Chapter 15
You’re Going to Get Yourself Killed
Ghost
The second she stepped out into that corridor, I knew we’d crossed a line we couldn’t uncross. Not because of the kiss. Not because of the way my hands had moved like I’d forgotten every reason I had to keep control.
But because we got interrupted.
Bad timing inside Ironhand wasn’t just inconvenient; it was dangerous. It was exposure waiting to happen, and the way that guy’s voice cut through the moment, the way his footsteps hit the floor just seconds too early, told me one thing I couldn’t ignore.
We got lucky. And luck didn’t last here.
I stayed in the room a beat longer than I should have, listening, recalibrating, forcing everything back into place while adrenaline burned through my system.
My breathing evened out first. Then my focus.
Then the rest of it followed, piece by piece, until I wasn’t standing there as Aiden anymore. I stepped back into Ghost.
By the time I moved, the corridor wasn’t empty. That was the first problem.
One of Silas’ lower-level enforcers lingered near the corner, not close enough to interrupt, but not far enough away to have missed everything either.
His posture didn’t scream suspicion, but his attention shifted the second I stepped out, eyes flicking from me to the direction Mira had gone and back again.
He clocked something. Maybe not what happened, but enough.
That was all it took.
I didn’t react. Didn’t slow. I moved past him like I had somewhere to be, like the last five minutes hadn’t happened, like I wasn’t already running through every possible angle of what he could have seen and how fast that information would travel.
Silas didn’t need proof. He needed patterns. And right now, we were starting to look like one. That changed everything.
Every adjustment I’d made to protect her would become a liability if it could be traced back to me. Every moment of proximity, every overlap in movement, every instance where we ended up in the same space too often could start to stack into something that didn’t look accidental anymore.
We were no longer invisible … not together. And that meant one thing. Protection wasn’t optional anymore. It was immediate.
I shifted routes the second I cleared the corridor, cutting through the system with more force than before, shutting down lines that could be traced, breaking patterns before they had time to form.
Watchers got redirected. Schedules got scrambled.
Access tightened around her, whether she liked it or not.
Because if someone had seen even a fraction of what just happened? Then we weren’t just dealing with suspicion anymore. We were dealing with attention. And attention in a place like this got people killed.
I wasn’t letting that happen. Not to her. Not again.
I should’ve left it alone.
That’s what the smarter part of me kept saying the second I spotted her slipping through a restricted corridor she had no business being in at that time of night.
The system was already tight. It already watched for inconsistencies, and she was moving as if none of that applied to her — like she still had the same margin for error she’d been working with before everything started closing in.
She didn’t. And I wasn’t about to stand there and watch her walk straight into something she couldn’t outmaneuver.
I moved before I thought better of it and cut her off just as she rounded the corner. My hand closed around her arm and pulled her into the nearest side room before anyone else could clock what she was doing.
The door shut behind us with a quiet click, but there was nothing quiet about the way my control snapped the second we were out of sight.
“What the hell are you doing?” I bit out, voice low but sharp enough to cut through anything she might’ve said in response.
She didn’t look surprised. Didn’t even look caught. If anything, she looked irritated that I’d interrupted her, like I was the problem here instead of the fact that she’d been seconds away from walking into a monitored lane with heightened oversight.
“Working,” she shot back, trying to pull her arm free.
I didn’t let go.
“Not like that, you’re not,” I snapped, stepping in closer without even realizing I was doing it until there was no space left between us again. “You’re pushing into restricted channels with eyes already on the system. That’s not strategy, that’s recklessness.”
Her gaze flashed, anger sparking just as fast as mine.
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” she fired back, her voice tight, controlled, but riding that same edge we always seemed to find now. “I’ve been doing this long before you decided to show back up and start interfering.”
“That was before they started watching,” I shot back immediately. My grip tightened just enough to make the point. “Before Silas started pulling at threads. You don’t get to act like the situation hasn’t changed.”
“And you don’t get to decide how I handle it,” she snapped and stepped into me instead of backing down. Her defiance hit head-on with everything I was trying to keep contained.
That should’ve been the end of it. A warning. A correction. Something controlled.
It wasn’t.
Because under the anger, under the frustration, under the fact that she still moved like she had something to prove, there was something else bleeding through that made it worse.
Fear.
Not for me … for her. And it pissed me off more than anything else.
“You’re going to get yourself killed,” I said.
The words came out rougher than I intended, edged with something I couldn’t fully hide this time.
“You keep moving like this, pushing deeper without adjusting for the pressure that’s already building, and you’re not going to see it coming when it hits. ”
She stilled for half a second, not backing down, not softening, just holding my gaze like she was weighing the words instead of dismissing them.
That should’ve grounded me. It didn’t.
Because being this close again, feeling the tension snap tight between us with everything layered on top of it, anger, history, unfinished shit neither of us had dealt with, it didn’t just make me want to protect her.
It made it harder to keep my hands off her.
Harder to separate what I needed to do from what I wanted to do.
