8. Chapter Eight
Chapter Eight
MIRO
Iwake tangled in heat and the fading remnants of a dream that leaves my skin damp and a definite throb between my thighs.
For a few disorienting seconds, motionless beneath the covers, I stare at the ceiling panels while fragments slip through my fingers.
Amber eyes. Warm scales beneath my hands.
A voice gone low and rough, chest vibrating with his low growl.
The details dissolve the harder I reach for them, but the feeling remains. Intimate. Dangerous. Unsettlingly real.
A frustrated sound escapes me as I drag a hand over my face.
This doesn’t happen.
Not to me.
I’ve spent two years surviving. Running. Looking over my shoulder. Worrying about oxygen cartridges, credit balances, and whether Helix Corp is finally going to find me. My subconscious has never once decided that now would be a good time to develop a sex life.
And yet here I am, waking up hot, restless, and painfully aware that the male responsible for the dream is very, very real.
My eyes squeeze shut.
Zavin Sethrak is attractive. There’s no point pretending otherwise. He’s intelligent, infuriatingly perceptive, and entirely too comfortable looking at me as though he’s already figured out parts of me I haven’t admitted to myself. Any woman with functioning eyesight would notice him.
That doesn’t mean any of this is a good idea.
He’s a crime lord.
A dangerous one.
A male who quite literally dragged me out of my apartment and locked me inside his compound.
I still don’t have a timeline for this audit.
No contract end date. No guarantee of when—or if—I’ll be allowed to leave.
Every day I spend here is another day farther from my parents and the life I’m trying to claw my way back to.
The sensible response would be resentment.
Instead, my brain insists on replaying every graphic detail of him etched into memory.
The way he followed the handoff-gap theory almost immediately.
His burning eyes remaining locked on mine whenever I explain anything technical. How quickly he grasps each concept.
The fact that the meal delivered last night somehow included every food I actually like. The atmospheric supplements that keep appearing.
The quiet certainty that, despite all evidence suggesting I should, I don’t actually believe he’d hurt me.
Groaning, I shove the blanket aside. Handsome, intelligent, thoughtful males are still capable of being terrible people. History has supplied plenty of examples.
Even if Zavin isn’t as bad as he should be, that doesn’t change the fundamental problem. I need to get off this planet. He is standing in the way of that.
The reminder settles some of the chaos in my head. I cling to it as I swing my legs out of bed and cross to Percy’s workstation. The audit is real. The mole is real. The compromised network is real. Those are problems I can solve.
The confusing feelings developing around a seven-foot-tall Sethrai male with amber eyes and entirely too much insight into my thought processes can wait their turn.
Preferably forever.
I already have my forever male.
“Morning, Perce.” He hums in his standby cycle, processors warming.
I run my palm across the housing until his display flickers to life and the amber glow fills the room, and the familiar sight of it steadies me more than the clean air or the comfortable bed or any of the comforts designed to keep me functional.
The behavioral profiles are still spread across the screen where I left them. Fourteen distinct fingerprints moving through the network. Different traffic patterns. Different timing signatures. Different habits. I can tell them apart easily enough now, but I still can’t put names to any of them.
I’ve spent two days squeezing every possible answer out of the data Zavin gave me.
The handoff-window theory is solid. The candidate pool is smaller.
The mole’s access points are mapped. The problem is that I’ve reached the edge of what the redacted logs can tell me.
Without identities attached to the patterns, my investigation has nowhere left to go.
Unless ... I stop trying to identify who doesn’t belong and approach the problem from the opposite direction.
Sitting back in my chair, I study the web of connections across the projection.
If I can’t find the intruder directly, I can account for everyone who should be there.
Track every behavioral fingerprint across six weeks of activity.
Build a complete picture of what normal looks like for each operative.
Once I know the shape of legitimate traffic, anything that doesn’t fit should stand out.
It’s not elegant. It’s not clever. It’s brute force, the kind of slow, exhaustive analysis that eats hours and processing power. Fortunately, that’s exactly the sort of work Percy and I excel at.
