9. LEO
NINE
LEO
My head throbs, but the pain… the pain is an old friend. The sting in my jaw—a broken tooth—, the burning in my stomach where Dante's punches had landed. All of it is music. The problem is the absence of sound now. His absence.
My erection still pulses. He didn't give me what I wanted. What I begged for. Not the end. Not the climax. He left me here, suspended, vibrating with an unsatisfied need. This refined cruelty… I love and hate it at the same time.
But, as much as I like this punishment, why did he run?
I lift my head and take a deep breath. The air in this shitty house is the same as before. The same bland, dead air I've been trying to escape for years.
This I don't like. He could deny me orgasm as many times as he wanted, and I would beg again every single time. But I don't like that he left me, not here . Again.
I look at my erection, still hard, pulsing, waiting. It's living proof of his violence, of his presence in me.
My hand slides over my own cock, copying his rough movements. The thumb. The knuckles. The squeeze.
I close my eyes, reliving every detail. His scent. The fury in his eyes. The taste of my own blood on his tongue. Every time he denied me, every time he forced me to beg, I had to work hard to keep from coming. And now, I have to finish what he started.
I moan, low. It doesn't come even close to the sound he pulled out of me.
His touch is addictive. Violent, humiliating.
I bite my lip and let out another moan, louder, deeper. This is not enough.
Dante's fingers, his mouth. His body, pressed against mine. His anger, his power. The taste of his lust and hatred.
My cock pulses again. The memory of his body, the feel of him, is too intense.
I clench my fists.
It's not him.
It's not the same.
The Volkovs. Their systems. Their networks. Dante's life. It's all an open book to me now. He may have thought he erased my digital footprint, but I know how to make ghosts. And I know how to hunt them.
I type shortcodes into the terminal. I don't care about their money. I don't care about their secrets for profit. I care about Dante .
I'm already in their peripheral systems. The smaller, neglected ones. The sound systems in their outposts. The internal printers. The tracking systems for their shipments. Now, I'll find their internal communication logs. Their meeting schedules. Dante's personal calendar.
What to do.
I need something that makes Dante crawl back to me. To me , specifically, and not anybody else—not another hacker, not a woman, not a man, not another lover.
I need to find a critical breach.
I spend hours diving deeper into their network, mapping their weaknesses, cataloging their vulnerabilities. Not just the ones I found in their printed code, but the ones I'm finding now, the subtle backdoors and faulty protocols they missed.
I'd pinpoint a vulnerability in their Atlantic City casino payout system—something that would start costing them real money—but I'm unsure if that's sufficient. My interruptions with their shipments most likely already did something to their bank accounts, but that feels little. Too little.
My phone rings. It's weird because no one ever calls me.
I take it, hidden in a drawer under the laptop's table, and check the name.
It's Chad.
I glance at the time. My sick leave is still active.
I ignore it. It rings again. And again.
With a sigh that's more annoyance than exhaustion, I finally answer.
"Yeah, Chad? You know I'm dying of a rare tropical disease, right?" I don't care to pretend my sick leave is real. Chad can't reason for shit about anything that doesn't involve his own name and five compliments anyway.
" Leo, my champ! " Chad's voice punches through the speaker, far too cheerful and loud for a man dealing with anything. " So glad you picked up! Look, I know you're... indisposed, but we've got a bit of a pickle here. "
A "pickle." Chad's pickles usually involve him forgetting a semicolon or leaving a fucking bracket open. "What is it, Chad?"
" The internal server, buddy. It's... well, it's not playing nice. We've got some data corruption, and the system's just kinda... frozen. Nicole's been trying everything, but you know how she gets. " He chuckles, a guilty and annoying sound. " She thinks it's my fault! "
It probably is.
"Did you check if the server's plugged, Chad?," I mutter flatly.
" That's what I thought too! But I checked!
Even got Nicole to check! And... it's plugged in!
That's why it's a pickle! " His voice is bubbling with his own misplaced sense of accomplishment for checking a plug.
" And we need it for the Q3 financial reports.
Total standstill, champ. No one else can figure it out. "
I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose. Chad is useless. I wonder all the time how he even managed to rise to the manager role. I wonder, in fact, how all of my coworkers got the job to begin with.
"Fine. What do you want me to do?"
