Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
GAGE
She kissed me.
Last night, behind that alley, she kissed me.
She doesn’t know it. Not really. Not yet.
But her lips tasted like wildfire and trust and the kind of hope I’ve spent years teaching myself not to crave.
And now—after the way she looked at me, after the things she told me about Mask—my entire body is on edge. The mask may still be on, but the lines are blurring fast.
Too fast.
I heard her whisper my name in her sleep.
Not Gage.
Mask.
Over the encrypted mic feed I left running—because I wanted to make sure she was okay—I heard her say it. Low. Breathless. Like a secret laced in silk.
And I fucking lost it.
I’m still losing it.
But that was nothing—nothing—compared to what I felt when I saw the image.
Her face. Her body—or at least, what someone imagined her body looked like—plastered across Cathedral’s splash screen like some sick marketing gimmick, twisted with malice and intent.
I nearly blacked out from the rage.
Not protective rage. Not rational anger.
Animal fury.
I’m trained to keep my cool under pressure. But when I opened that screen, when I saw her humiliation, the way they digitally touched her—
I wanted to punch something. Murder someone.
The crew at NovaPlay doesn’t even know the half of it.
But I do.
Because now I’ve traced the entry point.
And I wish I hadn’t.
It came from her laptop. Not her current system—but an old backup repository. One that hadn’t been connected to the network in over a year.
Which means it wasn’t pulled from the cloud.
It was taken from inside.
Someone had access to her local drive.
Someone inside the building.
That leaves Mason out.
“I should walk you back to your car,” I tell her, standing from the bench.
“I liked spending the day with you. Thank you,” she whispers, and I watch the way a strand of blue hair floats across her face.
Every part of me screams to brush the stray strand behind her ear like some goddamn hero in some corny romcom, but instead I keep my hands fisted to my sides.
What if I told her? What if I came clean?
What if I fucking kissed her right now? Right here?
She gazes up at me, and my heart nearly beats out of my chest. “You’re not the person I thought you were.”
I crack a small grin. “Hope that’s a good thing.” I rock on my heels as I shove my hands in my jean pockets before I touch her.
“It is,” she says with a smile as we start heading back toward the office.
I’m sitting in my home rig, screens flickering across the room in a sea of binary light, piecing it together.
Who fucking posted that picture? The log files don’t lie.
Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing.
They didn’t just pull one file—they combed through dozens of archives before finding an image they could manipulate.
River told me once she’d taken some modeling photos back in college, nothing explicit, just portfolio stuff. She said she deleted them. Apparently, she didn’t purge her backup fully.
She never meant for anyone to see them.
And now they’re global.
A part of me wants to crash the whole internet in retaliation.
Instead, I turn on the tracker I embedded earlier and lock onto a partial IP signature. The path leads back to a machine that’s been spoofed half a dozen times, but I’m narrowing in. Every ping, every trace, gets me closer.
“Coward,” I mutter to the screen.
And then, softer—more dangerous, “You touched her.”
I slam my laptop shut and scrub both hands over my face.
This is too much.
I’m in over my head. I know it. Every instinct I’ve got to keep her safe is now screaming that I can’t keep her safe if I stay in the shadows.
But stepping into the light means losing everything.
I check the timestamp. It’s been four hours since I walked her back to work.
She looked so tired.
But there was a softness in her eyes when she said my name—Gage, not Mask—that undid me. She trusts me. Not just online. In person. Even when I don’t deserve it.
She trusts me with her secrets.
And now she’s carrying mine without even knowing it.
I scroll to the archived feed of her confession. Just audio. I could delete it. Should delete it.
But I don’t.
Because hearing her talk about me—about Mask—with wonder in her voice and heat in her words, it makes me feel human again.
Wanted.
And fuck if that isn’t the most dangerous part of all.