Chapter 32
Sebastian
By ten o’clock, I had stopped pretending I was working. I’d also lost track of how many employees I’d yelled at. More than normal and that was saying a lot.
Ethan was quietly working on his laptop across my office on my couch. He hadn’t brought up Saturday night, but he’d checked in several times to make sure I wasn’t self-destructing.
I checked my phone again.
Nothing.
No reply. No read receipt. No sign she’d even seen any of my messages.
I slammed my phone down on my desk hard enough, Ethan jumped, as I scrubbed a hand over my face.
“You need to give her time.” He set his laptop on the coffee table. “You might need to let her go.”
I picked up my coffee cup and launched it at his head, wishing it wasn’t empty.
Victor barged in. “Someone just took down the mirror.”
“What?” I said, already pushing back from my desk.
Victor didn’t slow down. “And my security lock is gone.”
“That’s a skeleton key to everything.”
He shot me a look. “Don’t you think I fucking know that, Reid?”
The lights flickered off, and everything shut down. A moment later, it all popped back on. Victor swept around to my side of the desk and pushed my chair back as I stepped out of his way.
In less than two minutes, he was logged in to my system. “Do you have your key?”
I was already moving. I slipped my keys from my pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer. The hidden compartment popped open, revealing the security key I rarely touched. Victor grabbed it before I could, slotted it in, and took over my system like it belonged to him.
Victor’s hands froze over the keyboard.
“That’s not right,” he muttered.
My stomach tightened. “What?”
“This access pattern,” he said slowly, “it isn’t internal.”
My blood went cold.
“It’s coming from outside the building.”
Victor’s words hung in the air between us.
“That’s not possible,” I said as my gut twisted. “The mirror was—”
“—was intact,” Victor finished. “Until about ten minutes ago.”
The power cut again. A full sixty seconds this time. Long enough for the silence to feel intentional.
When everything came back online, my screen filled with lines of binary code, scrolling too fast to read.
“We’ve got another problem,” Ethan said as his fingers moved quickly across his keyboard.
I grabbed my laptop from my bag. “What now?”
“Someone is draining our operational accounts.”
Victor and I turned to him at the same time. His brow furrowed.
“They’re actively online.”
“What’s going on?” Micah asked as he walked into my office unannounced. He’d already been up here a couple times today.
“Good,” I said. “You’re here. Log into Mira’s workstation and lock down the floor. No one in, no one out. Send the temp down to HR to find another assignment today. Just the four of us on this floor.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Victor grabbed my laptop and flipped it around, moving the security key and logging in.
“What the fuck?”
“Whoever’s doing this just locked you out completely,” Victor said. “I can’t get past that running code.” His jaw tightened. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do with a computer so this wasn’t sitting well with him.
I moved back around my desk, scanning the code.
The code was tight. Elegant. Precise. Too precise and running too fast to make anything of it.
“Whoever it is not only has my security key but my laptop as well.”
“Guys, you want to see this,” Micah said as he stepped in, eyes already tracking the hallway behind him. “And we’ve got a problem. Elisa’s not at her desk.”
I looked up. “We’ll worry about Elisa later. Show me what you’ve got.”
Micah tapped a few keys on his iPad and took over the wall screen.
The accounts Ethan had flagged were still bleeding.
“We already know this,” Ethan grumbled.
“Yeah, but this is the interesting part.” He flipped the screen to another list of accounts.
The room went quiet.
These accounts weren’t draining.
They were frozen.
Victor leaned closer. “Those are operational buffers.”
“And emergency reserves,” Ethan added. “They’re not supposed to be touched unless—”
“—unless someone knows exactly which ones won’t trip an alarm,” I finished. Accounting doesn’t have access to these unless Ethan moves the funds into other accounts. It was done by design to protect us.
Micah zoomed in. “Notice the timing.”
The timestamps lined up in tight, deliberate intervals.
“They’re bleeding us here,” Ethan said, gesturing to the first list. “But they’re locking these down.”
“To slow us,” Victor said.
I shook my head. “No. To protect us.”
Everyone turned to me, questioning.
I pointed at the screen. “Whoever’s doing this is limiting the damage. Not maximizing it.” They were looping the money. For every dollar that vanished, two showed up somewhere else, buried deep enough to avoid alarms.
Micah frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does,” I said. “If the goal isn’t to steal everything.”
Victor’s eyes narrowed. “Then what’s the goal?”
I didn’t answer right away.
Because I knew.
They weren’t trying to take the company.
They were trying to survive long enough for someone else to stop it.
I didn’t know how or why, but it had Mira’s signature all over it. Even with everything I’d done to her, she was still trying to help me save my company.
Fuck.
I rushed back to my computer, and for the first time I actually looked at the code I’d dismissed because it moved too fast to read. I pulled out my phone, recorded the screen, then played it back in slow motion.
My breath caught.
I looked up at Micah. “Where’s Mira?”
“She was at home the last time I saw her.”
I didn’t answer. I was already moving.
I ran out of my office, ignoring the shouts behind me. There wasn’t time to explain. We’d already lost too much time. If she was anywhere other than her apartment, we were in far more trouble.
