Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
GAGE
She says my name in her sleep and I forget how to breathe.
I type the only thing that will keep me from making a nuclear mistake:
MASK: Don’t dream of me. I’m not safe.
Her reply—Too late—is a hand around my throat.
I shut the feed. Not the cameras—never the cameras—but the audio, before I make a choice I can’t unmake. Then I sit there, fist pressed to my mouth, and wait for my pulse to stop acting like it’s heard good news.
I care about her. That’s the whole problem. Caring turns smart people stupid.
And I’m already halfway there.
My body hums with excitement and need as I watch her fall back asleep. Fuck, I’d give anything to know what she dreamed about. I’d love to tell her how I dream about her every fucking night.
My cock hardens the longer I stare at the screen. I lean back, spreading my thighs as I think about the way she whispered my name. I’d give anything to have her whisper my real name. I undo my pants, pushing them down as I pull my cock out.
“Fuck,” I breathe out, wanting more than anything to bust through the door that leads to the room she’s in. What would she do if I went in there? Kissed her. Made fucking sweet love to her?
I let the thoughts manifest, turning into a reel of images. River on her knees before me. Her smile. Her eyes gazed up at me like I hung the moon.
I fist my cock, stroking up and down. Lazy. Not wanting this feeling to end. I watch the way her blue hair is splayed across her pillow. How I’d love to have my fist wrapped around her hair instead of my dick.
I think about what she’d feel like. How wet she’d be for me. She sighs in her sleep, and I nearly lose it.
I’m going straight to hell. I don’t care.
The thought of her, of what I could do to her, is all too much to ignore.
I keep stroking, my heartbeat ramping up.
Blood floods my system, heading straight to my engorged cock, and I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking about what I’d like to do to River.
All the things I’d do to make her feel so good.
“River,” I groan out, my hand picking up speed as I allow my thumb to gather the precum at the tip. I slide it over my dick, picturing it’s her saliva, sucking me deep down her throat.
I’d feed her my cock, begging her to swallow it whole. Begging her to let me taste her too. She’d let me. I know she would. I spread her legs, and dive between her silky thighs. I’d swipe my tongue through her wetness, and wait for her to moan my name. I’d make her beg.
I’d make her scream.
I’d make her come all over my tongue. All over me.
And I know I’d never be the same. She’d ruin me. And I want it more than my next breath.
I keep stroking, images of River flashing behind my closed lids. I picture her, legs wrapped around my back as I slam my dick deep inside her. Her nails raking down my back. Me whispering how I’ve never been so in love in my life.
Her begging me to never let her go.
My balls tighten as I lean my head back against the chair. My breathing’s labored, and I'm almost there. I want to barrel into her room, toss her legs over my shoulders, and fuck her deep. Hard. A little rough.
I keep pumping, my cock leaking precum with each stroke.
“Oh fuck,” I whisper into the stillness of the room.
“Fuck, River. What are you doing to me?” I give one last final stroke as ribbons and ribbons of liquid heat shoots across my stomach.
I don’t stop pumping until my breath evens out, and all the demons have been chased away.
Because as much as I want her, I know I can’t have her.
Not yet.
Morning hits on a silent count of three coffees and four texts from Arrow. Cathedral chatter is up. Some mid-tier troll is taking credit for the garage stunt, bragging about “making the Whale run.”
He calls himself Sopranette. Thinks he’s funny.
He’s a nobody with a mod’s attention, which makes him useful.
I message River before I can overthink it.
MASK: Want to help hunt?
Dots. Then:
RIVER: Yes.
I put on the Ghostface mask, and use the front entrance. She pads further into the room—hoodie, bare feet, jaw set—I feel something settle in my chest I didn’t know was loose.
“Briefing,” I say, voice filtered through the modulator clipped to my collar. I keep the hood up, the mask on, hands gloved. Distance. Rules. Boundaries I intend to honor right up until they kill me.
She takes the chair opposite, curls one leg under her, and looks at me like she could dismantle me with a semicolon.
“What’s the plan?”
I push the laptop toward her. “We bait Sopranette into a private DM, then trace the route when he grabs the prize.”
