David shut down the tablet. The first fat drops of rain streaked the windows, distorting the ocean beyond into ribbons of gray and white. The storm was almost here, and he couldn’t help but wonder if it was an omen or just Atlantic weather doing what it always did.
“We’ve survived worse,” Zach said, and it wasn’t bravado. It was history. Fact. A reminder of every threat they’d faced down and walked away from, battered but breathing.
David nodded. They had. But Nick’s expression held something David couldn’t quite read—concern, perhaps. Or recognition. The sense this time was different in ways they hadn’t mapped yet.
“Familiar,” Nick said again, his eyes distant, “but different. More personal. More patient.”
“Yeah,” David agreed.
Silence filled the space between them, poignant with unspoken understanding. They’d chosen each other. Built something unbreakable out of fractured pieces, three men who didn’t fit anywhere else but fit together with a precision that defied explanation. Whatever was coming for them—whatever was already here, circling in the shadows—would have to go through all of them.
The rain drummed harder against the glass, and somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled.
Zach stood, rolling his shoulders like a man preparing for a fight, all coiled energy and controlled violence searching for a target. “We set the trap, but the next move’s theirs.”
David watched his brothers—the only family that had ever mattered—and certainty locked into place.
Let them come.
Let them test and probe and strike.
They’d learn exactly what it meant to threaten what was his.
The storm arrived; rain now beat against the windows in waves. But the one brewing inside Ivory Tower? That one had teeth.
And it was personal.
Chapter 22
Feline Firewall
The soft glowof monitors danced across the tech office, casting long, shifting shapes onto the walls like shadows from another world. The fluorescents overhead remained dark—David never used them—and the room, wrapped in pale gold and luminous blue light from his screens, felt like a sanctuary hidden inside a machine.
Lena perched on the corner of his cluttered desk, the smooth surface solid under the backs of her thighs. The ceramic mug in her hands held too-hot–then-too-cold coffee, now bitter and slightly metallic on her tongue. Her pulse hadn’t fully stabilized since the water plant debacle yesterday, yet beneath the adrenaline still humming in her veins, something more slippery stirred—unease. An itch in the back of her brain she hadn’t been able to scratch all day.
That, she rationalized, was why she was here. Not because she couldn’t stop watching the way David’s fingers moved—fast, precise, his brows drawn together in focused fury. Not because her stomach flipped every time he adjusted his glasses with the same unconscious efficiency he plied to hack systems around the world. And definitely not because the idea of returning to theempty guest suite alone made her skin cold in places unrelated to air conditioning.
Zach had ordered her—yes, ordered—not to move around the resort alone after dark. He’d said it with a cold, steel calm that allowed no dissension. ‘You’re not alone, not now,’ a comment that had wormed its way into her soul.
Beneath it all, though, was a small, disconcerting tickle every time she thought of the guest suite. She’d only been staying there five nights now, and already her brain labeled it home. A dangerous word. Dangerous comfort.
She glanced toward the wall monitor framed like a window. A pretty deception. Natural light bothered David when he was deep in systems—he needed consistency, not sunbeams, he’d told her. Tonight the screen displayed the beach near the Residence, waves eerily still, the ocean stretched flat and breathless, hiding secrets beneath the mirror of its surface.
Another curse slipped from David—a hiss, but sharp enough to cut.
“Talk to me, Genius.” Lena lowered her mug to the desk behind her. Her fingers itched to reach out, to smooth the worry line knifed between his dark brows.
He didn’t reply right away. “The network’s got ghosts,” he muttered finally, eyes flicking across code she couldn’t understand. “Sensors are throwing noise—contradictory data, impossible patterns. It’s like the entire system is lying. But… I ran intrusion sweeps twice. No breach.”
His fingers stilled before he pulled off his glasses and tossed them onto a pile of equipment with less force than his frustrated expression warranted. He slumped back in his space-age chair and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.
The sharp scent of scorched plastic still emanated from the jumble of broken parts on his desk—remnants of the failed sabotage attempt to knock out the entire desalination facility.Lena inhaled as quietly as possible. That odor, unpleasant though it was, somehow mixed with his skin and became grounding. Specific.
“David,” she said hesitantly. “Can I ask something personal?”
One of his hands drifted to rest on his chest, his fingers fisted. A thinking pose. “Always. I do, however, reserve the right not to answer.”
That was David in a single sentence. Direct. Dry. Distant, but not unkind.
