Then it flickers. Just for a second. Barely noticeable.
Then another monitor. Same flicker. Different hallway.
Someone’s spoofing the feeds.
I should have known Parker wouldn’t listen. Should have known she’d never stay back when told to stay back. When has she ever?
“What are you smiling about?” Aria demands, her hands on my chest, nails digging in.
“Just thinking about how predictable you are,” I say, and I let my voice go rough. Lower. The way it used to sound when I’d show up at her door at three AM and she’d let me in without asking questions. “Four years of this. Four years of you thinking you could make me stay.”
“I did make you stay,” she breathes, leaning down, her hair falling around us like a curtain. “You kept coming back.”
“Because you were easy.” I grab her hips, pull her down harder against me, watch her eyes go wide and eager. “Because you’dspread your legs whenever I wanted. Because you never asked for anything more than I was willing to give.”
She moans, grinding against me, and I’m not hard, not even close, but she’s too desperate to notice.
Behind her, another monitor flickers. Then another.
“Tell me you want me,” she whispers, her mouth near my ear. “Tell me you’ve always wanted me.”
I don’t, but she kisses me, and I let her. Hard and hungry and so fucking desperate it makes my skin crawl. But I kiss back, play the part she needs me to play.
Because in the corner of my vision, I can see more monitors flickering. More feeds being compromise,d and Aria’s too busy getting what she thinks she wants to notice her entire security system is being dismantled from the outside.
“I knew it,” Aria breathes against my mouth. “I knew you felt it too. We can be good together, Silas. We can build something. Something better than what you had with her.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We can build something.”
Then I feel it. The way her body goes rigid. The way her attention shifts. I guess I can’t fake it as much as I used to.
Aria turns her head towards the monitors.
All of them. Flickering now. Some going black. Others showing loops of empty hallways that repeat every seven seconds—I count, because that’s what you do when you’re cataloging escape routes and planning violence.
“What—” she starts, her voice catching. She pulls back from me, and I can feel the exact moment her attention fractures. The way her body goes rigid, muscles locking like she’s been hit with voltage.
She scrambles off me, practically throwing herself at the workstation. The silk robe fans out behind her like wings, and her fingers fly over the keyboard with the kind of desperate precision that tells me everything I need to know.
She’s losing.
Pulling up screens. Code. Access protocols. The guts of the Carter organization infrastructure laid bare across six monitors, each one showing her a different flavor of failure.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, sitting up slowly. Testing my weight, feeling where the pain lives—thigh screaming, chest tight, shoulder stiff from being restrained for God knows how long. But pain is just information. Data to be processed and filed away.
“Shut up!” Her voice cracks on the second word. Sharp and panicked in a way I’ve never heard from her before, not in four years of her showing up at my door with that needy look in her eyes.
She’s typing frantically now, her fingers hitting the keys so hard I can hear the clicks from across the room. Entering passwords. Access codes. Everything she stole when she cloned Charles’s and Cal’s systems during that mountain clusterfuck.
Nothing works.
Error messages flash across every screen in rapid succession, painting her face red with failure. Then blue. Then red again. Astrobe of digital rejection that would be beautiful if it wasn’t so goddamn satisfying.
ACCESS DENIED
INVALID CREDENTIALS
SECURITY BREACH DETECTED
