16. DANTE #5
" Take the data to him. Now ." She pauses. " Assuming your management hasn't compromised his cognitive ability, he needs to break the encryption as quickly as possible. "
I press harder. I feel a red mark outlining my fingers, the skin of my temple staining from the pressure. I wish I had fucked with him on a cognitive level. I wish .
I take a deep breath, forcing the rage to the bottom of my stomach. I won't give her confirmation of being who she thinks I am.
"His cognitive ability is intact," I say through gritted teeth. "Consider it done."
There's a pause on the other end of the line. Svetlana expected an explosion.
" Keep me updated, " she finally says. " Every hour. "
She hangs up before giving a chance for any useless discussion.
I waste no time. I grab the tablet from the table, the recently sent encrypted data relighting the locked screen, and leave my office.
It's work. Just work. An order from Svetlana.
I make every excuse not to delegate this to Luca.
Calling him would be the logical move, it would maintain the facade of my self-control, but logic abandoned me the moment that bastard smiled at me with a cigarette box in his hand.
Logic went up in smoke when he confessed he almost got hard knowing I controlled him.
This is much more than a masochistic fetish I can satisfy with a punch.
I don't want a report from Luca. I want to see his face.
This realization that I try so hard to hide and drown doesn't disappear; it feeds on his silence, on the obedience he gives me even after I deny his demands and conditions.
I have nowhere to vent this. This shithead invalidated all the hatred I've felt since the poker night— my asset—with the disdain of opportunistically detaching himself from all his coworkers to please me, telling me again and again the pettiness of caring who Nicole Davis is to him.
Fuck, how weak does he make me?
I stop in front of the door of the room I assigned him—the guards in the hallway pretend not to see. I don't knock. I am the owner of this house, his owner. I unlock the door with a fingerprint, turn the doorknob, and open it.
The room is completely dark. The only light source illuminates his face—flashes of green and white from a terminal scrolling a rapid sequence of codes. He doesn't stop typing for a second, immersed in the screen, and doesn't even notice my entry.
The ghost in the machine in its natural habitat.
I stand in the doorway, observing for a moment that stretches too long.
The only things moving are the reflection of the code in his eyes and the rapid movement of his fingers.
He's paler, with more dark circles. He hasn't slept in over twenty-four hours.
I should feel satisfaction from having pushed him to the limit.
I step fully into the room, letting the door close behind me.
The sound of the click isolates us from the rest of the world and is what breaks him from his trance—I see the subtle jump of his fingers the instant he stops typing, but it seems like a physical impulse.
His eyes don't leave the screen, his head keeps turning the gears dependent on the code.
"New job," I say. I walk slowly towards him and extend the tablet. "Svetlana wants this deciphered. Yesterday."
Finally, he turns his face to me. I see the empty energy drink cans around the desk, the coffee cups.
The things he's been asking Luca for. Is he eating properly?
The exhaustion throughout his body doesn't match the astute alertness of his state, with the level of detail and perfectionism of each report delivered to me.
He takes the tablet. And I don't leave. I should.
He looks at the data on the screen, and his eyes gain immediate focus.
"AES encryption?" he murmurs. I have the impression he's talking to himself.
"Solid math. It's a military standard." He turns back to the computer.
He opens a terminal outside his main window, and I see him typing something.
He leans back in the chair with a sigh as a secondary blank window opens and loads a wiped operating system in seconds.
I waste no time trying to understand him. "Break it," I say, forcing myself to step away.
But he starts to speak.
"I won't break the encryption."
I narrow my eyes. "What?"
"If you took the fastest supercomputer on the planet today and put it to work exclusively on finding the key, without stopping, it would take a few billion years to test half the possibilities, and that's an optimistic estimate," he says softly, glued to the screen with a feverish intensity, typing again.
"The energy needed to compute all the keys, with current technology, would boil all the Earth's oceans more than once.
Trying to break the encryption is useless. "
This irritates me. His only act of refusal waited to show itself in front of me? One of my men would have taken a punch for much less. I suppress the urge to smash his face against the computer screen.
"So you're telling me you can't?" I snarl. I make it clear that this possibility is a death sentence that even he won't like.
