Chapter 54 Silas #2
“That you need me.” She moves back to the bed, and this time, when she climbs on, she straddles me over the sheet.
The robe falls open. She’s naked underneath, and I keep my eyes on her face because looking anywhere else will make me vomit.
“That without me, you’re nothing. That Parker doesn’t want the monster you really are, but I do. I always have.”
But then I see it.
In the corner of the room, mounted near the ceiling. Security monitor. The feed is clean, showing the hallway outside, two guards stationed at the door.
Then it flickers. Just for a second. Barely noticeable.
Then another monitor. Same flicker. Different hallway.
Someone’s spoofing the feeds.
I should have known Parker wouldn’t listen. Should have known she’d never stay back when told to stay back. When has she ever?
“What are you smiling about?” Aria demands, her hands on my chest, nails digging in.
“Just thinking about how predictable you are,” I say, and I let my voice go rough. Lower. The way it used to sound when I’d show up at her door at three AM and she’d let me in without asking questions. “Four years of this. Four years of you thinking you could make me stay.”
“I did make you stay,” she breathes, leaning down, her hair falling around us like a curtain. “You kept coming back.”
“Because you were easy.” I grab her hips, pull her down harder against me, watch her eyes go wide and eager. “Because you’d spread your legs whenever I wanted. Because you never asked for anything more than I was willing to give.”
She moans, grinding against me, and I’m not hard, not even close, but she’s too desperate to notice.
Behind her, another monitor flickers. Then another.
“Tell me you want me,” she whispers, her mouth near my ear. “Tell me you’ve always wanted me.”
I don’t, but she kisses me, and I let her. Hard and hungry and so fucking desperate it makes my skin crawl. But I kiss back, play the part she needs me to play.
Because in the corner of my vision, I can see more monitors flickering. More feeds being compromise,d and Aria’s too busy getting what she thinks she wants to notice her entire security system is being dismantled from the outside.
“I knew it,” Aria breathes against my mouth. “I knew you felt it too. We can be good together, Silas. We can build something. Something better than what you had with her.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We can build something.”
Then I feel it. The way her body goes rigid. The way her attention shifts. I guess I can’t fake it as much as I used to.
Aria turns her head towards the monitors.
All of them. Flickering now. Some going black. Others showing loops of empty hallways that repeat every seven seconds—I count, because that’s what you do when you’re cataloging escape routes and planning violence.
“What—” she starts, her voice catching. She pulls back from me, and I can feel the exact moment her attention fractures. The way her body goes rigid, muscles locking like she’s been hit with voltage.
She scrambles off me, practically throwing herself at the workstation. The silk robe fans out behind her like wings, and her fingers fly over the keyboard with the kind of desperate precision that tells me everything I need to know.
She’s losing.
Pulling up screens. Code. Access protocols. The guts of the Carter organization infrastructure laid bare across six monitors, each one showing her a different flavor of failure.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, sitting up slowly. Testing my weight, feeling where the pain lives—thigh screaming, chest tight, shoulder stiff from being restrained for God knows how long. But pain is just information. Data to be processed and filed away.
“Shut up!” Her voice cracks on the second word. Sharp and panicked in a way I’ve never heard from her before, not in four years of her showing up at my door with that needy look in her eyes.
She’s typing frantically now, her fingers hitting the keys so hard I can hear the clicks from across the room. Entering passwords. Access codes. Everything she stole when she cloned Charles’s and Cal’s systems during that mountain clusterfuck.
Nothing works.
Error messages flash across every screen in rapid succession, painting her face red with failure. Then blue. Then red again. A strobe of digital rejection that would be beautiful if it wasn’t so goddamn satisfying.
ACCESS DENIED
INVALID CREDENTIALS
SECURITY brEACH DETECTED
SYSTEM LOCKOUT INITIATED
ALERT: INTRUSION ATTEMPT LOGGED
“No,” she breathes, and the word comes out small. Broken. Her hands hover over the keyboard like she’s afraid to try again, afraid to confirm what she already knows. “No no no no—”
“Locked out?” I ask, and I can’t keep the smile out of my voice even though my chest is tight with something that feels dangerously close to hope. Hope wrapped in fear and fury and the bone-deep certainty that Parker just declared war in the only language Aria understands.