And if someone had laid a hand on her—
I scanned my badge at the executive elevator, grateful it overrode the lockdown. As the doors slid shut and the car dropped toward the garage, I dialed 911.
The code looping across my screen, the one no one could slow down in time, hadn’t been a breach at all.
It had been an SOS.
From Mira.
With her address.
The line clicked live in my ear as the elevator dropped.
“911, what’s your emergency?” the Operator on the other end answered.
“My name is Sebastian Reid.” I took a breath. “I need officers dispatched immediately to a residential address. The resident there is being held under duress.”
“Sir, can you tell me who—”
“I don’t know who,” I cut in. “But I know she sent an SOS, and I know she wouldn’t do that unless she was in danger.”
There was a brief pause, the sound of keys clicking in the background.
“Give me the address.” Her tone was more urgent as she answered this time.
I did. From memory. Side effect of having a near photographic memory. It was good for some things.
The elevator doors opened onto the garage, and I sprinted to my car.
“Units are en route,” the dispatcher said. “Are you at the location?”
“I’m on my way,” I said, already leaving the garage. “I will be there before they are.”
“Sir, stay on the line.”
“I’m still here,” I said as I took a sharp left, and cutting in front of another car, ignoring the chorus of horns behind me.
“Sir, the police will investigate. You need to stay put.”
I glared at the phone. Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen. “Promise me you’ll send them.”
“They are already on their way. We’ve tried to reach out to Ms. Rhodes, and she’s not answering the phone. They’ll do a wellness check.”
“Thank you.”
I ended the call and slipped the phone into my jacket pocket. There was no way I was staying on the sidelines. I hadn’t spoken up when I should have before. I wasn’t making that mistake again.
The city blurred past the windows as my mind replayed the code, frame by frame. The restraint. The elegance. The way she’d buried the message where only I would think to look.
She’d been buying time.
For me.
For the police.
For anyone who could get there before whatever clock was ticking ran out.
“Stay with me, Mira,” I muttered, gripping the steering wheel. “Just stay where you are.”
I didn’t know who was with her.
I didn’t know what they wanted.
But I knew one thing with absolute certainty.
Whoever had forced her to break into our systems had made a catastrophic miscalculation.
Because I was coming.
And I wasn’t alone.
I reached her apartment building in record time, breaking several traffic laws in the process. I didn’t bother looking for parking, pulling straight up onto the curb, immediately drawing the doorman’s attention.
“Hey—!” he shouted.
I was already out of the car.
If a couple hadn’t chosen that exact moment to exit, he would’ve stopped me. Instead, I slipped inside before he could recover.
I didn’t wait for the elevator. I knew I’d need to be buzzed in anyway. Sirens wailed somewhere in the distance, close enough to hear, not close enough to matter.
My phone buzzed as I hit the stairwell. I slipped an earbud in without breaking stride.
“Not the time,” I said.
“It’s Stan,” Ethan said.
I took the first flight two steps at a time.
“Looks like he got himself into some trouble,” Victor added.
Second floor.
“What makes you think that?”
“No time,” Ethan said. “The guy pulling financials on staff ran the report this morning. A few names flagged.”
Third floor.
“Who else?”
“The temp,” Micah said.
My jaw tightened.
“Fuck,” I muttered, already knowing what that meant.
Fourth floor.
“Get me anything you have,” I said. “Everything.”
“We’re pushing it now,” Ethan replied. He didn’t continue.
“What aren’t you saying?”
The click on the other line made it clear he’d taken me off of speaker.
“We couldn’t keep this in-house anymore,” Ethan said. “We had to involve the police and—”
“Spit it out,” I bit out, lungs burning as I took the last flight of stairs.
“They called the FBI. They want us to shut the system down.”
I froze outside the stairwell door on the fifth floor.
“You can’t,” I said. “Not until I get Mira away from him.” My chest tightened. If anything happened to her— “She’s still in the system?”
“Yes,” Ethan said quietly. “And I know.”
“Ethan,” my voice cracked, surprising me. This wasn’t a dominant or submissive thing; this had nothing to do with being her boss.
This was something else entirely.
“Victor’s stalling, but they are on their way and won’t be able to once they’re here.”
I wrapped my hand around the doorknob. “Actually, that might be exactly what we need. If we do it at the right moment, it will work in our favor. Tell him to be ready.”
“You got it.”
The line beeped and I was back on speaker.
Sirens wailed closer now. The Seattle PD and FBI were closing in, and I was running out of time.
I stepped into the hallway and stopped outside Mira’s apartment door.
Stan’s voice carried through the wood of the door.
But so did hers.
“Hurry the fuck up.”
“I can only go so fast.”
She sounded so calm.
I’d never been so proud of her. I closed my eyes, and sent up a silent prayer that this would work.
“Shut it down,” I whispered into the phone, then disconnected the call.
Inside the apartment, something clattered.
“What the hell did you do?” Stan snapped.
“Nothing,” Mira said lightly. Almost cheerfully.
I exhaled once.
Then I raised my hand and knocked. This was going to end now.