“What’s the prize?”
“A file he thinks is the uncut interview. What he’ll actually get is our tracer. And a very bad day.”
A corner of her mouth lifts. “So… mean girl, but make it cyber.”
I shouldn’t find that hot, but I absolutely do.
I pull up a Cathedral mirror in a sandboxed browser. “We need bait that sounds like you—but not too much like you.”
“Because they’ll smell the switch if it’s perfect,” she says, already typing. She drafts a post in sixty seconds: just spiky enough to yank a troll across the room by his ego. It’s playful, irreverent, threaded with that sharp kindness that drives men like Sopranette insane.
I watch her hands and pretend I’m watching the words.
“Good,” I say. “Now add three mistakes.”
She shoots me a look. “Excuse me?”
“On purpose. A typo. An extra space. That weird double-sentence thing you do when you’re excited.”
Her eyes narrow. “I don’t—”
“You do.” My mouth gets ahead of my good sense. “You also overuse em dashes when you’re nervous. And you drink coffee too hot, then pretend you didn’t burn your tongue. And you hum when the unit tests pass.”
She stares at me for a beat that lasts a year. “You pay attention.” She’s cautious as she keeps staring at me.
“Occupational hazard.”
She sprinkles in the flaws. The post reads like River at midnight, not River at war. We push it live on the mirror. Sopranette bites exactly four minutes later, showing up in DMs with a string of keyboard courage.
SOPRANETTE: Prove it’s you.
River doesn’t ask me what to say. She doesn’t look to me for confirmation. She just… knows.
RIVER (BAIT): Prove you’re not boring.
He takes the hook, wide open.
SOPRANETTE: Link?
She glances up. I nod. Render’s single-use lure is ready. She sends it.
Now we wait.
Arrow’s voice crackles over the encrypted channel. “Tracer armed.”
Knight: “Outer ring clear. No cross-traffic on their end yet.”
Ozzy: “I have a twenty that says he’s on hotel Wi-Fi.”
“Twenty says coworking space,” I mutter, eyes on the packet captures spooling like rain.
On River’s screen, the status badge flips: download started.
“Come on,” she whispers, leaning in, hair slipping loose from her knot. “Come on, you little troll.”
Traffic spikes. A soft port opens—just a sliver—and our hook slides through. We catch a device signature, then a MAC, then the invisible thread that ties Sopranette’s bravado to something with a street address.
Ozzy crows. “Got him! Hello, No-Sleep CoLab, floor three, downtown. And look at that—guest network, but he authenticated to print.”
“Name?” Knight asks.
“Working,” Arrow says, coaxing the printer spool like a snake charmer.
River’s knee bumps mine under the table. She doesn’t move away. Neither do I.
The name pops onto the shared console.
Kyle M. Anders. Twenty-three. Lives in his mother’s basement in the suburbs. Commutes in to “network.” Five posts on a failed startup blog. Thirty-two on Cathedral. He runs a mean account and a small life.
“Let’s say hi,” I tell Arrow.
River’s eyes are bright, a little wild. “What do we do?”
“We introduce Kyle to natural consequences.” I send Render a link. “Make me a collage.”
Ten minutes later, Kyle’s manager at No-Sleep CoLab receives an anonymous packet: Kyle’s Cathedral posts, thread IDs, the messages he sent under a handle logged in from their Wi-Fi.
Alongside it, a compilation of his nastiest comments about “making her scream.” A nudge to their code of conduct.
And a suggestion they might not want him using company printers for harassment.
Addendum: a pre-written apology he can send, if he chooses to be a person today.
By lunch, Kyle is suspended. By afternoon, Kyle is very sorry. The apology lands in River’s burner with the punctuation of a dog who peed on the rug and knows it.
She reads it. She does not smile.
But something eases in her shoulders.
Power, returning to its rightful owner.
I send one more note to Sopranette: Next time you want attention, try kindness. It scales better.
He doesn’t reply.
River sags back in her chair, breath leaving like she’s been holding it for months. Then she looks at me.
Not the mask—me.
“Again,” she says.
I should say no. I should cite burnout and the number of favors we’ve already burned this week.
