Chapter 7 - Damian
Publicly, the marriage accomplishes what it was engineered to do.
The rumors stop. Whispers of liability cease the moment Harper stands beside me at the long marble table, my ring on her finger, her posture straight and unshakable under the weight of a room built on hierarchies sharpened to blades.
A wife is untouchable. A wife is protected. A wife is mine.
And the council understands that language better than any vow.
To them, it’s finished. But to me, it’s only begun.
Because I am no closer to peace than I was when she stood in my doorway covered in fear she tried to hide. If anything, having her in my space, my daily routines, my every field of awareness turns control into torment.
Every detail becomes a wound with memory behind it.
Her voice drifting down the corridor at night as she hums low, steady, threaded with that faint rasp she gets when she’s thinking too hard; her scent of coffee and warmth and something sweet in the kitchen every morning when I walk in to get my cup of coffee; a trailing fingerprint on the steel railing; or a hairpin left absentmindedly on my desk.
It’s maddening, the quiet domesticity of it. Maddening because it feels like a life I buried years ago, like a life I want.
She walks like she’s trying not to disturb the house. She pauses outside her door sometimes, exhales softly, as if working up the nerve to face another sleepless stretch of darkness.
And I lie there, jaw locked, telling myself not to go to her.
The urge isn’t protective, no.
It’s something darker, older, carved into the bones of the boy I used to be before power reworked me into its own shape.
I force myself to stay in bed until the footsteps stop but sleep rarely ever comes.
“I’ve got something,” Kiro says as he bursts into my office with a tablet in one hand, snapping me out of my reverie. “New breaches.”
The screen glows with a cluster of encrypted shells, stripped metadata, point-to-point leaps through dead nodes and falsified routing tables. But beneath the chaos, a pattern pulses like a heartbeat I recognize too well.
Anton’s encryption signature.
My jaw tightens.
“Where?”
“Tracing through Malta,” Kiro says. “Offshore relay. Sloppy enough to be bait, sharp enough to be dangerous.”
“And?”
“And that’s not the worst part.” He zooms into the decrypted fragments. The code rearranges into a symbol so familiar it might as well be etched on my skin.
The Ignatov crest.
Two crossed wolves encircling a blade.
Someone internal is cooperating. My stomach goes cold with the clinical edge of anger.
“Someone wants us to know they’re inside,” I mutter.
“Or they’re mocking us,” Kiro replies. “Either way, Anton isn’t working alone.”
I stare down at the unmistakable echo of betrayal.
This breach is only the surface, I realize grimly. Anton is probing, testing the waters. He’s building a map, and Harper’s involvement in the last incident marked her as a link in a chain he wants to pull.
She’s not bait anymore.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
Kiro raises an eyebrow.
“You mean you’ll let her handle it.”
The instinctive flare of possessive refusal nearly slips out—No, she’s not touching this again.
I swallow it before it can escape.
Harper is the only one who can read Anton’s patterns at the speed we need. She’s the variable I didn’t want to use but can’t afford not to.
“She assists,” I say finally. “Nothing more.”
“Right,” Kiro mutters, crossing his arms. “Duty, not trust.”
I glare at him.
He doesn’t flinch.
I find Harper in the lower operations wing, seated at the long metal table surrounded by three screens and an untouched glass of water.
Light intensified from reflecting off the snow filters through the narrow window above her, washing her in pale silver.
She’s concentrating so intensely she doesn’t notice me at first.
Her brows are drawn, mouth parted slightly as she works. Her fingers move over the keyboard with a precision that puts surgeons to shame.
A noise escapes me—a breath, maybe, or something less contained, but she hears it all the same. Her head lifts, eyes widening just slightly, like she wasn’t prepared for me to appear in her orbit. She masks it, sitting straighter, rolling her shoulders back as if bracing for interrogation.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I reply, though the word tastes like a lie.
Her gaze narrows. She doesn’t believe me, but she waits.
Kiro slips in, tossing her a tablet.
“Congratulations, Harper. You’ve been assigned.”
She scans the contents. Her skepticism is immediate. “Anton’s pattern?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And you’re giving me clearance?”
“I’m giving you responsibility,” I correct. “Don’t mistake it for anything else.”
She exhales shallowly, controlled.
“Right. Duty. Not trust.”
Kiro glances at me with a ghost of a smirk.
I resist the urge to put him through a wall.
Harper returns to the screen, pushing loose strands of red behind her ear. Her face shifts into focus as she starts tracing routes, dissecting encryption layers, peeling back digital skin until the breach’s architecture is laid open like an autopsy.
Her intensity is magnetic and dangerous.
God, how does she infuriate me so.
My pulse kicks, traitorous.
I position myself behind her, arms crossed, pretending to observe the data.
Her breathing slows when she sinks into problem-solving, just the tiniest crease appearing between her brows. The rhythm of her slender fingers is hypnotic, like she’s playing an instrument only she can hear.
I hate the way it affects me. This fucking familiar fascination coiling in my chest and this stupid marriage that hasn’t shifted the battlefield between us.
She leans in, the light hitting her cheek. Her eyelashes cast faint shadows on her skin. Every part of her feels like a memory I shouldn’t have kept and a future I’m not allowed to want.
She clears her throat.
“Your mole isn’t hiding well,” she murmurs, scrolling deeper into the breach. “They’re sloppy. Or overconfident. Or both.”
“You recognized that quickly,” I say.
“Of course I did.” She doesn’t look back. “You brought me here for a reason.”
Not just one reason, Harper.
There were a thousand, none of them strategic.
Her fingers stop suddenly, body freezing.
Eureka.
“Damian,” she whispers.