" Can you... swing by the office? Just for a bit? You're the only one who understands the... the server codes. " He recognizes it too. No one knows shit about what they're doing. " I'll make it worth your while. Pizza? My treat! "
Pizza. As if cheap, greasy pizza would compensate for having to breathe the same air as Chad. The idea of going back to that gray cubicle was bland, tasteless. A pathetic excuse of a manager was dragging back the monotony of my daily existence that I had just escaped.
"Fine, Chad," I say. "I'll be there."
" My champ! Knew I could count on you! Hurry up, okay? "
He hangs up before I retort.
I toss the phone onto the desk. The sheer idiocy of my day job. To fix a stupid server.
Chad's code is a monstrosity. He probably tried to implement some "innovative" new feature he saw on a LinkedIn post, then forgot to close a loop or declared a variable inside a conditional statement instead of globally.
Or, worse, he plugged an old USB drive from his personal collection into the main server and infected it with some ancient, forgotten virus from the early 2000s.
That would be just like him, to use the company server for his personal shirtless photos.
I stand up, grabbing a hoodie from the back of my chair. My body still aches.
The walk to the subway is a blur of gray concrete and droning city noise.
I hate it. I hate the mundane faces, the predictable movements, the suffocating normalcy.
I notice strangers looking at me curiously, even worriedly, and I only understand when I see my reflection in the grimy windows: the dark circles under my eyes, and the bruises.
A blossoming mark on my jaw, another faint one on my cheekbone, a crooked black and blue nose, and a fresh cut on my lower lip. Dante.
I reach the office building, a nondescript glass and steel tower. Inside, the lobby is a hive of identical drones in business casual. I head for the turnstiles, the kind with facial recognition cameras that scan your face and beep you through.
I place my face in front of the scanner. It whirrs.
ACCESS DENIED
What the fuck? My ID badge is still valid. I try again.
ACCESS DENIED
My patience, already thin, begins to fray. I glare at the camera. Is it the angle? The lighting? Or…
The fucking bruises. Of course . My face isn't registering correctly. The system probably flagged me as an unrecognized or, worse, a damaged employee.
With a growl of irritation, I turn towards the reception desk. Brenda, a woman whose smile was as fake as her blonde highlights, looks up.
"Good morning, sir! Can I help you?" Her voice is saccharine sweet.
"My badge isn't working," I mumble, trying to keep my head low, hoping she wouldn't notice.
Too late. Her eyes, magnified by thick glasses, zero in on my face. Her fake smile falters, replaced by a wide-eyed stare.
"Oh my goodness!" she gasps, losing her sweetness. "Mr. Leo! What on earth happened to your face?!"
I clench my jaw, the pressure sending a fresh throb through the bruise. "Just... a minor accident." I force a neutral tone, trying not to snap. It is none of her business. It is none of anyone's business.
Brenda leans forward, her voice dropping to a theatrical whisper, as if she were privy to some juicy gossip. "A fall? Or... did someone...?"
"It's fine, Brenda. Can you just manually let me through?"
She types something into her computer. The turnstile whirs again with a soft click. "There you go, Mr. Leo. Do be careful!"
I stride through the gates, ignoring her last remark, and head straight for the elevators. I press the button for the IT floor. My cage.
The elevator ride is slow, the canned music doing nothing to soothe my frayed nerves. I step out onto the IT floor, a brightly lit expanse of cubicles. The air hums with the drone of computers and the quiet murmur of suppressed despair.
Nicole is perched on the edge of her cubicle, her usual messy bun threatening to unravel with a forgotten coffee cup in her hand. Her eyes light up as she spots me, in a genuine, unadulterated warmth that always seems out of place in this cynical office.
"Leo! Oh, thank goodness you're here! Chad's been pulling his hair out—" She breaks off mid-sentence, her bright smile faltering as her gaze lands on my face. "Oh, my god, Leo! What happened to your face?!"
Just then, Chad pops his head out of his office with his comb-over askew. He beams when he sees me. "Leo, my champ! You made it! I knew I could count on you, you magnificent genius! Now, about this server?—"
He looks at my face, and his already red skin somehow goes a shade redder. His smile vanishes. "Good heavens, Leo! What in the blazes happened to your face?!"
Just what I need. Two rounds of superficial concern before I even get to fix the same damn server for the hundredth time.