16. DANTE #4
"So, if I understood correctly…" he says. He approaches my desk, walks around it. "You bought an entire company, installed a state-level surveillance system… and now you're threatening to destroy an innocent woman's life… because I smiled at her?"
He gives me a half-smile. I watch him say these words as he gets closer and closer, until he crosses the table separating us and is beside me. My chair turns towards him and I expect him to kneel before me, spitting more of his sick profanities to explain exactly who Nicole Davis is to him.
He presses one knee beside the chair. He leans in, gets closer, and I find no reason to stop him from sitting on my lap, even with a red impulse screaming at me to push him off and make it clear he can't say those things and put on a show with someone else in front of the cameras.
He brushes against my chest. He slides his hands to my shoulders and presses his weight against my groin, breathing heavily, letting a crimson flush paint his face.
"You don't need to threaten her," he says, softly. "She doesn't matter. Why don't you threaten me ? Tell me what you'd do to me if I smiled at her again…"
He leans into me, whispers his shameless invitation in my ear, closing his eyes in anticipation. You don't need to threaten her. My jaw locks.
"You're protecting her, huh?" I question, grabbing his hip. I squeeze. I need to take this out on something. "Why?"
He shivers and says, fascinated, "Protecting her?
Oh, mister…" then sighs, brushing his mouth against mine.
"Are you really jealous? I don't care about her…
I care about the fact that the idea of her touching me drives you crazy ," he whispers, sliding his hands inside my blazer.
He grips my shirt with his nails, leaves a warm, wet kiss on the corner of my jaw.
Of course, he'll piss me off until I break his bones; he doesn't try to explain himself, doesn't justify it.
I tighten my fingers on his thigh—I expect him to moan like the whore he is, to beg me to rip off his clothes, to ask for anything.
I expect him to provoke me, to admit to fucking Nicole in the fucking restrooms.
He doesn't.
He says, slowly, as if his entire body wasn't reacting to me, "I'll do as you say. I'll stay away from her. I'll be good to you… I just have one condition."
My hand trembles with the effort of holding it back from closing around his throat, and he dares to say that—a condition .
"You are not in the position to condition anything, Nyx."
I spit the words through clenched teeth, but he just gives me that half-smile he always has before doing the worst things.
"But if I'm out of your sight, you don't know what I'm doing," he murmurs, tracing a line down my chest with his fingertip. "What I'm thinking. Who I'm thinking about." He pulls back to look me in the eyes. "I'll obey you. Every rule. But, at night... let me sleep in your bed."
His words stun me, and for a second—just a second—my hold loosens, and he takes advantage to run his fingers down my arm, taking my hand off his hip, placing my palm between his legs—hard as steel.
"I said you don't give me conditions, fucker," I hiss, grabbing his wrist to prevent him from continuing this idiocy. "You sleep where I tell you to sleep. And if I tell you to sleep on the floor at the foot of my bed like the fucking dog that you are, that's what you do. Understood?"
He bites his lip. His pupils dilate. And he doesn't stop his hips from grinding into my hand.
"You'd like to do that... ? Keep me as a pet. You don't know how good I can be," he says. He gets off on his own fantasy, moaning as he puts more weight on my hand. "How well I'll take your punishment if you think I'm disobedient. If you want me on the floor... I'll sleep there, mister..."
I can't fucking stand his filthy words, and I can't stand his goddamned look —so turned on and eager for the violence I don't have to offer him, not right now. My fingers press against his crotch to stop him.
"What the hell do you think we are? Lovers?"
"No..." He gives me a lewd smile. "You don't love me."
Fuck this. Fuck him.
I tighten my grip and squeeze. His moan dies in his throat. "I don't."
This is the answer to his confession. I think I'm falling in love with you . This is the answer . I don't love you . I can't love him, or anyone.
"But you like that I do," he whispers, leaning forward, running his hand over my cheek.
I see the lust in his eyes—it's not him anymore, but that slut , Nyx in his most twisted form.
He brushes his lips against mine and smiles, in a daze.
"That I think of you all the time, mister. .. That you're always in my head..."
I think of him all the time. He's always in my head too. But it's an unbalanced, unstable fixation, not a confession .
