Chapter 13 - Damian
A thin line of pale winter light cuts across my desk, severing the remnants of last night’s battles: Harper’s venom, my restraint, her wounded suspicion. The air still holds the shape of the argument we didn’t finish, the accusations she swallowed but didn’t hide.
Of course, I don’t look toward her office door or listen to her footsteps.
Fucking loser.
Screens bloom awake across the wall, a line of code glowing in red, stretching from Cyprus to Hong Kong to a shell corporation with a name so forgettable it screams importance.
The false intel I fed through Inessa’s channels worked. Anton bit the bait with the hunger of a man who believes himself untouchable.
Kiro steps in without knocking and hands me a tablet.
“Movement,” he says simply.
His voice is gravel. The screen shows me a fresh wire transfer routed through Anton’s offshore maze, landing in a Moscow courier service that prides itself on anonymity.
“Courier picks up the package at thirteen twenty,” Kiro adds, watching me with those storm-gray eyes that always seem to anticipate violence before it arrives.
“And delivers where?”
“We’re narrowing the radius. Likely northern district.”
A good place to vanish a man or a secret.
I nod once, every piece sliding into place.
Every piece except the one woman whose silence weighs more than this operation.
I feel her before I see her. Harper’s presence enters a room like a shift in gravity. She walks in without acknowledging me.
Copper hair pinned back, jaw set, expression composed with the kind of precision that only comes from anger held too long. She wears that quiet defiance like jewelry.
Her eyes flick to Kiro directly, not me.
“Send me the encryption route,” she says to him.
Kiro looks at me for confirmation. The fact that he doesn’t simply hand it over is its own message: he wants the go-ahead.
I give a clipped nod.
“You’ll get full access.”
Harper doesn’t thank me. She only takes the tablet Kiro offers, fingers brushing the screen but never the hand.
She is ice sheathed over fire, and I am the fool that made her this way.
She turns to leave.
“Harper.”
She stops at my tone, shoulders stiffening, but she doesn’t look back.
“Don’t fall behind on the live trace,” I say, instead of the words I want to actually say. “Timing will be tight.”
“I don’t fall behind,” she answers after a beat, closing the door behind her with a sharp click.
The room feels smaller without her, like the oxygen left with her footsteps.
Kiro exhales slowly.
“She’s angry.”
I shoot him a dry look.
“You think?”
He shrugs one shoulder. This is the closest he’s ever gotten to humor.
“She’s usually… less murderous.”
She is. The fact that I caused the shift sits in my chest like an unspent bullet. Unfortunately, I have to sit with it. I have to let it be at least until Anton’s trap snaps shut.
And not until I confirm what Inessa really is.
After Kiro leaves, I force myself back into the operational flow, but Harper’s silence trails me like a ghost. It pulls at the back of my mind, a persistent ache, the echo of a door closed too hard.
Mikhail bursts in an hour later, bringing the scent of cold air and old resentment.
His glare lands on me, then slides to the empty chair Harper abandoned earlier.
“You’re bringing her into this?” he asks, voice low with disapproval. “Now? When she’s compromised?”
A muscle ticks in my jaw.
“She isn’t compromised.”
“She’s emotional.”
“So are you,” I snap before I can stop myself.
Mikhail’s eyes narrow.
“Don’t mistake my concern for emotion. You’re letting your attachment to her—”
“That attachment,” I cut in, “is the reason she’s alive. And the reason this operation won’t collapse.”
He steps closer, all brute presence and unspoken threat.
“You’re protecting her at the expense of clarity.”
“No,” I answer. “I’m involving her because she sees what the rest of us don’t.”
“Or because you think she’ll forgive you if she feels needed,” he scoffs.
The words hit harder than they should.
He’s wrong.
But the truth is that everything in me wants to pull her back into my arms, if only to know she hasn’t drifted somewhere I can’t reach. I look away first.
“Judgment,” I say quietly, “was poisoned long before Harper.”
Mikhail studies me for a long, dangerous moment. Then he leaves as quick as he appeared. The door slams, and the glass trembles with the impact.
I stand still until the vibrations fade.
Then, as if summoned by my failure to keep the distance I claim to want, Harper reappears in the doorway. She holds her laptop under her arm, screen still glowing with live code.
“Courier rerouted,” she says, her tone clipped. “Your timeline just shrank.”
There’s no hint of the warmth she used to give me without effort.
But she’s here, isn’t she, despite the seed of jealousy I hate myself for provoking.
