Chapter Three #2
I stop typing, fingers hovering above the keys as I turn in my chair.
She’s standing in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, her hair a tangled mess that somehow looks intentional, wild, perfect.
The soft light from the monitors paints her blue and gold, the glow catching the edge of her cheekbone, the small curve of her smirk.
She’s wearing one of my shirts—too big, hanging off one shoulder—and the sight alone makes my pulse kick.
“Hey, baby,” I murmur, voice rough from hours without talking. “You get enough sleep?”
She tilts her head, expression unreadable.
For a second, I think she’s going to scold me for staying up, but then she crosses the room and climbs into my lap like she’s been doing it all her life.
The heat of her body sinks into me immediately, grounding and dangerous all at once.
I rest my hands on her hips, keeping her close.
Her eyes drift to the screens, the endless strings of code and static feeds. “Any luck?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Not much. The bastards are smarter than we gave them credit for; every trace we find, they’ve already covered. Whoever’s cleaning up after them knows what they’re doing. They’ve turned ghost—no signals, no accounts, no leaks.”
She hums thoughtfully, the corner of her mouth curling upward in a way that makes her look like she’s plotting someone’s death—and loving it. “Then they still have allies,” she murmurs, more to herself than to me. “And if they have allies, they’re still reachable.”
“Exactly what I was thinking,” I say, giving her hip a squeeze.
“So, we reverse-engineer it. Find whoever’s been scrubbing their mess.
Everyone leaves a footprint eventually.” Her grin sharpens, and for the first time since everything went to hell, she looks alive again.
“Did those clumsy fools wake you?” I ask, jerking my chin toward the hallway.
She laughs softly, a sound that doesn’t quite reach her eyes but still pulls something loose in my chest. “No. They kept me warm when you abandoned me.”
I clutch my chest in mock offense. “You wound me, my lady.” I lean forward, catching her chin and tilting her face toward mine. Her lips are soft and warm when I kiss her—slow, deliberate, full of everything we can’t put into words.
When I pull back, I rest my forehead against hers. “You want to help me tear into these fuckers and find their mole?”
Her breath hitches, and the wicked glint in her eyes returns. “You know I’d love nothing more,” she says, her voice dropping low. She cups my cheek, thumb brushing my jaw, then slides off my lap and into the chair beside me.
“First one to the clue gets to kill them?” she teases, arching an eyebrow.
“Damn,” I mutter, grinning. “You’re fucking sexy when you threaten to kill people.”
Her head tilts, her smirk widening as she wiggles her fingers in a mock taunt. “Worried you won’t win?”
“Not even close,” I say, leaning back in my chair, letting my grin spread slow and wolfish. “But when I win, I’m bending you over this table.”
She hums, turning her attention to the screens, her voice all silk and challenge. “We’ll see.”
The air between us hums with that dangerous mix of focus and tension—the kind that only ever builds when we’re working together.
Her fingers fly across the keyboard, already tracing digital threads I haven’t even spotted yet, and I can’t help the surge of pride that hits me. She’s brilliant. Ruthless. Mine.
We sit shoulder to shoulder, the quiet filling with the soft clack of keys and the hum of machines.
For the first time in a while, there’s a rhythm to our chaos again.
The world might be burning, but in here, it’s just us—two predators at the center of the storm, plotting the ruin of everyone who thought they could fuck with us.
By the time Berk slams the enter key, my eyes are gritty and my back aches from leaning over the console.
The room smells like coffee and ozone, the monitors painting everything in that sick blue light that makes you look older.
For a second, nothing moves but the cursor.
Then she whoops, loud and sudden, the sound ripping the tension out of my shoulders like a punch and making me jump.
She yanks my chair toward her without looking up, fingers still flying across her keyboard.
“Ha. Found them,” she says, half laugh, half growl.
Her grin is dangerous, the kind that means she’s already three steps ahead and absolutely loving it.
I scoot closer until our sides brush and peer at the screen.
Lines of code and traffic logs scroll down, but she’s highlighted something that looks like a faint trail in a rain-smeared window—an echo of a connection someone thought they’d buried.
“See this?” she asks, tapping the trace.
“They tried to scrub it clean, but they missed the handoff. Whoever’s been ghosting them left an access point exposed for, what, five minutes?
Long enough for me to grab its fingerprint.
” She says it as if she’s describing a bruise she’s proud of finding.
I can feel a thrill prickle through me. This is a mistake a tired cleaner or a sloppy ally makes when they think no one’s watching.
