CHAPTER 8 Declan
The sound of aggressive typing echoes from my office down the hall.
It is a sharp, relentless staccato that completely disrupts the usual sterile quiet of the house.
I stand at the kitchen island, a ceramic mug of black coffee in my hand, listening to the rhythm.
She pauses every few minutes—likely to bite the cap of whatever pen she found on my desk—before resuming the assault on the keyboard.
I take a slow swallow of the coffee. The bitter heat grounds me, but it doesn't entirely erase the dull tension at the base of my neck.
When I offered her access to the offline terminal last night, it was a calculated risk. I needed to channel her anger into something productive before it consumed her. I needed her to stop looking at the walls of this house like a prison and start looking at them like a war room.
It worked. Too well.
I set the mug down on the marble counter and walk down the hallway. The door to my office is wide open.
Maeve is sitting in my heavy leather desk chair.
She has her legs pulled up, her bare feet resting on the edge of the mahogany desk—a blatant violation of my organizational protocol that I find myself entirely unwilling to correct.
She is wearing the dark green sweater again, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows.
Three monitors are glowing in front of her. The screens are filled with cascading lines of financial data, routing matrices, and offshore banking protocols.
She doesn't notice me standing in the doorway. She is completely absorbed in the architecture of Richard Evans’s fraud.
"You missed breakfast," I observe quietly.
She jumps slightly, her hand knocking a stray pen off the desk. It hits the floor with a clatter. She doesn't pick it up. She turns the chair halfway toward me, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands.
"I was eating code," she mutters, her voice thick with exhaustion. "It tastes like betrayal and offshore tax evasion."
I step into the office, picking the pen off the floor and placing it precisely parallel to the edge of her notepad. "Did you find the routing key?"
"I found three," she says, leaning back in the chair.
She gestures to the right monitor. "Richard is sloppy, but he isn't stupid.
He didn't just use my terminal to authorize the transfers.
He set up a ghost protocol. Every time the cartel deposited funds into the primary holding account, a script automatically fractured the money into fifty different micro-transactions and sent them to shell companies in the Caymans. "
I look at the data. The sheer volume of transactions is staggering. "And the kill switch?"
"It exists," she confirms, a fierce, vindictive light sparking in her dark eyes.
"He built a backdoor into the script. If the feds ever audited the primary account, he could trigger the switch, wipe the routing history, and make it look like the money never left the original deposit point.
The cartel would think the feds seized it, and the feds would think it was a standard clerical error. "
"Leaving you holding the bag for the initial deposit."
"Exactly." She bites her lower lip, a habit that draws my attention entirely away from the monitors. "But here's the fun part. The kill switch requires a manual override using a specific digital token. A token that is currently sitting on a secure server in his downtown office."
I process the tactical implications immediately. "You can't access it remotely."
"No. It's air-gapped. You have to physically plug a drive into the server rack in Chicago to trigger the wipe." She looks up at me, her expression a mix of frustration and challenge. "Which means we can't bankrupt him from Colorado. We have the map, but we don't have the detonator."
I lean against the edge of the desk, crossing my arms over my chest. The black henley I’m wearing pulls tight across my shoulders.
"I have operatives in Chicago," I say smoothly. "I can have a team inside Evans’s office by midnight. They pull the token, transmit the data to Leo, and you execute the kill switch from here."
Maeve shakes her head. "It won't work. The server room requires biometric access. Richard's thumbprint, or mine. And unless your team plans on cutting off his thumb and carrying it into the building, they aren't getting through the door."
The silence in the office is absolute.
I look at her. She is sitting in my chair, in my house, casually explaining why my highly trained extraction team is useless against a corporate security door.
"There are ways around biometric scanners," I note, keeping my voice perfectly level.
"Not this one. It's a dual-factor thermal scanner. It checks for a pulse." She offers a small, entirely humorless smile. "So, unless you have a way to clone my exact thermal signature, your guys are locked out."
A heavy, dangerous realization settles over the room.
She knows exactly what she is saying. She isn't just explaining a technical hurdle. She is laying out the terms of her own necessity.
"You are suggesting that you need to be in Chicago," I say.