I nod once and gesture her inside. She steps closer but only close enough for professionalism.
“We have one shot at this,” she says. “If Anton realizes the intel was planted—”
“He won’t,” I cut in.
She gives a small, humorless laugh.
“You can’t guarantee that.”
“I can.” My gaze holds hers, steady, controlled. “Because he’s predictable and because I have you.”
For a fraction of a second, the mask behind her eyes cracks, before it disappears.
“Send me the courier’s updated route,” she says. “I want to overlay it with the last three hours of account traffic.”
She’s already working as she speaks—fingers flying over the keys, copper hair falling over her furrowed brow.
God, how I wish I could put my tongue against her neck right now and watch her squirm.
I watch her in spite of myself. I know she feels it.
But she doesn’t meet my gaze. And that alone spreads numbness across my chest that I haven’t felt since I buried my father.
Kiro returns with updated intel.
“Courier moving early.”
Harper looks up sharply. “How early?”
“Now.”
She snaps her laptop closed.
“Then we need to leave.”
Her eyes flick to me, nothing but professional distance in them.
I nod, already dialing Kiro. “Kiro, prep the team.”
Harper brushes past me to grab her coat, taking extra care to make sure our arms don’t touch. The careful action stings somewhere deep in my chest.
The stakeout begins under a sky the color of bruised steel. Wind is carving down alleyways, streetlights flickering with the kind of electricity that predicts bad choices.
Harper sits in the back of the surveillance van, laptop balanced on her knees, face illuminated in pulse-blue code. Her focus is absolute. Kiro feeds her live intercepts from the body cam of our shadow trailing the courier.
It’s of a man in a gray coat, briefcase in hand, all casual and calm.
“Packet’s transferring,” Harper whispers.
She brushes a strand of hair behind her ear, fingers trembling just slightly, a detail no one else but me would catch. I see too much when it comes to her.
“Encryption’s… different,” she murmurs, leaning closer to the screen. “He’s using dynamic cycle masking. Old-school, but modified. Give me a second.”
Her brow furrows. Her breath slows as she loses herself in the code. And I lose myself watching her.
When she solves it, she taps the comm.
“Courier is heading to the drop point. Ready when you are.”
We move.
The intercept is quick. The courier never even sees Kiro’s man coming before the briefcase is switched, the decoy inserted, the real drive secured.
Inside, the device hums with Anton’s next chapter. And when Harper cracks it open in the van, the truth floods the screen in lines of violence disguised as logistics.
Shipping fronts. Laundered funds and political targets.
She inhales sharply.
“This… Damian, this isn’t just leverage. He’s planning assassinations using Ignatov routes.”
Kiro curses. Mikhail mutters something sharp through our comms. My pulse stays steady, but the pressure behind my eyes spikes.
“We’ll analyze it fully when we get back,” I say.
Our victory is short-lived and fake. I don’t even get more than three hours to bask in it because—
My phone detonates with alerts; news articles, leaked files and images, all about me leading the raid.
The team, the drive—everything has gotten out. Kiro’s gadgets are all ringing, the same way mine are, and Harper stands there, still clicking away at her laptop, only to be flooded with notifications a second after ours.
“Impossible.” Kiro’s disoriented face meets mine as he breathes. “It was locked down. There were only—”
Three people: Harper, Inessa, and me.
My stomach goes cold.
Harper’s face drains of color as she scans her own server. “This is not me. Damian, I didn’t—”
“I know,” I cut in immediately.
It surprises her. Maybe it surprises me too. But the certainty is instinctive. Still, someone did.
I don’t even notice when Mikhail enters the room, expression granite. I only hear him when he says, “The council wants answers.”
A leak of this scale is the kind that topples leaders; of course they want answers.
My brain is static from then on. How I manage to get to the council, to my seat, my face carefully blank, I have no clue. Blood is roaring loudly in my ears, almost as loud as the accusatory glances being thrown at me from the moment I step in.
Harper’s presence near the door is what grounds my feet, otherwise I would have floated away. Men and women who have trusted me for years suddenly watch me like a predator who has revealed his fangs. I know the silent speculation, insinuation that’s going on behind the muted whispers.
Others laugh under their breath at the possibility I staged the entire leak to destroy rivals. Pervasive, like moisture seeping through old walls, invisible until the damage is irreversible, I am well aware of this suspicion and how it poisons.
Inessa moves gracefully between clusters of leaders, offering sympathy with the same softness she uses when she lies.