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“Hear me out.” She cuts me off, and I can see the steel in her eyes. “I want information. After this is over, you tell me what you’re really holding me for. No more games, no more half-truths. The real reason.”

I consider this. It’s a reasonable request, and giving her information won’t compromise my position.

“Agreed.”

She nods and moves toward the main terminal. “Get out of my way.”

I step back and watch.

She takes the chair in front of the terminal with a familiarity that suggests she’s spent most of her life in front of screens. Her fingers move across the keyboard, pulling up data, running diagnostics, mapping the attack in real time.

The room is silent except for the sound of her typing and the occasional ping of an alert. Kirill and Andrei have stepped back, giving her space, but I can see their expressions—skepticism, concern, and something that might be disbelief.

She works fast. Within minutes, she’s identified the attack and started building a countermeasure. Within ten minutes, she’s found a vulnerability in the ransomware code that our team missed entirely.

“There,” she says, pointing at a section of code on the screen. “The attacker left a backdoor. They’re using it to monitor the system, but it goes both ways. I can use it to inject a kill command.”

“Do it,” I say.

She does. The screens flash, the alerts change, and then the system begins to respond. The locked protocols start unlocking. The frozen transactions begin processing. The attack signature fades from our monitors.

It takes her twenty-three minutes to do what my team couldn’t do in over an hour.

When it’s done, she sits back and looks at me. There’s no triumph in her expression, no satisfaction. Just a quiet acknowledgment of a job completed.

“It’s fixed,” she says. “Your system is back online. I’d recommend patching that vulnerability before someone else finds it.”

The room is still. Kirill and Andrei are staring at her with expressions I’ve never seen on their faces—something between respect and wariness.

I dismiss them with a gesture. They file out, leaving me alone with Davina.

She stands up from the chair, stretching her shoulders. “You owe me an explanation.”

“I do.” I’m still looking at the screens, at the data flowing normally again, at the evidence of what she just accomplished. “Not tonight.”

“That wasn’t the deal.”

“The deal was after this is over. This isn’t over. The attack is neutralized, but we need to trace the source, understand the motive, and ensure it doesn’t happen again. That work will continue for days.”

She looks like she wants to argue, but she doesn’t. She’s too smart to push when she’s already gained ground.

“Tomorrow, then,” she says.

“Tomorrow.”

I call for the guard to escort her back to her room. She walks past me without another word, her shoulder brushing mine for a moment as she passes.

I watch her go. Her curvy hips sway as she walks, and I catch myself watching her disappear into the distance.

When she’s gone, I turn back to the screens. The system is running normally now, the crisis averted, the threat neutralized. I’m not thinking about the attack anymore.

She’s not just skilled. She’s exceptional.

Chapter Eleven - Davina

I don’t sleep well after the system fix.

It’s not the room, and it’s not the guards, and it’s not the fact that I’m still being held captive by a criminal organization that probably wants me dead.