CHAPTER 7 Maeve
I stole you.
The words don’t just hang in the air after Declan leaves the room. They sink into the heavy leather of the armchair, seep into the dark hardwood floor, and wrap around my throat like a physical weight.
I stare at the chessboard. The firelight flickers across the black marble squares, casting long, distorted shadows behind the heavy steel pieces. My white queen is still sitting triumphantly next to his trapped king. I won the game.
But looking at the board now, the victory feels like a sick joke. I didn't corner him. He let me play my little strategy, let me feel smart, all while holding the absolute, terrifying reality of my existence in his hands.
He wasn't hired by a benevolent third party. He wasn't a professional contractor doing a job.
He was the hitman.
The Sinaloa cartel pointed a finger at my messy, boring, spreadsheet-filled life, and Declan Vance was the weapon they deployed.
A wave of nausea hits the back of my throat, sharp and acidic. I press my fingertips against my mouth, taking a slow, ragged breath through my nose. My wrist is burning. Not a literal burn, but a phantom heat right where his thumb pressed into my pulse point.
I rub the skin aggressively, trying to erase the sensation, but it only makes the area flush red.
I realized that if another man walked into your apartment, I was going to hunt him down and tear him apart with my bare hands.
I close my eyes, my fingers curling into the fabric of the black long-sleeved shirt I’m wearing. The shirt he bought for me. The shirt he picked out while watching me through a hidden camera, calculating exactly how it would fit my shoulders.
I should be screaming. I should be throwing the heavy steel chess pieces at the bulletproof windows until the glass shatters or my arms give out. I should be terrified of him.
And I am. I am terrified.
But beneath the terror, buried under the layers of shock and betrayal, there is something else. Something dark, twisted, and deeply humiliating.
Validation.
My entire life, I have been the person people leave.
My father walked out when I was seven. My mother checked out emotionally a year later, preferring the bottom of a vodka bottle to raising a chaotic daughter.
Boyfriends got tired of my sarcasm, my inability to trust, my constant need to test their loyalty until they inevitably failed and walked away.
No one has ever stayed. No one has ever looked at my messy, defensive, broken edges and decided I was worth the effort.
Until a lethal cartel fixer watched me through a lens, saw every ugly, unfiltered part of my life, and decided he would rather burn his own career to the ground than let anyone else have me.
"You are losing your mind, Maeve," I whisper to the empty room.
I drop my hands, open my eyes, and force myself out of the armchair. My legs feel hollow, but I lock my knees and stand.
I cannot sit in this living room and analyze the psychological dysfunction of my own survival instincts. If I sit here, I will spiral. I need information. I need to know the exact dimensions of this cage, and I am not going to get them from the warden.
I turn away from the fire and walk out into the dimly lit hallway.
The house is dead quiet. The ambient temperature is perfectly regulated, completely ignoring the fourteen-below-zero blizzard raging outside the thick walls. I walk past the kitchen, my wool socks completely silent on the floor, and head toward the heavy steel door that leads to the basement.
It isn't locked.
I pull the heavy handle, the metal hinges gliding open without a single squeak, and start down the grated stairs.
The server room is exactly as I left it hours ago, except the empty energy drink cans on Leo’s desk have multiplied.
He is slouched in his ergonomic chair, wearing the same faded band t-shirt, tossing neon gummy worms into the air and trying to catch them in his mouth.
He misses three in a row. They bounce off his chin and land on the concrete floor.
"You know the five-second rule doesn't apply in a subterranean bunker, right?" I say, stopping at the bottom of the stairs.
Leo jumps, his knee slamming into the underside of the desk. He spins around, his eyes wide behind his thick glasses.
"Jesus, Maeve. Put a bell on." He rubs his kneecap, wincing. "Shouldn't you be asleep? Or, I don't know, staring out a window looking tragically beautiful while contemplating your captivity?"
"I tried that. It got boring." I walk further into the room, crossing my arms to ward off the chill of the servers. "And I can't sleep. The existential dread finally kicked in."
Leo studies my face for a second. The playful energy drops slightly, replaced by a sharp, assessing look that reminds me he works for Declan. He might wear pajama pants and eat garbage, but he isn't an idiot.
"He told you," Leo says quietly.
I stop a few feet away from his desk. "He told me he was the one the cartel hired. He told me he was watching me."
