Chapter 12 - Harper
Inessa Markova steps into my world the way a cold front rolls over warm water. She carries herself with a softness that feels like velvet hiding a blade’s edge.
Everyone notices her before she speaks; they can’t help it. Her smile is polished, her stride precise, her perfume the kind that lingers even after she’s disappeared around a hallway corner.
The air cools by degrees when she enters a room. She introduces herself with palms exposed, voice dipped in charm.
“I’ve heard so much about you, Harper,” she purrs, as if we’re old friends reunited in some elegant tragedy. “You’re brilliant. A mind like yours keeps empires alive.”
I try not to let my spine stiffen. It was Mrs. Ignatov in front of Damian, and now it’s “Harper”?
Her compliments slide too easily, delivered always when someone else is within earshot, always with the faintest tilt of curiosity behind her eyes, like she’s taking measurements of me and my reactions.
Rivalry bites at the edges of her smile, but its source is a cipher.
What I can’t put my finger on is if she’s targeting me as Damian’s wife or as a trusted source within the Ignatov network?
I let her comments go with a mute nod, and a meek smile.
I’ve worked in tech labs where ego outweighs gratitude, corporate boardrooms where politeness is a sport. I know weaponized charm, and I know how it’s wielded.
But Inessa makes it look like a dance. It’s only when I get looks where I haven’t before, commands ignored where they were law before, and whispers behind my back where there were compliments before do the alarms start ringing in my head.
Right as I’m about to leave the break room, I hear a soft murmur. The same honeyed voice, the same ass-kissing she must be doing.
Only this time, her words pin me in my place.
“Oh yes, Harper is brilliant, of course she is… but one wonders how much authority she actually holds. After all, power through marriage is not quite the same.”
When my feet work and I leave the room, Inessa is nowhere to be seen, but the executive she was talking to startles when he sees me. He avoids my eyes, scurrying out of there before I can open my mouth.
From then on, I never hear anyone repeat her words directly, but I see the effects clear as a day. There’s hesitation in their responses, a fleeting pause before agreeing to my directives. A subtle recalibration of respect.
And I know exactly where it’s coming from.
I tried to chalk it up to paranoia. I told myself I’m imagining it. That maybe I’m overreacting.
Confirmation arrives on an ordinary afternoon, at the worst possible time, the final straw that breaks the camel’s back.
I give a simple command regarding system redundancy testing. It’s a basic procedure, routine as breathing.
The two analysts I’m commanding exchange glances. When my brow raises at their hesitance, one of them opens her mouth to ask, “Are you sure Mr. Ignatov approved—?”
Anger blinds my senses, the sheer disrespect making me see red.
Fucking Inessa. All of this is her doing.
I try to brush it off, to keep the emotions buried under logic. I remind myself she is nothing but a communications liaison.
But my feet storm through the floor, my rage leading me to no one but my husband’s office.
Enough is enough. He has to see the bullshit I’m putting up with.
He is at his desk, posture straight but exhausted, like he’s holding himself together with threads of steel that are beginning to fray. The room is dim, lit only by the amber glow of a desk lamp that casts warm shadows across his face that make him look older and harder.
“Did you invite her onboard?” I ask, trying to stop my voice from trembling like a wire under tension.
He looks up, slow, measured, almost too calm.
“Invite who?”
“Inessa,” I bite. “You know who I mean.”
His jade eyes are unreadable as he takes a beat too long to answer.
“Her assignment came through official channels.”
Official channels. Not what I asked.
That nonanswer enrages me even more.
“Did you approve it?” I snap.
His jaw tightens, just barely.
“It’s complicated.”
Another evasion. Another bullshit nonanswer.
Fury blooms through my chest in sharp, bright streaks.
“Complicated,” I echo. “Right. Just like everything else that somehow ends up in our house without explanation.”
He doesn’t rise to the challenge. He just watches me with that unreadable calm that always makes me feel like he’s seeing more than he’s saying.
That silence bothers me more than an affirmative would have.
Why is he acting like this? Why isn’t he answering me straight-up?
Is there something he’s trying to hide? Is there something else, something that’s related to the doubts I’ve tried to bury ever since I saw that godawful blonde talk to him so sweetly in his office?
“What am I supposed to think, Damian?” I grit through clenched teeth. “She’s been going around saying shit to the staff. They are hesitating. They’re second-guessing my instructions, Damian. And you sit here, saying nothing.”
“I’m handling it,” he replies coolly.
His words, his tone, his gaze, they’re all dismissive. He wasn’t like this even before we married, before everything went wrong. What the fuck has gotten into him?
“So you know,” I snarl. “You knew she’d be a problem.”
“I thought she might be.” He leans back in his chair, voice low. “That doesn’t make her ours to dismiss.”
Silence permeates the air, as loud as a glass plate being smashed on the floor. We stare at each other across the desk. He sits there with his unreadable stillness, me with my pulse hammering like a trapped thing. Neither of us yields.
The cold war clicks into place. It’s pride against pride, logic against emotion, silence against frustration. It settles between us like smoke, thin enough to see through but dense enough to choke on.
After a long moment, I pull back.
I have my answer.
The storm inside me needs somewhere else to go.
Back at my desk, I bury myself in the work. This work, that has always been mine, the work that never doubts me, the work that doesn’t question my authority because I built it with my own hands, my own mind.