"I am stating a logistical fact."
"No."
The word leaves my mouth before she even finishes her sentence. It isn't a negotiation. It is a concrete wall.
Maeve stands up. The sudden movement pushes the heavy leather chair back, the wheels scraping against the hardwood. She doesn't back down. She steps around the desk, closing the physical distance between us until she is standing inches away from me.
"Declan, it is the only way to trigger the wipe," she argues, her voice rising. "If we don't destroy his infrastructure, he will just build a new paper trail. He will keep pointing the cartel at me. I will be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life."
"You will not be looking over your shoulder," I counter, my voice dropping to a low, lethal murmur. "Because I will be the one standing behind you. I will eliminate Evans myself. I don't need a digital token to put a bullet in his head."
"And then what?" she demands, her dark eyes flashing with absolute fury.
"You kill Richard. The cartel realizes their money is gone.
They assume I took it because my name is on the transfers.
They send fifty men instead of two. We spend the rest of our lives hiding in this bunker while you shoot wolves in the snow? "
She reaches out, her hands pressing flat against my chest. The physical contact is a shock to my system. I can feel the heat of her palms burning through the thin cotton of my shirt.
"I don't want to hide, Declan," she whispers, the anger fracturing into something desperate and raw. "I want my name cleared. I want to burn his life to the ground the way he burned mine. And I can't do that from a basement in Colorado."
I look down at her hands resting against my chest. I can feel the erratic, frantic rhythm of her heartbeat echoing through her fingertips.
She is asking me to walk her back into the exact city I just pulled her out of. She is asking me to put her in the crosshairs of a cartel hit squad and a federal manhunt.
Every single operational protocol I have ever written screams at me to sedate her, lock the door, and handle the threat myself.
But I look at her face. I look at the fierce, chaotic intelligence in her eyes. If I lock her away now, if I deny her the agency to fight her own war, the fire that fascinates me will eventually burn out. She will survive, but she will hate me.
And I find, with a terrifying clarity, that I cannot tolerate her hatred.
I reach up, my hands wrapping around her wrists. I don't push her away. I hold her hands flat against my chest, trapping the heat of her skin against my own.
"If we go to Chicago," I say, my voice rough, "you do not leave my side. You do not make a single move without my authorization. If a situation goes tactical, you drop to the floor and you do not move until I tell you the threat is neutralized."
Her breath hitches. She stares up at me, processing the fact that I am actually conceding.
"You're agreeing to take me," she whispers, disbelief coloring her tone.
"I am agreeing to let you open the door," I correct softly, my thumbs pressing into the delicate pulse points on her wrists. "I am going to be the one who walks through it and kills everything inside."
She shivers. It isn't from the cold.
"Okay," she breathes.
"Say it, Maeve. Acknowledge the parameters."
"I acknowledge the parameters," she repeats, her voice trembling slightly. "I won't leave your side."
I hold her gaze for three long seconds, ensuring she understands the absolute gravity of the promise. Then, slowly, I release her wrists.
The absence of her touch leaves a cold ache in my chest, but I ignore it. I step away from the desk, pulling my phone from my pocket.
"Pack whatever you need from the guest room," I instruct, dialing Leo’s secure extension. "We leave for the airfield in twenty minutes."
**
The flight back to Chicago is entirely different from the extraction.
Two nights ago, Maeve was a terrified, shivering mess wrapped in my suit jacket. Today, she is sitting across from me in the Gulfstream cabin, a secure laptop open on the mahogany table, rapidly typing out the sequence she needs to bypass Evans’s internal security.
She is wearing a black tactical jacket I pulled from the armory. It’s too big for her, the sleeves rolled up, but the dark, utilitarian fabric makes her look less like a victim and more like an operative.
I watch her from over the rim of my coffee cup.
"You're staring," she says, not looking up from the screen.
"I am observing."
"You're observing loudly. It's distracting."
"My apologies," I say dryly. "I will attempt to observe more quietly."
She finally looks up, a faint, genuine smile touching the corner of her mouth. It is the first time she has smiled at me without using it as a weapon or a shield. The sight of it does something violent to my chest.