12. Luka #2
"That jealousy you saw on me last night, and the thing I just felt finding his handshake on your channel," I went on, "it isn't possessiveness.
I've called it that for years. It's fear, and I'm tired of obeying it.
The boy who lost everything decided that holding tight was the same as keeping safe.
It isn't. My father held tight. It didn't save anyone. It just made him the last to know."
"Luka." My name, not Luke, the first time she'd used either since she walked out. It cost her something to say it.
"Let me finish, because I'll lose the nerve.
" I felt the smile start and killed it. "I can cage you.
I'm good at cages, it's the family trade.
I could keep you in this compound, safe and furious and mine, for years.
And every day you'd be a prisoner I could keep.
" I held her eyes. "I would rather have you as a partner I could lose. "
The half-open door swung the rest of the way. Not an invitation. A decision.
"That terrifies me," I added, because she deserved the whole truth and I was done rationing it.
"Loss is the thing I've organized my entire life around not feeling.
Choosing it on purpose, choosing the version of this where you can walk away with my whole operation in your head, that scares me more than losing ever did.
I'm doing it anyway. That's the only thing I have to offer you that isn't a leash. "
She looked at me for a long moment. The wariness did not leave her face, but it changed jobs, stopped guarding the door and started measuring me as a collaborator instead of a captor.
"You'd let me read him," she said. "My call on what he gets."
"Your call. I'll tell you what we can't afford to lose. Everything inside that line is yours to spend."
"And if I play it wrong?"
"Then we play it wrong together, and I clean up my half." I shrugged, and it cost more than it should have. "Partners cover each other's mistakes. That's the part I never had hardware for. I'm installing it now."
That, finally, pulled the ghost of a real smile out of her, crooked and reluctant and devastating.
"That was almost a joke," she said. "From you. The intel chief made a joke."
"Don't tell Nikolai. He'd revoke my access."
She stepped back from the door, which was its own answer, and jerked her head toward the workstation. "Then stop hovering in my doorway looking tragic. We have a prodigy to disappoint."
It is a particular thing, watching someone work and recognizing your own hands in it. I had only ever experienced it as a threat. With Harper it was something else, two instruments finding they were tuned to the same string.
She dropped into the chair and woke the terminal, and I pulled a second one alongside hers, close, our shoulders nearly touching over the desk.
She pointed without preamble. "He came in through a relay he thinks is invisible.
It isn't. He reused a fingerprint from the original breach. Sloppy. Arrogant."
"He's young," I said. "He still thinks being good means being unseen."
"He'll learn." Her hands moved. "If I answer warm, he leans in. If I answer cold, he works harder to convince me. We want him leaning and working. So." She glanced sideways at me. "How greedy do we let him be?"
"Greedy enough to keep his session open. Every minute he spends pitching you, he's holding a door for us."
"Then I bait the hook with something shiny and useless." She started typing, fingers fast and sure, and I watched a message take shape that was all interest and no commitment, a hacker's flirtation, every line designed to make him want to show off. She paused over a phrase. I leaned in.
"Make it a question about his architecture," I said. "He won't be able to resist correcting you."
She huffed a laugh. "You do know him."
"I was him. Minus the loyalty to the wrong man."
She sent it. We waited. The cursor pulsed, and then Kade answered, fast and pleased with himself, exactly as predicted, a long reply bragging about a routing scheme he should never have described to anyone.
While he typed, I worked the channel underneath the conversation, mapping his relays back toward their source, and Harper kept him talking, kept him performing, her replies the perfect blend of admiration and challenge that made a clever boy spill.
"He's opening a tunnel to show me a demo," she murmured, eyes flicking. "He wants to impress me with live access."
"That tunnel runs both directions." My pulse picked up, the old hunter's quickening, but warmer now, shared. "When he opens it, I ride it home. Keep him distracted for ninety seconds."
"Ninety seconds of making a genius feel adored," she said. "I was built for this."
She wrote something that made the reply come back instantly, eager, and the tunnel bloomed open on my screen, a clean bright path straight into the edge of Voronin's network.
I moved. Harper kept her line going with one hand and watched my work with the other eye, and when I hesitated for half a beat over a fork in the route she said, without looking, "Left.
The right one's a honeypot, the latency's wrong," and she was correct, and I took the left.
Shoulders touching over one screen, we sprang the trap live. "We're in," she breathed, and I understood, with total calm, that I would burn the world down for this woman.