6. Grayson
6
GRAYSON
I t’s just past three in the morning when I find her. The light from her office spills into the darkened hallway of the penthouse like a soft, digital glow. The rest of the world is silent. New York has finally gone still outside, its usual sirens and engines dulled into occasional murmurs against the glass. But inside? Inside it feels like the eye of a storm. Not calm. Just suspended.
I walk in barefoot, my black T-shirt rumpled, grey sweats hanging low on my hips. The marble floor is cool beneath my feet. I don’t say anything right away, I just watch her. Margot is curled over her desk, tablet in one hand, laptop open to a wall of code I can’t make sense of. She’s in one of my old hoodies now, navy, oversized, sleeves bunched up around her elbows. Her hair’s in a messy knot, her face bare and flushed from too much screen light and not enough sleep. But it’s her eyes that stop me. Sharp. Focused. On fire. She doesn’t hear me until I step closer.
“Grayson,” she says without looking up. “You should be asleep.”
“I could say the same to you.”
Her fingers keep moving, swiping through lines of data, voice clipped and low. “I found it.”
That makes me stop. “Found what?”
She turns the tablet toward me. The screen glows with access logs, timestamps, and a set of names I immediately recognize.
“You were right,” she says. “Something is wrong with the system. But not in the way you thought.”
I stare at the logs. There, buried between routing commands and authorization calls, are three matching internal IDs. All tied to beta patch overrides.
“Who is it?” I ask, though my gut already knows.
“Alana.”
Alana Beckett. One of our senior engineers. A trusted team member. A developer Margot personally recruited three years ago.
“She had root access,” Margot says, rising to her feet, still clutching the tablet. “She bypassed the ethics flag on our secondary review model. She’s been pushing live updates directly to the core match engine.”
I run a hand through my hair. “Why?”
“I don’t know yet. But she hid the changes under your name.”
My blood chills. “She forged my login credentials?”
Margot nods. “It was meant to look like a performance tweak. A few algorithms adjusted for user sentiment calibration. Nothing that would’ve triggered the system’s compliance alerts. But the changes affected long-term pairing models. They created matches with deeper emotional hooks than were originally calculated.”
I exhale slowly. “So people were being paired… too well.”
She looks up at me, her expression torn between triumph and dread. “Yes. Intentionally. To generate emotional feedback loops. Increased dependency. Obsession in some cases.”
My jaw tightens. “She weaponized love.”
Silence hangs between us. Margot moves away from the desk, walking toward the windows, her bare feet silent on the marble. She presses her hand to the glass like she’s grounding herself against the skyline. Her voice is lower now, almost a whisper.
“I don’t know how long she’s been doing it. I don’t know if she’s working alone. But the changes… they were smart. Subtle. This wasn’t sabotage to destroy us. It was sabotage to reshape us.”
I move to stand beside her, close but not touching.
“What do you need?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer at first. She’s staring out at the lights of Manhattan like they might blink a solution back at her.
Finally, she says, “I need space. Somewhere safe to finish investigating. I need time without distractions, without press, without board meetings or PR spin. I need to do this before anyone else finds out.”
I nod. “Okay.”
She blinks, caught off guard. “That’s it?”
I meet her gaze. “That’s it.”
A long pause stretches between us. The kind that’s too heavy for the room but too honest to ignore.
“You don’t have to come,” she says quietly.
I shake my head. “You’re not going alone.”
“Grayson…”
“You can argue with me later. Right now, you’re not staying here. Not with someone inside the company manipulating the code and trying to frame me for it.”
Her jaw tightens like she wants to fight me on it, but then something in her gives. She exhales, shoulders slumping slightly.
“Okay,” she says. “But I pick the place.”
“Deal.”
We pack light. Two duffel bags. Laptops. Chargers. A burner phone Margot pulls out from her sock drawer like this is something she’d prepared for, just in case. The tension between us simmers quietly. Not anger, not quite. Just a heavy awareness of everything left unsaid.
An hour later, we’re in the back of a black SUV headed north, away from the city lights, toward the Catskills. Margot picked the destination, a secluded cabin that belonged to an old family friend, tucked between two hills, surrounded by trees thick enough to block out the world. No cameras. No neighbors. No signals strong enough to track. It’s the kind of place people go when they want to disappear, and right now, disappearing feels like our best option.
Funny how this isn’t the first time we’ve run. The last time we dropped everything in a blur, it was because of Liam, her ex-fiancé with a vendetta and a lawyer's charm polished into a blade. We were trying to protect Perfectly Matched then, too. And Margot. Always Margot. It’s almost becoming a pattern, every time life flips itself sideways, I end up behind the wheel next to the smartest, most frustrating woman I’ve ever loved, fleeing something neither of us fully saw coming.
I should be irritated by that. But instead, I find myself almost smiling. Because if I’m going to run, if I’m going to hide out in some forgotten mountain cabin with lines of code and the threat of betrayal trailing us like shadows, there’s no one else I’d rather do it with.
Margot doesn’t sleep. She watches the dark road like it’s a puzzle she hasn’t solved yet. Her profile is lit by the dashboard glow, and every now and then, her fingers twitch like she’s typing on invisible keys. I want to reach for her. To say something comforting. But the truth is, this isn’t a moment for comfort. It’s a moment for truth. And right now, the only truth that matters is this: Someone tried to break what we built. And we’re going to find out who, together. The silence in the car stretches comfortably for a while, but I know it won’t last. Not with us.
She shifts in her seat, tucking her legs up slightly like the leather’s too cold. Then, as if she can’t help herself, she mutters, "You're taking the long route. Again."
I glance over at her. "It’s the scenic route."
"It’s the slow route," she says, arms crossed. "You always take the longest possible way to anywhere."
"It’s safer. Fewer major roads, less chance of being tracked," I reply evenly, even though I know she’s not really talking about logistics.
She exhales sharply, not quite a sigh. "I just want to get there already."
"We will. Unless you’d rather drive?"
She gives me a look. "Last time I drove, you spent the entire time criticizing my braking distance."
"Because you don’t brake, you attack the pedal like it owes you money."
Despite herself, her mouth twitches. "You’re the only person I know who drives like a bodyguard and argues like a philosophy major."
"You’re the only person I know who packs a burner phone and thinks that’s a perfectly normal thing to do."
She finally smiles, just a little. But it’s enough. Enough to ease the tension between us, even if it’s only temporary. I don’t say anything more. The road stretches ahead of us like a promise we haven’t yet decided how to keep. But I know one thing for sure, things are about to get a lot more complicated.