I want her under control.
If I have to lock her down myself, I will.
I don’t want to go to war with Alexei. Which might happen if I take Ella away from here. Or … maybe not. Maybe he’ll be grateful that I took care of the threat and he can still appear innocent to his woman. Well, as innocent as he can seem. Hard to tell with him.
Those three women—Ella, Alana, Rosalie—they’retight. They’re twisted into each other’s lives like rope. If I hurt Ella, even by accident, it won’t just be Alexei who wants my head.
Alana will come for me.
Rosalie, too.
Which means my brother’s life gets caught in the fallout.
“Leave Ella to me,” I say, and I mean it.
Thorn knows me better than anyone else walking this planet. He looks at me like he’s reading more than I want him to. “Are you interested in her?”
“God. No.” The denial comes out too fast. Too sharp. I clear my throat. “Yes, she’s beautiful and brilliant. But so is the black widow spider.”
He doesn’t say a word. Just raises one brow.
So I shut up.
He really does need a vacation, and I need him gone so I can figure out what the hell is going on with my health and the fucking garnet that seems just fine running our servers now. No longer diseased, which confuses me since I’m definitely having issues. With him out of the way, I have options. I can take Ella out of play. Quietly. I’ll handle it myself. I won’t risk someone else screwing it up.
I don’t want the blowback to touch Thorn. I can live with Alana hating me. I can live with Rosalie’s fury. I can even live with Alexei sending his entire organization after me.
But I can’t live with letting anything harm my brother.
I can have Ella dropped on an island in the middle of nowhere with no signal, no server, no keyboard, no power grid. Just sun, water, and books. She’ll have to take up reading. Gardening. Maybe swimming.
The image of her on a beach clicks through my brain. Her bare feet in the sand. Her skin golden under the sun. Naked. Wild hair down her back. No phones. No firewalls. Just Ella skinny-dipping at night.
My whole body tightens instantly.
I shift my stance and clench my jaw.
This is a problem.
A real one.
FOUR
Ella
I’m in.
The Aquarius Social firewall gives way, but not easily. This is the third layer, and it’s built to hide something. Not protect. Hide.
I should feel guilty, maybe a little, for hacking into Alana’s company. Or her dad’s, anyway. I’d almost too easily sent the code through the system that opened up doors for me. Those poor idiots in that tent. It had been child’s play. But I also know that Aquarius Social has been working to gain entrance into TimeGem’s servers. Wesley had let that little fact slip while we’d been miniature golfing, and I’d shrugged it off on the surface while already planning. Yeah, I feel guilty about it, but not enough to stop.
As far as I’m concerned, TimeGem is mine. I’ll protect it, even if I don’t have control yet. Lines of code scroll across my screen as I infiltrate Aquarius Social. I isolate the threads connected to the aquamarine crystal protocols.These aren’t just random encryption strings. They’re tied to resonance-based shielding systems. The kind integrated for high-clearance data. The system should be clean.
But something’s wrong.
There’s a pattern embedded in the subcode. It’s close to the crystal resonance profile, but not exact. The frequency is forced. Someone has tried to mimic the aquamarine interface, and they’ve come close. Too close.
Someone has been inside the Aquarius system. Someone who shouldn’t be—besides me, that is. I easily find the hack from Wesley trying to get into TimeGem. He’s not even close, and I have to wonder if he’s noticed the trail in his own system.