I lean in until the glow of the monitor warms my face.
The trace arcs out into a relay hub I don’t recognize, wrapped in routing nonsense the bastards hoped would mask it.
“So that’s the cleaner,” I say, voice low, because saying the word aloud makes the possibility real.
“If we pin that relay to an actual place, maybe a rental or a burner node, we can make them sweat. Make them cough up whatever backups they’re keeping. ”
Berk’s eyes glitter. “Backup drives are paranoid people’s security blanket,” she says.
“They stash everything. Contracts, bank dumps, contacts. If they’re keeping copies, we can recover deleted logs.
We can trace money flows. We can find who paid them to scrub.
” She taps another key, and a new window unfurls, scraping deeper into the routing, peeling back layers like an onion until a set of coordinates and a hashed IP blink at us.
For a second, the war room is nothing but our breathing and the soft rattle of the hard drives.
I think about Kimber on that cheap chair, about the way Dean sounded like he was enjoying the joke.
My jaw tightens until my teeth hurt. “You sure this isn’t a red herring?
” I ask. The question is half about the data and half for the part of me that refuses to get my hopes up.
She shakes her head. “They’re sloppy because they’re desperate,” she says.
“They moved funds, but some of them got stuck. The cleaner pulled it out and scrubbed the logs, but a fallback ping hit the relay for a split second. That’s our in.
” Her voice is flat, clinical, and underneath there’s that dangerous heat.
She’s already mapping how to press, who to threaten, where to strike.
I let my breath go slowly, metallic and sharp. “Alright. We trace the relay. Locate the cleaner. Make them talk.” The structure steadies me—a plan built to bite back.
“Plus,” Berk says with that wicked smirk that always makes my blood run hotter, “I won.”
The words roll off her tongue like smoke, smug and sharp enough to cut.
I lean forward in my chair, a low growl rumbling from deep in my chest. “You sure did,” I say, my tone a mix of warning and praise.
Her eyes catch mine, and the glint there tells me she knows exactly what she’s done—what she’s provoked.
She might’ve beaten me in our little hacking game, but she’s just ignited something far more dangerous.
Her chin lifts in that proud, infuriating way that makes me want to ruin her composure entirely.
Even after everything we’ve been through—the fire, the blood, the loss—she still pulls that spark out of me, to make me remember what it’s like to feel something other than rage.
My gaze drifts down her body, tracing the line of her throat to where her pulse beats fast and wild, to the faint tremor in her thighs as she presses them together.
She’s trying to stay focused, but I see the shift in her breathing, the way her chest rises just a little quicker.
“You won the right to take our next kill,” I murmur, my voice rough and deliberate.
“I’ll give you that, Pix. But don’t think that’s the only prize you’ve earned.
” I let my eyes drag back up to meet hers, my meaning written in every inch of the space between us.
Her lips part, her breath catches, and for a second, it’s just us—the air charged, the room shrinking to the rhythm of her pulse and mine.
She squirms in the chair, pretending to roll her eyes but failing miserably, and it makes my grin deepen. “But,” I continue, forcing myself to drag the heat back into focus, “we’ve got a rat to track down before I collect.”
I stand, my chair scraping against the floor, and she tilts her head, observing me like a cat watching prey. “I’m going to wake the guys,” I tell her, tightening my voice to keep from saying what I really want. “You find us a location, baby, and then gear up. We’re going hunting.”
As I step behind her, I grip the back of her neck and tilt her head up to me. Her skin is warm under my palm, soft despite everything she’s survived. I crash my mouth against hers in a hard, claiming kiss. It’s not gentle. It’s a promise.
A promise that when we get back, I’ll have her again, the way she deserves—skin to skin, breath to breath, until she forgets every nightmare that came before this.
A promise that the bastards who took Kimber won’t die quickly.
I’ll make them remember every second of pain they caused before I end them.
A promise that no matter how far this goes, Berk will never fight alone again.
Her breath shudders when I pull back, and I rest my forehead against hers for just a heartbeat before I release her. She looks up at me with that dangerous little smile—the one that says she’s already plotting the next move.
“Go on,” I say softly, brushing my thumb along her jaw. “Find them for us.”
Her smirk turns lethal. “Always,” she whispers.
As I walk out of the room, the blue light of the monitors flickers against the walls, casting her in an eerie glow that makes her look like something half angel, half avenging spirit. My chest tightens. Whatever she’s tracking down, whatever we find when this is done—it’s going to end in blood.
And God help whoever stands in our way.