And that was a problem. A bigger one than either of us was ready to admit.
Her expression didn’t soften, not even a little. If anything, something in it hardened, like my words had hit exactly where they were supposed to and she’d decided to throw it right back instead of absorbing any part of it.
“You don’t get to care now.”
The sentence landed clean. No hesitation. No room for interpretation. Just a fact delivered with enough weight behind it that it cut straight through everything else in the room.
My jaw tightened.
She didn’t stop there.
“Not after what you did,” she continued, her voice low but sharp, each word measured like she wanted them to land exactly where they’d do the most damage.
“You don’t get to disappear for two years, leave me with nothing, and then walk back in here acting like you’re suddenly responsible for whether I live or die. ”
I held her gaze, didn’t look away, didn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing it hit even though it did.
Harder than anything she’d said so far.
“You made that choice,” she went on, stepping closer instead of backing off, forcing the distance between us to collapse again. “You decided I wasn’t worth telling the truth… that I couldn’t handle it. That it was better for you to vanish than to give me a say in any of it.”
There it was. Not just anger. Abandonment.
“And now?” she added, her tone tightening just enough to betray the edge underneath. “Now you want to stand here and tell me what’s dangerous? What I can and can’t handle?”
A bitter laugh slipped out, quiet but cutting.
“That’s not a concern,” she said, shaking her head once, like she couldn’t believe I was even trying it. “That’s hypocrisy.”
The word hit like a punch I didn’t see coming, not because it wasn’t true, but because she said it out loud, stripped down to exactly what it was without trying to soften it.
“You walked away when things got dangerous,” she finished, her eyes locked on mine, not giving me anywhere to hide from it. “You don’t get to act like I’m the one making bad decisions for staying.”
Silence followed, but it wasn’t empty. It was heavy.
Because she wasn’t wrong.
And for once, I didn’t have a clean argument to throw back at her that didn’t circle right back to the same thing she’d just called me out on.
That didn’t make her right either. It just meant we were both standing in something that didn’t have an easy answer. And neither of us was willing to be the one who gave ground first.
Neither of us took a step— not forward, not back.
We simply existed in this small area — too close for comfort, too charged with electricity, too weighted with all we left unsaid and all we couldn’t avoid.
Words didn’t stop because there was a clear ending to them. There wasn’t a moment when one of us relented or pulled back or conceded that the other person was right. They just stopped because they couldn’t go on … because when we spoke again, there was some larger issue waiting to bust open.
And that was the issue. Dodging her wasn’t possible here, not in Ironhand.
Ironhand didn’t allow for space between us, not with the way the infrastructure necessitated movement and crossover, not with the way both of us functioned within it. Even if we spent our entire days skirting each other, so we never had to deal with this, eventually we’d run out of space.
The building itself would herd us into each other at intersections, force us to share closeness, and force us into situations when ignoring all of this wasn’t just hard, it became impossible.
And maintaining professionalism? Fuck professionalism. We obliterated that boundary a long time ago.
When I touched her again, when she spoke my name like she didn’t have to think about it, when we started reacting to each other like everything left unsaid still mattered …
then professionalism wasn’t a factor. There was no going back to that point of ignorance by simply deciding not to acknowledge it.
We broke that wall down, and every second we let ourselves interact after that just pushed that wall farther away.
And that wasn’t just murky waters to navigate around anymore. It lit explosives all over the damn situation.
On top of everything else we were dealing with, Ironhand itself was changing.
Silas stopped watching the big picture; he stopped allowing his minions to meander.
He started narrowing his gaze, pinching it down tight around certain behaviors, certain pathways, certain…
anomalies that he began to catch as we pressed the network harder.
In the past two days, it felt like his gaze was focusing. Not on the broad concepts like before, but something. And what he zeroed in on was starting to look a hell of a lot like her.
He wasn’t there enough for it to be definite, but he didn’t have to be. Small tells: the way his goons paused longer when she walked into a room, the way they shifted so they had clearer shots of her, the way certain doors took on more importance than they used to when she was near.
It all led to the same conclusion — he was zooming in, narrowing his scope — and Mira was falling into his field of vision whether she knew it or not.
Which brought us back to the question of why the fuck we were standing here, staring at each other.
See, it wasn’t just unfinished business between Mira and me lingering over us anymore.
It wasn’t just volatile history that bled into a dynamic that refused to accommodate it.
There was pressure building against us from the outside, too, and it wasn’t slowing down.
Emotional tension and structural noise converged, and what we had wasn’t stable. In fact, it was the opposite.
The longer we waited, the more likely it was that something would snap.
I met her eyes again, silently acknowledging that she knew this, too, though she didn’t say as much. There was no neat solution to this mess. No way for us to walk away from it untouched or unscathed by the chaos we allowed to gather momentum.
It wasn’t going to end because we hoped it would.
It wasn’t going to blow over because we needed it to.
And it sure as hell wasn’t going to remain within the lines we tried to draw for it. It was going to explode.
Only time would tell how bad a shape we left ourselves in when it did.