Leo sighs, running a hand through his messy hair. He turns his chair fully toward me, abandoning the gummy worms. "Look. I know how it sounds. On paper, it sounds like a true crime documentary waiting to happen. But you have to understand the context."
"The context being that my bodyguard is actually my stalker?"
"The context being that Declan Vance does not deviate from the mission parameters," Leo corrects, his voice losing its casual drawl. "Ever. We get a contract, we execute the contract, we erase our digital footprint, and we move on. He doesn't get involved. He doesn't care. He is a machine."
"Until me."
"Until you," Leo confirms, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. "I was monitoring the network traffic when he pulled your file. He was supposed to locate your IP, confirm your physical address, and hand the dossier over to the local cleanup crew. It should have taken four hours."
I swallow hard, the dry air of the server room scraping against my throat. "What happened?"
"He opened your webcam feed to confirm visual ID," Leo says, his eyes dropping to the floor for a second before meeting mine again.
"And he just... stopped. For three days, he didn't leave his terminal.
He didn't sleep. He just watched you audit those files.
He watched you dance around your kitchen making terrible coffee.
He watched you fall asleep at your desk. "
A shiver runs down my spine. The invasion of privacy is staggering, but the way Leo describes it doesn't sound like a predator hunting a victim. It sounds like a man who found a glitch in his own programming and couldn't look away.
"When the cartel got impatient and bypassed us to send their own guys last night," Leo continues, "I thought he was going to tear the doors off the armory. He broke every protocol we have. He burned our reputation with the biggest syndicate in North America. He brought you here."
"Because he thinks he owns me," I say, my voice tight.
"Because you're the only thing he's ever actually wanted," Leo corrects gently.
I look away from him, staring at the blinking lights of the server rack. The conversation is too heavy. It’s too much reality for a Tuesday night. I need to redirect. I need to focus on the practical, logical problem of my ruined life, not the emotional black hole of Declan Vance.
"Did you decrypt the rest of the flash drive?" I ask, changing the subject with the grace of a car crash.
Leo blinks, the sudden shift catching him off guard. He leans back in his chair, his eyes darting toward the center monitor on his desk. The screen is currently displaying a complex web of code, but the movement of his eyes is a dead giveaway.
He is hiding something.
"Yeah," Leo says, his voice a fraction of an octave higher than it was a minute ago. "I got through the secondary firewall. It's just more of the same. Routing numbers. Dummy accounts in the Caymans. Standard money laundering stuff."
I narrow my eyes. I am an auditor. My entire career is built on reading micro-expressions and finding the lie in a spreadsheet. Leo is a terrible liar.
I take a step toward the desk. "Show me."
"It's boring, Maeve. Seriously. Just lines of data." He shifts his chair slightly to the left, subtly blocking my view of the secondary monitor.
"I like lines of data. I spent the last three months staring at them. Move."
"Declan said you shouldn't—"
"I don't care what Declan said," I snap, the lingering adrenaline from the living room flaring back to life.
I close the distance, stepping right up to the edge of the desk.
"This is my life on those drives, Leo. It's my apartment that got shot up.
It's my boss who sold me out. If you don't move that chair, I am going to spill this entire can of whatever toxic sludge you're drinking directly onto your motherboard. "
I grab the half-empty energy drink can from the desk and hold it over the exposed cooling vents of his custom PC tower.
Leo’s eyes go wide. "Okay! Okay, psycho, put the radioactive caffeine down."
He rolls his chair back, raising his hands in surrender.
I set the can down carefully. I walk around the desk and look at the center monitor.
It isn't a spreadsheet.
It’s a live feed from a secure news aggregate site. The page is pulling local and federal bulletins from Chicago.
My eyes lock onto the headline in the center of the screen.
CHICAGO ACCOUNTANT WANTED IN CONNECTION TO $40M EMBEZZLEMENT SCHEME. WARRANTS ISSUED.
Beneath the bold black letters is a photograph of me. It’s my company ID badge photo. I am smiling slightly, wearing a neat navy blouse, my hair pulled back perfectly. I look professional. I look trustworthy.
I look like a federal fugitive.
The air leaves my lungs in a single, violent rush.
"What is this?" I whisper, my fingers hovering over the keyboard.
"Maeve, don't read the article," Leo says, his voice tight with genuine regret. He tries to reach for the mouse, but I swat his hand away.