I pull my hand away. I push him and get up—this is getting out of control, and I'm losing my ability to handle it.
"You'll obey me regardless of what you want. That's what it's about," I say. "Now, get out. I'm sick of looking at your face."
He catches my wrist.
"You want me to get out... but you don't want me to want anyone but you. That's how this works, right?" He gives me that fucked-up smile, but I'm too close to my limit.
I yank my arm away.
"Get the fuck out before I change my mind and fucking kill you," I order.
I can't look him in the eye. If he smiles like that at me again—like a goddamn slut, like I'm the only one for him—I don't know what I'll do.
I hear him step away.
I don't breathe until he's gone.
Svetlana is worried. Nyx's report on our collaborators' lives so far revealed no rat—it was ordered according to the trust and probability she saw in each of those people betraying us.
This means those she judged most likely to betray have nothing, and that's eating at her as much as Nyx eats at me.
He completed 50% of the list. The full reports from other reliable sources for comparison arrived today without a conclusion pointing to betrayal.
The issue seems minor since Nyx became such a big problem for me, but Svetlana still has her head on straight. She continues to investigate the rat in our operations, the traitor who, ironically, was the reason I brought Nyx into this hell in the first place.
She tells me not to bother him, in a condescending tone—to let him keep the list of potential traitors as a priority task.
And I don't see him again. The image of him on my lap, the whisper of his provocations, the look of triumph when I threatened him…
that will take a long time to leave my head.
It's the most I can allow myself to see him—only in that disgusting memory that restarts every moment, repetitively, repulsively.
So, I create distance. I communicate only through Luca and divert Svetlana's request: I bury him in work. I give him impossible deadlines. Tasks that should take days, I demand in hours.
Luca warns me, "Sal's team would take a week," and I understand. Luca starts looking at me the way Svetlana looks at me, as if what I do to Nyx, because of Nyx, is a monstrosity. He, too, doesn't understand. Even having seen Nyx's perversion at first, now, Nyx only shows it to me .
If his mind is occupied with firewalls and encryption, it won't be occupied with me.
The problem is that he adheres to my absurdity.
I shouldn't be surprised, after seeing him save my family's system in twenty-four hours.
Each of my demands is met with perfection, detailed reports, and precision.
At my desk, on the terminal—with every fucking completed task, he reminds me more that he's becoming indispensable, and I see favors traveling to his door.
Indispensable to the whole fucking team, asking stupid favors all the time, and to me .
His work is impeccable. The perception he used at that poker table that completely stripped my men was only a fraction of his attention, and that becomes clearer with each new report and service rendered.
The image of Nyx on my lap doesn't diminish, doesn't fade. It spreads .
It's the second pen I unintentionally break in half.
Nyx is the best hacker we've ever had. He is extraordinary, and I hate that he is. It would be much easier to get rid of dead weight, of someone who wouldn't make the slightest difference in any aspect of my life.
The worst part is that, in the ridiculous IT office of his daily job, he obeys me. I watch this. I watch each of that woman's—Nicole's—attempts at approach be met with disinterest and monotony.
It's late at night. The mansion is silent. I stare at a logistics contract I can't read. His absence is a black hole in the center of my concentration.
That's when Svetlana calls me.
" We have something ," she says, without preamble. " A burst transmission intercepted ten minutes ago. Directed to a ghost server in Estonia ."
I straighten in my chair. "What did Sal get?"
I can almost hear her disdain on the other end of the line. " He managed to hit his head against the wall. He thinks it's an AES encryption variation with a quantum key, but it could take days to force decryption, if it's even possible. "
I press my temples. Days. Svetlana doesn't sleep well either, I know—the time of this call is proof of that. The lack of movement from our rat puts her more on edge than if he were setting fire to all our bases.
" We don't have days, Donya ," she continues. " I told you to let the asset focus on unraveling the list, but this is more urgent ."
The asset. The way she talks about him, as if he were a piece of machinery, irritates me. That's how I should see him too.
Svetlana calling me before deciding something alone also means something. She's tired of this unspoken tension. I am too. But isolating Nyx with absurd tasks was the only way to keep myself sane.
Of course, she doesn't know. And she won't know.
"What are you suggesting?"