Fierce Bratva Daddy (Ruthless Bratva Daddies #9)

1. Harper

HARPER

Rent was due in nine hours, and I was about to commit three felonies to avoid thinking about it.

The radiator clanked once, gave up, and went cold again.

I tugged my hoodie sleeves down over my knuckles and kept typing.

The desk in front of me held the wreckage of a double shift: a name tag I hadn't taken off, two energy drinks, one empty and one going flat, and a styrofoam cup of ramen I'd eaten standing up forty minutes ago, because sitting down felt like a commitment I couldn't make yet.

Three in the morning hummed around me. The building ran through its night noises, pipes ticking behind the wall, somebody's bass two floors down, a bus sighing to a stop on the avenue and pulling away with nobody on it.

My headphones caught most of it. What they missed was the laptop fan, screaming softly for the past hour because I kept asking too much of a machine I'd built out of other people's discards.

I'd named it Gremlin. It earned the name nightly.

My feet still ached in the shape of my work shoes.

Under the hoodie, my shoulders carried the whole shift, the trays, the smiles I hadn't meant, the table that left me ninety cents on a forty-dollar tab and a note that said thanks anyway.

I'd long since memorized the arithmetic of my own life.

Sixty dollars in tips tonight, forty of it already promised to the electric company, a textbook for tomorrow's class three chapters behind on the floor where I'd dropped it.

I cracked my knuckles one at a time and let the code be the only thing that needed me back.

On the screen, a shell company was quietly coming apart.

It called itself Brightwater Staffing. It had a tidy little website full of stock photos of strangers shaking hands, and last month it had run payroll for the diner through some subcontracting arrangement nobody could explain, then vanished with two weeks of everyone's checks.

Marisol had cried about it in the walk-in cooler, fast and furious, scrubbing her face with her apron before she pushed back out to smile at a four-top.

She had two kids and a car that started when it felt like it.

Brightwater had four hundred and eighty of her dollars.

They were not going to keep it.

My fingers moved on their own, the autopilot that kicked in once the work got good.

I'd already strolled through the front, a payment portal with the security posture of a screen door, and now I was deep in their billing layer, reading invoices like somebody's diary.

Whoever set this up had been clever enough to steal and lazy enough to recycle one password across three different services.

The gap between those two facts was where I lived.

It was a small, warm, illegal place, and tonight it had a couch and good lighting.

I wasn't taking anything for myself. I never did, which was either a code I lived by or the priciest form of self-respect a broke person could buy, and I'd stopped letting myself decide which.

The number in my own banking app was a thing I refused to look at after midnight.

Rent was a wall with today's date painted on it, and the closest thing to peace I could reach was this, the small charged satisfaction of clawing back something stolen and handing it to a person who would cry from relief instead of rage.

I tapped the can, found it empty, and drank the flat one anyway. It tasted like battery acid and regret. Before anything else, I mapped my way back out, because you find the exit before you strike the match. Then I pushed deeper.

My phone lit up against the desk. Not the burner. The other one. The one that mattered.

I flipped it over, and the warmth hit before I'd even read the words.

Luke: Still awake, I see.

Me: Sleep and I are on a break. It isn't going well.

Luke: Lights on, nobody home?

Me: Lights off, actually. I'm economizing. Very adult of me.

Luke: It's 3 a.m.

Me: And there you are, timestamping my poor life choices.

Luke: I'm not judging. I'm worried. Those aren't the same thing.

I stared at that one longer than I meant to. Six months of nights, and he still found the door I kept forgetting to lock.

We'd met on a forum, under a thread about a memory bug nobody else could reproduce.

I posted a fix at two in the morning. Ten minutes later he posted the reason it worked, which I hadn't fully understood myself until his three sentences made my whole brain go quiet and bright at once, the hush that falls over a room when the right person walks in.

We'd been talking ever since. Software engineer, he said.

East coast, he said. Not once had either of us turned a camera on.

I told myself it was because he traveled.

The truth was that the chat window was the one place I let myself want anything, and a face would make it real enough to lose.

Me: I'm working. It's a thing of beauty. You'd weep.

Luke: The coworker thing?

Me: That's the one. I cracked their billing wide open. They reused a password from a fish-tank-supply forum.

Luke: A fish tank forum.

Me: Aquariums are a serious hobby, Luke. Don't.

Luke: Wouldn't dream of it. Tell me you're being careful.

Me: I'm always careful.

Luke: You're never careful. You're good. Those are different animals. Careful people don't do this at 3 a.m., in the dark, for somebody else's paycheck.

He was right. I hated that he was right, and I loved that he could tell the two apart, all in the same half second. I pulled my knees onto the chair and balanced the laptop on them, the cursor blinking at me, patient, while the two windows of my life waited for me to choose one.

Me: Nobody else is going to do it. That's the whole problem with everything, always.

Luke: Who does it for you?

Me: Meaning?

Luke: The thing you do for everyone. Who shows up at 3 a.m. for Harper?

My throat tightened. I took a slow sip of the flat drink, just to buy myself four seconds.

Me: You're the only one who's ever asked me that.

Luke: Then the rest of them aren't paying attention.

Me: Can I tell you something?

Luke: Always.

