In a flash, my good hand jerks toward my weapon, but he moves faster, steel glinting from the sleeve of his jacket.
A cold, sharp blade presses against my throat before I can finish drawing.
“Try that again, sugar.”He flicks his goddamn tongue against my earlobe.“I’ll make sure your blood splashes beautifully.”
Adrenaline roars through my veins.Too bad my free hand is broken.Otherwise, I’d grab his dick just to watch his reaction.
I see it clearly, the ruthless violence behind his calm mask.But I sense his confusion, too.He doesn’t know whether to gut me or fuck me.I bet he’s never been with a man.But he thinks about it.Jacks himself to images of it.
All that untapped curiosity and testosterone make him easy prey.Easy to draw him close, twist him around my finger, and break him down until Dove returns to me.
“You’re playing with fire.”I swallow against the blade’s tip, causing it to nick my skin.
“I live in fire.Now get the hell out of my town.”
The blade digs deeper, drawing a thin trickle of blood that warms as it trails down my throat.“Everyone bleeds, Strakh.Even you.”
“Oh, sweetheart, I bleed just fine.The difference is I like it.”
I move swiftly, jerking back just enough to free myself from the blade’s immediate threat, and draw my gun fully this time.I level it directly at his chest, my finger tense against the trigger.
“Go on, Codebreaker.”He doesn’t flinch or blink.“Let’s see what your fingers can do without a keyboard.”
I’m not surprised he knows about my criminal activities.With a family like his, stacked with money, muscle, and roots that can be traced back to Soviet nightmares, they probably dug up some juicy, high-profile shit on me.My hacks.My breaches.My fingerprints in digital blood.
But here’s the thing.
He only knows the tip of the iceberg.
Most people think the surface is all there is.The pretty white tip glinting in the sun.A couple of cyber crimes, a few blackmail trails, some corrupted files on a senator’s server.That’s child’s play.That’s bait.
The real iceberg is structured like the nine circles of hell.
The upper layer is a breeding ground for script kiddies and amateur hackers.Wannabes trading malware like porn and chasing dopamine highs with ransomware.
The professionals play in the middle layers.Governments.Corporate espionage.Silent wars waged in fiber-optic veins.It’s clean, efficient, and mostly anonymous.
But deep beneath it all, where no light touches, is where I live.
The bottom layer.
The abyss.
That’s where the monsters dwell.We don’t leave digital footprints.We leave ghost stories.We don’t crash systems.We dismantle lives, identities, infrastructures,nations.Down there, code isn’t written.It’s etched in bone.
That’s where I made my kingdom.
For all of Wolfson’s charm and knives and mobbed-up bloodlines, he’s never been that deep.He doesn’t even know that kind of cold exists.
Not yet.
But he will.
“You’re not the first pretty thing I’ve broken,” I murmur.
For a long second, we stare each other down, tension thickening the air, every heartbeat resonating like thunder.
I can squeeze the trigger and end this right now.One bullet and all that wolfish sex appeal would bleed out onto the floor.The Strakhs would retaliate, sure.But not before I disappear.Not before I take Dove and vanish.