And I have nothing else to do. This is why my brain has room to conjure Zavin into my dreams. Back to work it is.
“Change of approach, Perce.”
I pull up the first signature and begin working through its activity history, tracing it across the timeline one access point at a time. If I can’t identify the mole directly, then I’ll build a complete picture of everyone who belongs in the network and see what’s left when the pieces stop fitting.
Percy’s processors spin up immediately. The pitch of his cooling system climbs high enough to tell me I’m asking a lot of him. I rest my palm against his casing until the heat steadies.
The next two hours disappear into the work.
Weeks of traffic data scroll past. Access logs.
Routing patterns. Behavioral markers. Percy handles the heavy analysis while I sort, tag, and compare.
One signature becomes two. Two become six.
Then fourteen. The steady hum of his processors fills the room while timelines take shape across the monitor, each one revealing the habits of an anonymous operative I’ve never met.
The rhythm settles something in me.
This is the part I’m good at. Systems. Patterns. Questions that have answers if you’re willing to look long enough. The world makes sense when it’s reduced to data and logic and problems that can actually be solved.
Unfortunately, my brain keeps wandering.
Every time I pause to let Percy process another batch of data, my thoughts drift to a flash of bronze scales catching the light from the hologram. I don’t want to be thinking about his hands. I drag my attention back to the audit, gritting my teeth.
By the time the second hour is ending, something finally catches my eye. Something about profile 9.
The pattern is clean and predictable. Access windows open when I’d expect them to.
Files are handled efficiently. There are no wasted movements, no unnecessary detours, none of the messy habits inexperienced operators tend to leave behind.
Whoever this operative was, they’d been doing the job for a long time.
The signature moves through the network with the kind of quiet competence that only comes from experience.
For three weeks, everything is normal.
Then it stops. There are no reduced permissions, no transition markers, no evidence of responsibilities being handed to someone else.
“Perce, flag this.”
I pull the timeline closer and study the point where Profile Nine disappears.
For three weeks, the rhythm is exactly what I’d expect from a competent operative. The activity is steady. Predictable. Then it stops.
One day the profile is active. The next, it’s gone.
I trace backward through the records, following the signature’s final movements.
The last activity appears during one of the windows I’ve been tracking for the mole.
Not only does the timing match, it originates from the same part of the system where the suspicious traffic keeps surfacing.
A knot forms in my stomach. There are innocent explanations. I know there are. Operatives get moved. Reassigned. Retired. Networks change.
I start looking for evidence of one of those explanations and come up empty. There should be records showing what happened. Transfer notices. Administrative updates. Some indication that the profile was deliberately removed from active operations.
Instead, I find gaps. Missing entries. Sections of the timeline where information should exist and doesn’t.
I zoom in further, studying the breaks in the record. They don’t look natural. They look altered. Not carefully enough to hide the fact that something is missing, but enough to leave holes where complete records should be.
Someone deleted part of this operative’s history. Profile Nine didn’t simply disappear from the network. Someone went back afterward and tried to erase evidence that they’d ever been there.
At Helix, they did it with employee files. Security clearances. Access permissions. Whenever someone became inconvenient, records started vanishing until it looked as though they’d never existed in the first place.
But Helix was usually erasing careers.
I stare at the broken timeline on the screen and a chill works its way down my spine.
This feels different. Whatever happened to Profile Nine, I don’t think they left voluntarily. And the kind of disappearance that requires this much effort to cover up rarely ends with the missing person walking away.
Sitting back from the projection, I stare at the gap in the timeline. The longer I look at it, the less it resembles missing data and the more it resembles an outline. A shape left behind by something that used to be there.
I’ve seen records altered before. Seen files disappear.
Seen access permissions revoked and employment histories rewritten until it looked as though a person had never existed in the first place.
Corporations don’t like loose ends. When someone becomes inconvenient, the paperwork changes first. At Helix, they erased people from databases long before they came after the people themselves.