And the way she says my name—soft, focused, unaware of what it does to me—makes the room feel smaller.
I step closer.
The screen fills with strings of code, each one pulsing with Anton’s unmistakable signature.
But my gaze doesn’t stray away from her long enough.
She never was strategy, and knowing that terrifies me more than Anton ever could.
Just a few days after I’ve put Harper on the case, she’s sitting beside the main console, tendrils of blue-white code reflecting sharp lines across her cheekbones. The hour is late enough that the compound has settled into its nocturnal hush.
The servers are still running, humming with the consistency of trapped bees. She works with the contained ferocity of someone who knows she’s being watched and refuses to be intimidated by it.
Kiro left an hour ago, muttering something about packet logs and Malta’s relay boards. The moment the door shut behind him, the temperature in the room shifted subtly like it always does whenever Harper and I are left alone in a contained environment.
She scrolls through Anton’s encryption signature, mouth set in a narrow line. Her fingers move over the keys, and like the pervert I am, I feel something hot and unwelcome coil low in my chest.
Focus, dumbass.
She doesn’t look at me when she says, “You inserted a command I didn’t authorize.”
“To avoid corrupting the metadata.”
“That’s not why you did it.” She finally swivels toward me, narrowing her eyes. “You did it because you don’t trust anyone to do something without your fingerprints on it.”
A small, sharp laugh escapes me. “I don’t trust easily. And for good reason.”
She stands, pushing her chair back with a controlled force that still manages to echo off the steel cabinets.
“You treat every person like a variable. Something to be manipulated until it fits whatever outcome you’ve already chosen.”
“And you don’t?” I ask, rising as well. “You use logic like armor.”
“Because logic doesn’t lie.” Her voice cracks like ice. “People do.”
We face each other across the small divide of the operations room. Her breath rises and falls in short bursts; my own feels lodged somewhere between my ribs, refusing to move. The fluorescent lights overhead cast an unforgiving glow, stripping both of us down to raw edges.
“You think I treat everyone like assets?” I say quietly.
“Isn’t that what we are to you?”
“Assets are predictable,” I answer before I can stop myself. “People are not.”
The truth, once spoken, settles between us with an almost audible thud. Those chocolate pools of hers soften as she looks at me.
“You don’t get to hide behind strategy,” she whispers. “Not right now.”
But I do. Strategy is the only constant left.
I open my mouth to reply, but the lights flicker. The monitors go black, their sudden silence deafening.
A blackout.
The air stills in the dark as the room dissolves into shadow. I should call for Kiro. I should check the fuse routing to see if someone triggered the power grid externally.
I do none of that.
Because Harper is close enough for me to touch and the darkness makes the distance between us disappear entirely.
My breathing sounds too loud. Hers too soft. She smells like that sweet scent of coffee and the memory from that night in the car crashes into me again. I feel the warmth radiating from her, feel the tension vibrating in the small space between us.
“We should—” she begins, her voice barely a whisper.
Neither of us move, the air thick enough to drown in. An instinct I’ve caged for years strains toward her, rattling its bars now with dangerous persistence. I can tell she feels it too in the way her breath hitches, in the way her silhouette trembles almost imperceptibly.
A knock explodes against the door. Harper jerks back like she’s been burned
The sound cleaves the moment cleanly in half. My fists clench reflexively, nails biting into my palms. The lights stutter back on, harsh and blinding as reality reasserts itself.
Kiro pushes into the room, carrying urgency like a shadow thrown over his shoulders.
“Boss,” he says, breath uneven. “We have a problem.”
I look at Harper once before refocusing. Her eyes flick away immediately, as if punishing us both for what almost happened in the dark.
“What kind of problem?” I ask.
Kiro hesitates, and I know instantly the news is bad.
“It’s a leak,” he says. “Anton’s people dumped files across three channels—anonymous forums, encrypted chains, even a private intelligence feed. They’re claiming Harper was an informant. That she fed intel to outside agencies years ago.”
Harper stiffens beside me.
I go very, very still.
Kiro continues, voice tight. “They included fabricated logs, falsified transcripts… Someone put real time into making the accusations look credible.”
My vision narrows. My anger burns cold this time, fury blurring my vision.
Of all the angles Anton could have attacked, he chose her reputation and her credibility. Her place under my protection.
“This is meant for me,” I say, every word sharp. “He’s using her as a door.”
“Seems so,” Kiro says quietly.
The room feels smaller now. Harper crosses her arms, the movement defensive but steady. She looks at Kiro, then at me, chin lifted with defiant calm.
“I’m not staying locked away because Anton wants to provoke you,” she says.
“Yes,” I answer, already deciding. “You are.”
Her eyes flash.
“So that’s it? You isolate me under the pretense of safety? That’s not protection—it’s controlled captivity.”
“Call it whatever you want,” I say. “But you’re not leaving the compound.”
“You can’t make this a gilded prison just because it’s convenient.”
I step closer, lowering my voice.
“Convenient? You think this is convenience?”
Her breath catches, but her expression doesn’t falter.
“If I lose you,” I say, quietly and without armor, “I lose the only leverage I have left.”
Silence punches the room hollow.
The admission tastes like surrender, and I hate how true it is. I intended it as strategy, a simple statement of fact. But the moment the words exit my mouth, I hear them as something else entirely.
A confession.
Harper blinks, stunned for a moment. The tension between us liquefies into something sharper, something dangerously close to understanding.
She just watches me wordlessly, searching for whatever truth I didn’t mean to give.
Kiro shifts uncomfortably.
“I’ll coordinate containment,” he offers, quietly retreating.
I nod once without looking away from her.
The door shuts behind him, leaving us alone again.