“The floor's hard. Let's go to bed.”
“Not yet,” I whine, nuzzling into his chest. His body is so big and incredibly warm. “Five minutes.”
“Two minutes,” he teases, hugging me close.
“Okay,” I say sleepily, feeling happier and more at ease than I have in days. “Do I get the key now?” His laugh is warm against my hair. “You get everything,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Come on, let's get you to bed.”
I'm barely conscious as he lifts me into his arms and carries me to his bedroom. The sheets are cool and soft against my skin, and when he slides in beside me, pulling me close, I finally let myself relax completely.
His voice is the last thing I hear before sleep claims me. “I love you, Fiona.”
“Love you,” I mumble against his chest. “Raziel.”
I feel his smile against my hair as I drift off.
Epilogue
Six Years Ago
Lorenzo
Six years ago, I stumbled across a name on a site full of script kiddies with half-baked exploits. Everyone wanted to be a hacker, quite insulting to a title you had to earn, but the site was full of people who used pre-made programs to hack into systems without even understanding how they worked, just so they could brag about it.
This site was full of them, and I had every intention of skipping off when I noticed a name.
Var.
The profile picture was one I was familiar with. As was the name. Having the user name of a Norse goddess intrigued me a little, and I found myself looking up their work. A part of me was skeptical about the user being yet another script kiddie, but she wasn't. One look at her latest project, and I was hooked. The code she'd written was…clean, efficient, almost elegant. The way she'd approached the user authentication process was genuinely clever. I was almost charmed. Almost.
But then I saw it. The flaw in her system. Her encryption keys were hardcoded into the client-side JavaScript. A rookieoversight or accident, easily exploited. But the rest…the rest was promising.
I was hooked. So I reached out to Var to point out a mistake that would have been exploited if the site wasn’t full of phonies. The error was fixed in hours, impressively fast. And I knew then that Var was special.
Then years later, I met Fiona O'Shea. And I knew she was special, too.
And I was right.
As I stare at my blank computer screen, I can't help but smile at how far my little flame has come. From making rookie mistakes in her work to hacking my system.
“What the hell just happened?” My assistant stares at my blank screen in horror. One minute, we were reviewing a report on a program we're working on, and the next, my screen went blank. “Did the power go out?”
“No,” I chuckle, pointing at the light on the monitor. “Someone just hacked into the system.”
“What?” He cries out, alarmed. “H-how? This is the most secure system in the whole fucking city.” He looks around, hands useless as he tries to figure out what to do, but then he turns to me. “Wait, why aren't you doing anything? Why am I the only one panicking here?”
“Because I know who did it,” I say with a proud smile, watching as the screen flickers to life and a message box appears.
Oliver peers at the screen and reads the words out loud. “You have been hacked. Solve these puzzles to regain control of your system.” Then he straightens up. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It means my wife misses me,” I say with a grin, patting the horrified kid on the shoulder. “Let's call it a day, Oliver. Go home. I have a puzzle to solve.”
Oliver looks at me like I've grown a second head before quietly leaving. I smile after him. At just twenty-three, the kid might be young, but after three years of working for me, he has proven himself in ways my former assistant never did. Three years ago, we went through a complete overhaul of several departments and fired nearly half of the company after a serious audit. When the job positions were posted, we received applications in the thousands. Fiona and I carried out intense vetting before picking an IT team we were confident in. Oliver, fresh out of college, was incredibly smart and honest in a way that stood out the most.
“Alright then,la piccola flamma. Let's get to work,” I say, rolling up my sleeves and cracking my knuckles.
The first puzzle is a series of numbers, disorganized, and it takes me a couple of minutes of rearranging them to realize they're GPS coordinates. I laugh, grabbing my coat and heading out.
A sandwich shop.
