding people—used to the certainty that enough data would always reveal the pattern. The fact that Randall had stayed hidden suggested connections, expertise, and infrastructure that went far beyond a simple criminal operation.
Not some amateur. Something bigger. Something with reach.
His tertiary monitor flickered with another batch of messages. Lincoln glanced at the senders, and his stomach dropped.
Treasury. FBI. Homeland. His NSA back channel. All marked urgent. All asking variations of the same question they’d been asking for days.
Can you help us locate the fire sale suspect?
He’d been deflecting them. Responding with vague assurances—still analyzing the attack vectors, will advise if I find anything useful—while providing nothing of substance. It was a delicate game. Too helpful and they’d expect results. Too evasive and they’d wonder why. He’d spent a decade building these relationships on a foundation of reliable intel. Now he was feeding them empty calories and hoping they wouldn’t notice the difference.
She was being hunted from both directions. Randallwanted his asset back. The government wanted their scapegoat. And Lincoln was the only thing standing between her and both of them.
He switched to his dark web monitoring channels. The chatter there was illuminating.
Asset still missing. All traces cold.