My thumbs hovered. The radiator stayed cold. Somewhere in the walls, water moved.

I'd composed it in full inside my head a hundred times.

That the best part of every wrung-out day was the second his name surfaced on the screen.

That I'd started hoarding funny things just to hand them to him later, like coins.

That a man I'd never laid eyes on had become the only one who answered when I called out into the dark.

That I was, against every rule I'd written for myself in self-defense, falling, and had been for a while, and had run clean out of ways to pretend the floor was where it used to be.

Me: I think this fish-tank forum is going to be huge for us.

Luke: Harper.

Me: Scott from accounting bred a rare cichlid. Genuinely moving stuff.

Luke: See, you do this. You walk right up to the edge of something real, then crack a joke and back away from it.

Me: I resent that. Mostly I resent how accurate it is.

Luke: Someday you'll say the real thing. I'll be right here when you do.

Me: Someday. When I'm brave, or rich. Whichever shows up first.

Luke: My money's on brave.

I let that one sit, because it was kind, and because I didn't trust my own hands to keep the truth in while I wasn't watching them. Then I closed the window, slow and careful, the way you set down something you're scared of dropping.

Me: I have to finish this before sunrise, or Marisol doesn't get paid. Go to sleep, East Coast. You're four hours ahead of your own bad decisions.

Luke: Be careful. For real this time.

Me: Always.

Luke: Never.

I set the phone face down so it would stop tugging at me, flexed my fingers, and went back in.

The transfer was the easy part. Brightwater had a payment queued to slip out and disappear by morning, washed somewhere I'd never trace.

I rerouted it to the diner's account instead.

There was a clean justice in it, their last theft paying back their first. I built the route one hop at a time, checked it twice, breathed, and watched the confirmation resolve.

Four hundred and eighty dollars, turned around and sent home.

Marisol would find it before her first cup of coffee.

For one bright second I let myself feel like the good guy.

Then I reached for the final jump, the deep account where they parked everything before it slid offshore. I wanted the names. People who build a machine to rob waitresses don't quit until somebody makes it expensive, and I fully intended to be the invoice.

This was the part I was good at, the part that felt less like breaking in and more like reading a lock until it told me how it worked.

I lined up the last query. My reflection hung ghosted in the dark gloss of the screen, glasses sliding down my nose, a loose curl slipping free of the tie at the back of my neck.

I nudged the glasses up with a knuckle and sent it.

That was where the floor wasn't.

I'd expected another sloppy little room, another spare key under another welcome mat. Instead my probe slipped past a layer that had no business existing, through a crack I hadn't made and wasn't meant to find, and dropped.

Down into something else.

I stopped breathing. The amateur stink was simply gone.

Everything above this had been a kid's fort of couch cushions; underneath it, all at once, sat the real thing.

Architecture. The kind I'd only read about in incident reports written by people with clearances and acronyms after their names.

Segmented, silent, watching. Every layer folded inside the next, nothing recycled, nothing wasted, nothing left lying where a stranger could lift it.

The shape of it filled my screen, and it was wrong the way beautiful things go wrong when they're aimed at you.

Nothing flashed. Nothing screamed an alarm.

It simply sat there, vast and unbothered, a hand closing slowly into a fist, and every trick I owned shrank to a toddler's vocabulary in a language grown men use to hurt each other.

It had the patience of something built by people with all the time and money in the world and no reason left to hurry.

I knew this kind of quiet. It was the hush of the diner thirty seconds before the cook came out from the back to end an argument, the held-breath stillness of a place that never had to raise its voice, because everyone already understood what it could do.

Whatever this was, no one had built it chasing money.

Money was a hobby to it. This belonged to people who meant never to be found and had the means to guarantee it, who raised rooms like this one for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone's payroll.

The certainty landed in my body before a single fact did, cold and absolute, the lurch of a foot coming down on a stair that isn't there.

Every instinct I owned stood up at once and said the same word. Leave.

My mouth had gone dry. The part of my brain that always kept a wisecrack loaded had nothing, and I wasn't sure that had ever happened before.

I wanted Luke's name on the screen. I wanted the one steady voice in my life on the other end of this, and the phone lay face down a foot away, and I didn't reach for it, because some animal part of me had decided that moving would be the same as being seen.

I started backing out, retracing my steps, erasing the route behind me as I went, fingers fast and clean and just beginning to shake. Get out. Shut it down. Forget the room. Find Marisol's money some other way tomorrow, any other way, a way that didn't end here.

The screen went black.

Not asleep. Not a crash. The fan died mid-scream. The cursor vanished. The flat drink turned to acid at the back of my throat, and the apartment fell into a silence so total I could hear my own pulse inside the headphones, where there was supposed to be nothing at all.

Then a single line of text typed itself across the dark, one character at a time, unhurried, spaces opening between the words like someone choosing each one, like someone who already knew I had nowhere to go.

Hello, little ghost. You shouldn't be here.

I ripped the ethernet cable out of the wall.

The plastic clip snapped off in my hand. The connector dangled from my fingers, useless, its copper teeth bared, and it didn't matter, not even a little, because the screen had stopped being black.

I sat frozen in the dark, and the little green light beside my laptop camera blinked on. By itself.