“I said shut up!” She’s pulling up different systems now, her movements getting jerky and uncoordinated.
Trying backdoors. Trying the kill switch, she threatened us with.
Her fingers are shaking so badly she’s hitting wrong keys, having to backspace and try again, leaving typos in her wake like breadcrumbs leading straight to panic.
Nothing.
Every pathway she built is gone. Every door she opened is closed and welded shut. Every trap she set has been dismantled and turned into something else entirely—something sharp and waiting and designed to bite back.
Parker.
That’s my girl. That’s my brilliant, terrifying, beautiful girl who looked at Aria’s sophisticated cyber-attack and tore it apart like tissue paper. Who took everything Aria stole and built something unbreakable in its place. Something that says fuck you in ones and zeros.
Pride surges through me, hot and fierce, cutting through the pain like a blade.
Aria slams her fist against the monitor. Once. Twice. The third hit cracks the screen, a spiderweb of broken glass blooming across the display like frost. “I can get back in. I just need to—I just need—”
That’s when the gunfire starts.
Distant. Outside the building. But definitely gunfire—the distinctive pop-pop-pop of suppressed weapons followed by the louder crack of unsuppressed return fire. The kind of sounds you learn to identify when you’ve spent half your life in rooms where people die.
Aria freezes, her hand still pressed against the broken monitor. Blood wells up around her knuckles where the glass cut her, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her face goes white, then red, then white again, like her body can’t decide whether to fight or flee.
Static crackles through the speakers mounted in the corners of the room, the kind that means someone’s keying a radio in a hurry. Then voices. Her guards. Professional, clipped, already under pressure, and trying not to show it.
“We’ve got hostiles breaching the north perimeter—”
“How many?” Aria screams at the speaker, spinning toward it like she can see through the walls to whatever’s happening outside. Like volume will somehow change the answer.
“Unknown. They’re using suppressors, moving in teams. We’ve lost contact with teams two and four—”
“Fall back to my location!” She’s pulling a comm unit from somewhere behind the monitors, pressing it to her ear with her bleeding hand while the other reaches for something else.
A bag. Black tactical gear that looks military-grade, the kind you don’t buy at a sporting goods store.
“All units, fall back to the master bedroom. Now! I want a defensive perimeter, overlapping fields of fire, and someone tell me what the fuck happened to our early warning system—”
She’s moving fast now, all pretense of seduction gone. Rips off the silk robe with one violent motion, and underneath she’s already wearing a black sports bra and black underwear. Smart. She was ready to run even while she was trying to seduce me. Always hedging her bets, always planning the exit.
She yanks on black jeans that fit like they were tailored for tactical work—reinforced knees, cargo pockets, probably Kevlar-lined.
A black long-sleeve compression shirt that’ll wick sweat and move with her.
Black sneakers that look like they cost more than most people’s rent, the kind of high-end tactical footwear that special forces wear when they want to move, silent and fast.
She’s done this before. Practiced it. This isn’t panic—it’s rehearsal paying off.
The guys came instead of keeping Parker safe.
Fucking idiots.
They had one job. One goddamn job. Keep our woman and our sons safe while I clean up my own mess.
I gave them the perfect out, the perfect justification to walk away and protect what actually matters.
Parker’s cyber-attack should have been enough.
Should have let them cut their losses, regroup, come back when they had better intel and a cleaner shot.
And they couldn’t even do that.
Which means Parker’s here. Has to be. Because there’s no way Jace and Cal would breach without her forcing them to, without her standing in front of them with that look in her eyes that says I’m going with or without you, so you better decide which one gets us all killed.
Stubborn woman.
Stubborn, brilliant, terrifying woman who’s going to get herself killed trying to save me, and I don’t know whether to be furious or grateful or so fucking in love with her that it hurts worse than the bullet in my leg.
Aria grabs another gun from somewhere—a Sig P365XL, compact and deadly—checks the magazine with practiced efficiency, racks the slide. The sound is sharp and final in the ornate room. She tucks it into a holster at the small of her back, then grabs two more magazines and shoves them in her pockets.