“Okay,” I say.
We hunt two more trolls before the sun trails off the warehouse windows. Smaller fish. Loud mouths. One loses access to his guild after we pipe his DMs to the admin. One gets a call from his mother because Render is evil and family plans are public on Facebook if you know where to look.
River learns fast. Adjusts faster. She has a programmer’s brain—pattern-seeking, unsentimental, funny when the pressure needle redlines.
She catches me looking at her hands again and quirks a brow. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar.”
“Your thumbs are right,” I say, deadpan.
She rolls her eyes and laughs, low and warm. I store the sound somewhere under my sternum.
We eat cold dumplings on the floor while packet captures run like credit scenes. I maneuver in the mask while she laughs at me, eating a cupcake as she does. She tells me, unprompted, about early days at NovaPlay. About Mason.
“We dated when I started,” she says. “He was bright. Charming. Knew where to find the good candy. And he…I thought he really liked me.”
I don’t move. Breathing feels impolite.
“It changed when I got promoted. He did this thing where he’d ask questions just to catch me wrong.
Or ‘fix’ my code when the only thing broken was his ego.
I saw him for what he truly was. Honestly, I can’t remember what I ever saw in him.
” She picks at a chopstick wrapper, shredding it to confetti.
“When I ended it, he said one day he’d show everyone who I ‘really’ was. ”
“What did you say?” My voice is smoke.
“That I hoped one day he’d meet her.” She huffs a laugh. “I didn’t expect him to try to invent her first.”
Silence sits between us, not heavy, just present. I want to tell her Mason’s days are numbered. Because even though he’s fired, he could still be very much behind this. That the lion she thought was in the tall grass is really a mutt on a leash. That we’re already shortening it.
Instead, I say, “Today you made three men less dangerous. That counts.”
She looks at me like she wants to read my face through the mask. Not just the angles—the man under them.
“Why do you care?” she asks softly.
Because I’ve been in love with you longer than is advisable for anyone’s health. Because you made a bug named Biscuit a hill you would die on and I fell a little in love with your stubborn mercy. Because when you fight, you fight fair, and when you fall, you fall forward.
“Because you deserve quiet,” I say. “And because they don’t know who they picked.”
She sucks in a breath—tiny, sharp. Her knee is still against mine. I can feel heat through denim. I’m twenty-seven and somehow sixteen at the same time, obliterated by proximity.
“Let me see you,” she murmurs.
It isn’t a dare. It isn’t a game. It’s… a petition.
My heart goes off like a dropped tray.
“River—”
“Not your voice. Not your rules. You.” Her gaze flickers to my mouth like she knows where I’m weakest. “I want to know the man who teaches me to fight and buys my stupid peppermint tea and knows how I type when I’m excited.”
I close my eyes. The room tilts. The mask is a weight and a mercy. One tug and everything I’ve built comes down.
“If I show you too soon,” I say, each word a careful placement, “I make you a bigger target. Anyone who can name me can hurt you.”
She sits with that. She doesn’t pout. She doesn’t push. She just nods once like she’s adding a variable to a long equation and deciding to carry it.
“Okay,” she says. “Then promise me something else.”
“Name it.”
“When this is over—when they’re over—no more masks.”
The room goes quiet except for the fans and the part of my chest that just decided to be a drum.
“Deal,” I say, because even if it kills me, I want the right to keep that promise.
She exhales, a warm sound that feels like the future.
And then she ruins me: she leans over, slow as sunrise, and presses her mouth to the edge of black fabric where it drapes across my jaw. Not a kiss. Not quite.
A hello.
“Good night, Mask,” she whispers. “Don’t make me dream alone.”
She stands, tucks her hair behind her ear, and disappears into the small room we call a bedroom.
I sit there, hands limp, mask intact, soul in open revolt.
Arrow’s text breaks my concentration.
ARROW: Cathedral banned Kyle’s account. Nice work, team.
I type back with steady fingers I do not feel.
ME: She did most of it.
I look at the closed door, at the strip of light under it, at the laptop she touched.
No more masks, she said.
Soon, I promise a God I don’t believe in and a woman I absolutely do.
Soon.