Project Velvet Blade.
The remnants of it still pulse like a half-dead heartbeat in the depths of the archive system. Fragmented code, corrupted sequences, a project designed to manipulate perception itself. A weapon masquerading as intelligence.
And if Inessa is part of whatever is coming, Velvet Blade might be the only place I can find leverage.
You’ll see it, Damian Ignatov. I’ll make sure you fucking see it.
With spite fueling me, my fingers fly across the interface, matching corrupted blocks to older prototypes. The room around me fades, hours slip past unnoticed.
It’s no longer about proving anything to Damian, or his legacy. This is far personal. It’s about proving myself to me.
Proving it to the girl who survived Anton’s digital labyrinth, to the person I refuse to let anyone, not even a polished liaison with red-lacquered nails, diminish.
I exhale slowly, my pulse still sprints beneath my skin, restless, craving answers he refuses to share. If I could peel back his ribs and look directly at the truth, I think I would.
Anton’s fingerprints are everywhere.
Code scrolls across my monitor, each character a bead of cold sweat trailing down my spine. His revived network moves like an organism rebuilt from old bones.
I find it in media channels first. News feeds and entertainment conglomerates that look clean on the surface but hum with hidden carriers. Compressed packets disguised as marketing reports. A blackmail pipeline dressed up as public relations.
Like arteries pumped full of poison.
All of them lead me back to Inessa’s company.
She belongs from a seemingly innocuous communications firm threaded into too many intersections. Her logo is a subtle watermark in the metadata, almost invisible unless you go looking for it.
And, trust, I will tear this woman down like a detective does a murderer.
It doesn’t take me long to piece that Anton has been using her corporate infrastructure as a smuggling route. Digital contraband traveling beneath original content, disguised as file updates, leveraging her channels to distribute blackmail across Europe.
Inessa is disguised as liaison. In reality, she’s a carrier.
A sacrifice placed at the right angle to reflect suspicion away from the real players until it’s too late.
The realization slams into me like cold wind through a cracked window.
Does Damian know this?
I collect my findings and carry them downstairs to Damian’s office. My fingers tremble with the electric urgency of knowing I’ve uncovered something that matters.
He sits at his desk, sleeves rolled up, forearms tense, eyes trained on the documents spread out before him. He doesn’t look up when I enter.
I toss the handset on the desk.
“I think I found how Anton’s getting his leverage through corporate media. And it all points back to Inessa,” I declare righteously, crossing my arms smugly. Fucking asshole, always underestimating me.
Only then does he meet my gaze.
To my surprise, there’s no doubt or surprise in his eyes, just a smudge of satisfaction at being proven right.
Like he has already walked this path and is waiting for me at the end of it.
“Harper,” he says quietly, “I know.”
My jaw goes slack, hand dropping by my sides.
He knew. Was he ahead of me this whole time?
My jaw tightens.
“Why the fuck did you let me think you invited her?”
He remains silent, flipping the files he had been going through before I stormed in closed.
If he was ahead… did he say all that because he knew I’d storm in, holding the proof he wanted to see?
“You used me,” I state, neutral. “You already had your doubts about her. You think she’s useful?”
Of course he’s been studying her. Gauging her presence like a chess piece positioned to draw the enemy forward.
And he didn’t bother to tell me.
“She is useful,” he replies. “To Anton, therefore to us.”
Cunt.
I storm back to my cubicle, my heart pounding in my ears. My mind feels full of static as I drop my head into my hands.
He’s used me. He thinks he is protecting me, but the taste it leaves in my mouth is of betrayal. Sera’s warning resurfaces like a bruise pressed from the inside. Am I supposed to feel proud that he trusts my skill enough to let me find the truth myself?
I just feel like a pawn moved without my consent.
The servers hum with a low, steady vibration. My own heartbeat stutters when an encrypted alert flashes across my secondary screen.
I recognize the signature immediately—a ghost protocol I haven’t seen in years.
Unregistered and untagged, it slips through my firewall easily.
My throat constricts.
One line of text appears, no header, no sender:
He trusts the wrong woman.
What the fuck does this mean? Is this some kind of a joke?
Before I can move towards the keyboard, an attachment loads.
A grainy, slightly blurred picture, timestamped with tonight’s date, taken from a hallway camera angle.
Inessa.
She’s standing outside Damian’s office, and the door is partially open.
There’s nothing weird about the picture, except for the fact that I can see Damian’s shadow on the other side, way too close for comfort.
And there’s a grin on her face I can’t make sense of, the top button of her blouse popped open.
My stomach twists.
This is bait, right? It’s got to be.
Except it doesn’t sound right to me at all. I’ve seen the way Damian’s eyes have followed her, even in my presence, and I’ve seen the particular grin she reserves for him specially.
I close the window too fast, but the image is already seared into my mind. The ugly green monster rears its head again, and this time, I can’t beat it back with a stick.
The wheels of my chair roll back, bumping into the wall as I stand up abruptly. My palms are sweating.
I hate this.
I hate the tight coil in my chest, the question twisting itself into a noose: What if?
What if she’s not just a trap he’s setting? What if she’s a trap he’s falling for?
I pace the room.
Please let me be wrong.
He trusts the wrong woman.
Jealousy has now melted into fear. It’s ugly and it makes me feel small, but it’s there nonetheless.
I can’t lose him to that woman.
I just can’t.