"I'm saying it's a dispensable effort," he says, and doesn't even deign to look at me. "If this is still about hunting rats, yours isn't that good. If he was, he would pass undetected. He just used a powerful tool."
And what irritates me most is how he just says it. He's not spitting arrogance on purpose, and yet he positions himself as if he's miles above me.
"Then enlighten me, you arrogant little shit," I say. I need to exert physical force not to grab him by the collar. "If breaking encryption is ‘dispensable,' what's your magic solution?"
"I don't attack the math."
I watch. Nyx is stupidly brave, but that was already established. He doesn't compute the insubordination of ending his monologue with that . He just types, and in the middle of lines and lines of indecipherable characters, a small section of pure text stands out.
He analyzes it. He bites the tip of his thumb and smiles a small, private smile of pure, unaltered satisfaction—a smile that isn't for me.
I cross my arms. I lean against the wall, watching that thing triumph, opening an editor and typing a sequence of codes. It's almost disturbing. He doesn't even stop.
"Where the hell did you learn that?" I say on impulse.
He doesn't take his eyes off the screen. The satisfied smile is still there, private, and it irritates me that it isn't for me.
"YouTube tutorials."
The answer is so trivial it sounds like a teenager's nonchalance.
"…Nyx," I warn him.
He laughs. "What? It's true."
"Tutorials don't teach you to bypass quantum security systems. And they certainly don't teach you to have the fucking audacity you have."
Only then does he stop. The rhythmic sound of the keys ceases, and he turns in the chair, facing me for the first time since I handed him the tablet. Illuminated like this, his smile isn't defiant, but soft. Beautiful. He knows he has me. He knows my curiosity is overcoming my rage.
"Do you really want to know?" he asks. He leans back in the chair and inclines towards me. "I'll tell you. But since you refused my last proposal, I hope you accept this time."
Of course. A manipulative son of a bitch to the end. Everything with him is a transaction, a power exchange. I prepare for some ridiculous demand.
"What proposal?"
"Tell me, what was the moment you were closest to death?"
My first instinct is to tell him to go to hell.
Who does he think he is to demand a piece of my history, a moment of weakness?
But then I look at him. The exhausted boy, illuminated by lines of code, who is becoming indispensable with each new service.
The boy who looks at me as if I were much more than a captor.
The curiosity, the necessity to understand what created him, what drives him, is stronger than my pride.
The memory causes a dry heat in me, a metallic, burnt smell, and a ringing in my ears.
"Car bomb," I say. "In Moscow."
It's all I say out loud. I remember the impact throwing me against a brick wall in an alley, the shower of glass and debris, the delayed understanding that the only thing that saved me was bending down to shield the flame of my lighter, trying to light a fucking Dunhill in the rain. A second.
It cost three of my best men, and weeks with broken ribs, ruptured eardrums, and shrapnel everywhere.
Nyx remains silent. He looks at me with an intrusive understanding for a boy who lives locked inside a room.
"…Want to know mine?" he says softly.
The intimacy of that doesn't let me answer. Yes ? I don't know. I shouldn't say that, shouldn't admit that.
But my silence is the only permission he needs.
"It was on a highway overpass," he says. "On a Sunday dawn. It was starting to rain… and there were still many cars passing. I stood there for a while. Watching. The high-speed headlights leave a trail of light. The sound… turns into white noise."
He stares at some point on the wall. I await the conclusion of that story, the accident, what would threaten the life of a nobody looking at cars.
It doesn't come.
Only then do I understand.
He looks back at me with a melancholic smile. "I knew I could just wait. There would be a moment, in the future… my health isn't good. The future will come in one or two decades. But I wanted… I wanted to be faster than that."
The understanding bothers me. The feeling bothers me. He's showing me a part of him I didn't ask for and shouldn't have the right to see.
"What stopped you?" The question escapes me, quieter than usual.
He looks away and thinks. As if finding the only thing that kept him alive was difficult now. And maybe it is.
Svetlana's voice echoes in my mind. He doesn't seem crazy, he seems depressed.
"I was… afraid," he says.
It doesn't fit him.
"Of what?"